Episode #342: Brooke & Grant on Miranda July’s All Fours
Hello culture-vultures, reading machines, lit guzzlers, and hypebeasts!
A few weeks back, Grant suggested Write-minded dedicate a whole episode to All Fours, by Miranda July—and we decided to do it. This week Brooke and Grant explore All Fours as a novel of a generation, and talk about who Miranda July is, why the book has hit such a zeitgeist moment, and whether publishers can anticipate or make these kinds of successes. Brooke has suggested that All Fours is the Fear of Flying of this generation, and we’re diving into why the book matters, some of its controversies and uncomfortable moments, and why we think you should read it.
Other books by Miranda July:
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: I’m Brooke, here with my co-pilot Grant. And Grant, a lot of times we casually throw out the idea that maybe we should do a whole show about a topic or a particular book, but then we don’t always follow up on those good ideas because they’re just that, good ideas—and we have guests to interview. But when you suggested a few weeks back that maybe we should dedicate a whole show to Miranda July’s All Fours, I couldn’t help but feel excited about the prospect. I realized I in fact really wanted to do a whole show about this book for a lot of reasons that we’re going to unpack on today’s show. And we had an opening in our schedule, and so we’re doing it.
Grant: Yeah, a little unusual for us, for sure. And a little intimidating given the subject matter of All Fours being is so overtly and extremely sexual—and, you know, I’m from a small town in the Midwest, so we tend not to talk about sex in front of thousands of listeners. I have to say, though, Brooke, that in some ways the novel wasn’t all that sexual, because I think the sexual impulse and interest spoke to a larger life conflict and yearning. That’s the mood I left the novel with. But that said, one reviewer tallied that the narrator masturbates approximately ten times over the course of the novel, has sex nine times, and at one point experiences an exquisite moment of intimacy when someone else removes her bloody tampon. More on that later. Beyond the joy of reading about sex, a big part of the reason we went ahead with this show in this format today is because this book is hitting a crazy zeitgeist moment at a moment when a lot of people seem to also be talking about Gen X sex. It also seems that literally everyone has read this book. Which automatically sets a high bar for a book. I had one friend who I hadn’t spoken with in a couple of years, and we ended up spending three Zoom calls talking about the book. She, in fact, required a whole group of her friends to read it so they could discuss it together. And I know I speak for both of us, Brooke, when I say we think Miranda July really met or exceeded those high expectations, because we both loved the book. Before we even get into the book, I remember that you told me that All Fours was our generation’s Fear of Flying. And we had Erica Jong (pronounced with hard J) on the show a while back, and Fear of Flying has sold at least 20 million copies since its publication in 1973. All Fours just came out in May of last year, and the hardcover alone has sold well over 200,000 copies. The paperback edition will be released soon and will give it a whole new life and readership, not to mention the audiobook numbers. So, Brooke, why has this book reached such a fever pitch? For those who don’t know who Miranda July is, maybe we start there, and then what is it about the book that makes it a novel of a generation?
Brooke: First of all, Miranda July has a cult following and she’s a literary darling. She herself is unique, but her following is unique too. She’s written a number of other books before this one, but none of them have been the true breakout that All Fours already is. She’s best known for her film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. She’s quite prolific, too, insofar as she has multiple films and short stories and books. She’s also original and fearless in her work, which is part of she’s so beloved. She’s also a performance artist and actress. I read about her work: “Her style blends vulnerability, quirkiness, emotional intensity, and an off-kilter sense of humor that has earned her a devoted following.” So that’s her in a nutshell. You can get a real sense of all that by watching some of her videos on Instagram, which I recommend, because a lot of them are designed to make you feel uncomfortable, which is kind of her specialty. So then, All Fours. I guess I would say it’s a perfect storm moment because Miranda July is the perfect person to write a sex book for Gen Xers. She has that aforementioned fearlessness. She’s willing to go where others may not. It’s at times a very graphic book. But it’s also restrained in other ways, surprisingly so—and it’s full of taboos. She ploughs right into all the things—a mother leaving her husband and kid for two weeks only to have an emotional affair right down the street from home. She wrestles with what women feel they should be getting out of their relationships, their sex lives. Her character sleeps with an older woman, and her best friend is a lesbian who’s having, in my mind, like really intense sex with her partner. There’s a lot in here about longing and sexual desire and about feeling sexy and the ways we do and don’t express that, can or can’t express that, especially after a certain age. And women ate it up—and apparently some men, too, Grant, because I know you were really moved by the book. I’d love to hear your take on it—what about it moved you and do you think more men should be reading the book?
