Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, is at once entirely singular and also feels like the natural next step in her body of work. The novel is a surprising and sensual exploration of middle age and how desire, ambition, and creativity survive the hormonal stew of menopause. The novel begins with a creative woman in her mid-forties who’s experienced a fair amount of success in her interdisciplinary career (if that sounds familiar, yes this is a work of autofiction!)—she’s the mother of a young child, Sam, and the wife of a music producer who’s also achieved mainstream success, Harris. The narrator decides that for her upcoming work trip to New York, she’s going to undertake a cross-country drive from LA instead of flying, an adventure she hopes will spark creativity and free her from the confines of the repetitive routines of child-rearing and marriage.
But once she sets off, a force pulls her off the highway only 30 minutes from home in the town of Monrovia, where the narrator begins her second life. She becomes enraptured by Davey, a local married man in his mid-thirties who works at the Hertz in town. She gets a room at the local motel, and at first the narrator admires Davey from afar, but eventually tries to get closer—she hires his wife, an interior decorator, to decorate her motel room for the duration of her two week stay (to her husband and child, she’s still pretending to be traveling to New York), and eventually he invites her out and the two begin a torrid love affair. Davey is committed to his marriage, meaning their love can never be consummated, but the anticipation makes things all the more exciting for the narrator, who had previously believed herself to be past the point of desirable (when an elderly man winks at her she remarks, “Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days?”).
The sex-less affair ignites in the narrator a passion and intensity that was not present in her marriage, and clues her in that she may not be as fulfilled by her life as she had thought. July writes with trademark wit and sensuous prose about the narrator’s discovery that her body can be used for other things than just being a mother and a helper. When the two weeks inevitably closes, she heads back home, losing touch with Davey. Plunged into a depression, she also discovers she’s perimenopausal—meaning her stock of hormones is in a huge decline. She yearns to return to her second life, free from time and the aging process: and while she continues to be plagued by flashbacks of her traumatic childbirth process, she’s now also haunted by the specter of a future without desire or passion.
From this low point, through a series of humorous and absurdist turns, the narrator rebuilds her life into something that feels more liberating. She finds a new way to be a mother, a partner, a lover, and an artist—all the while reexamining her assumptions about herself and others. She speaks to friends and acquaintances about menopause, and a doctor friend remarks that a “woman’s mental health postmenopause is usually better than it’s been at any other time in the life of that particular woman…of course, in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.” From this new understanding about women’s lives, July’s narrator begins to understand how to step into her second life.
July’s novel is an astounding project that heralds a new entry into the canon of literature’s unsatisfied women—women who seek arrangements outside the conventional in order to escape the confines of their realities. All Fours is sensuous, hilarious, and deeply personal, the kind of novel that women is all sorts of circumstances will see themselves in. The narrator remarks, “it wasn’t a performance … nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment,” which is about as good a summation of July’s work that I can think of.