Grant: It’s a fascinating book because I found people had a very either/or taste for it. It’s an all or nothing book, I guess, which is a sign of an important work. And I think the book struck women and men in that vein to some degree. One of my women friends got so mad at a couple of her book-club friends for not liking it that she thought about quitting the book club—and her friendship with them. Conversely, though, I think more men bristled at it—and felt threatened by it. I had one friend joke that he wasn’t going to let his wife read it because if she did, it would disrupt their marriage too much. He was joking, but still. While I was reading it, I wondered if it should actually be required reading for all couples, but then I wondered if most couples could truly handle the conversations that might come out of it. I gave my copy to my daughter, by the way, so my wife Heather is next in the family to read it. I joked with Simone that it was a kind of handbook to middle-age. I was with a group of men recently, and one of them asked for recommendations of contemporary novels. These were all thoughtful, sensitive guys, so I recommended All Fours, but they ended up pillorying the novel over email. I was actually offended by how much they hated the novel, and I thought it revealed something really bad about where some men are these days, even the liberal guys, because their reactions seemed beyond any novel critique. To answer your question, though. I loved the novel the way I love an Annie Ernaux story because Ernaux is noted for writing about tough female subjects with unflinching honesty. It took on difficult and often embarrassing subject matter, especially since the main character resembles Miranda July so much, and it did so in frank and surprising ways. I should say that I read it on my 60th birthday road trip to Death Valley, but I wasn’t done with it, so on the last leg of my trip, I found an excuse to stop for the night, and I spent the night at the Lost Hills Motel 6 just so I could finish the book in a hotel room. I loved the first act of the novel because of that cocoon of a hotel room Miranda July created, so this reading experience was among my most memorable and special. Brooke, you have a personal connection to Miranda July and so I’m curious about whether or how that affected your reading experience.
Brooke: Well my personal connection to her, yes, is through her parents. I worked for them for five years—my first job in publishing. I am just a couple years younger than her, and so since I started that job when I was so young, twenty-three years old, her parents did take on a very parental kind of role with me in that job. It’s not like I ever thought of her in a sisterly way, but I will say I was very close to her parents during those years at North Atlantic Books, the publishing company they founded in the 70s, and I met Miranda maybe 2 or 3 times at the office, and I went to her Berkeley screening of Me and You and Everyone We Know which came out one year after I left North Atlantic Books. Knowing her parents did make me hesitant to read the book at first. A lot of times I have a book on my long list, which means I’ll get to it in a few months, or next year. So that was what happened over last summer. The book was getting a lot of attention, but I don’t think it reached that real fever pitch until the fall, at least in my circles. That’s when everyone I knew started asking me if I’d read it yet. But what tipped me over the edge was when I went to a holiday party and walked in and here are all these middle-aged women, all of us moms to middle schoolers, and the first woman I started talking to is like—Have you read All Fours? And I bought the book the next day. I bought the audiobook, Grant, because sometimes that’s the only way I can get through new work. I do wish I had read it instead because Miranda reads her own book and her voice is very particular. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like it as I could not get into it being a novel. With her reading it, I was all the way in memoir land, and I know which things are true, which is a lot of it—like Miranda’s own child being non-binary, and the fact that her grandmother and aunt really did commit suicide in the way she writes about in All Fours. It’s not like these things are secrets because Miranda has shared this in interviews. In fact, it’s written in articles that according to Miranda her grandmother and her aunt died commited suicide at age of 55 because they found it unbearable to see their looks go. I had never heard that particular lens from her dad, but obviously this is an intense legacy to inherit. Going on with the similarities, the character in the book is quasi-famous, and the way she writes about her, you can see how Miranda grapples with her own fame—the way she is conscious of it, ambivalent in some ways, superior to others in other ways. She’s certainly honest, not always likeable, and that in and of itself makes the book gripping. So Grant, given my immersion in memoir, the whole experience was more food for thought about the blurring of the lines between memoir and fiction. What’s your take on this?
Grant: Definitely blurry. In fact, the line between fiction and memoir is as blurry as it’s ever been in literary history, I think. Authors have always leveraged their lives and the lives of those around them in fiction, but rarely with the directness and the confusing boundaries we see today. Some fiction is described as auto-fiction to label it as not quite fiction, not quite memoir, but I know that some authors don’t like it when their work of fiction is labeled this way. I’m thinking of Jenny Offil with her book Dept. of Speculation, for example. But then so many authors court that label: I’m thinking of writers like Ocean Vuong and Rachel Cusk. In the case of Rachel Cusk, I feel like I’m literally in her head, not in a story per se. I actually loved the parts of the story where Miranda July the real person shined through. I love how she walked through the world as a minor celebrity, as she described herself. I’m curious about that decision because so often writers will offer a somewhat thin veil of identity. The writer becomes an artist or musician in other words, but everyone sees through it. I listened to Terry Gross’s interview with Miranda July, and, unfortunately, she missed this great opportunity to explore identity in real life and identity on the page. I’m going to read this part of the transcript of their interview, Brooke, because I know you also thought Terry Gross missed an important moment here. Miranda gives her an opening, and Terry doesn’t take it:
Terry Gross: There’s a line in your book where you’re buying something from an older woman. And you think about how you sometimes really hate old women. And so . . .
Miranda July: Let’s not - yeah, we’re going to have to decide are we saying you.
Gross: Oh, I’m sorry - the character.
July: (Laughter) I mean, we can get into that.
Gross: Yeah.
July: But, you know, the narrator is saying - yeah.
But Terry Gross doesn’t circle back to get into that at all. Instead she obsesses over Miranda having worked in the peepshows when she was younger and the interview in my opinion sort of spirals from there. But Brooke, did you find other interviews online where Miranda has spoken to this blurring of life and fiction?
Brooke: Online reviews refer to the book as autofiction. The Guardian reviewer wrote that July tangles “explicitly with reality across mediums” and “pushes autofiction to new limits, revealing how good this genre is at questioning reality. How can the narrator make her own peculiarities part of a lived life? How can she get real in the face of death if what remains most real is art?” One of the things I most loved about this book is the way that July’s protagonist fantasizes. It’s an exquisite thing to read (or listen to as the case may be) because she trips off into flights of fancy. She scenarioizes. She imagines. She has full blown self-fulfilling sexual escapades by the things she conjures up in her own mind. Clearly July herself has a very rich imagination, but to bring that to the page embodied as it is by her character is really wonderful. I also liked the book because I felt a lot of things. I was bewildered and embarrassed at times. I laughed out loud. I was surprised and in awe. It resonated. It didn’t resonate. I related to her protagonist and then I didn’t. There were things the character does that are outrageous and push boundaries big time, but as I mentioned earlier, one of Miranda July’s signature things is making people uncomfortable. And not a lot of people position their work in this space because it’s also very uncomfortable to do. I have a friend like this who thrives off of uncomfortable situations, and so he says things that are designed to make people uncomfortable and he puts himself and others in uncomfortable situations, and I have to say that sometimes I really love it and sometimes I hate it—but it’s always kind of thrilling and titillating in a way. And it does make you feel something—and I think for Miranda this is really center to her performance art. I have watched a lot of her stuff and felt decidedly squirmy, and I think a few things—more power to her; and I couldn’t do what she does; and I don’t think very many people feel the freedom to do what she does because a lot of us are very bound up inside of social pressures and norms that are not only societally imposed, but imposed by self and by family. And so part of her work is an examination of all that—which is perhaps why it’s so inherently feminist. So Grant, let’s talk a bit about the dancing. And about Davey. You were intrigued by the dancing and the performative nature of this affair that is never consummated. Say what drew you into the story line.
Grant: Yeah, never consummated is a key part of this highly sexually charged relationship. It’s weird to use “never consummated” and “highly sexually charged” in the same sentence, but it was such a unique, strange, and compelling love affair, and I think Miranda July very consciously didn’t have them have sex or be too physical in conventional ways for the reason that she wanted to show the deeper yearning, the deeper dissatisfaction her character was experiencing. And the ways that fantasy itself is a sexually compelling realm, and how perhaps the best sex is actually anticipation and hope. I have to give a little bit of a spoiler alert here, but to set the stage, just an hour into the narrator’s road trip from LA to New York, she locks eyes across her window with Davey, a handsome attendant at a smalltown garage. She decides to stay the night there, and then, in an obsession with Davey, squanders thousands of dollars commissioning Davey’s wife Claire to exquisitely redesign the room she takes in a roadside hotel. She stays in this perfect oasis that smells like tonka bean for the three weeks of her vacation, where she is joined every afternoon by Davey himself, with whom she discovers mutual but unconsummated passion. He turns out to be an amazing airborne dancer, and through dancing they find forms of intimacy that finally make life seem real. It’s because they don’t have sex that it’s all so sexually charged because every accidental brush of skin sends them into desire. Since they can’t have sex, their almost-sex is hotter. When the narrator isn’t with Davey, she does little but masturbate to fantasies of him. It was interesting for me because I follow Miranda July on Instagram, and several years ago she started doing all of these intense, revealing dances, and now I can’t help but think some version of this novel was taking place in real life. The first third of the book in the hotel room was overwhelmingly the best of the book for me, and I’ve heard that from others, so it’s interesting that the book hits its peak so early and then the narrator has to reckon with the aftermath of that rather ecstatic experience for the rest of the book. Returning home she has to somehow make sense of the rest of her life. She’s estranged from her husband, and she realizes that her menopause holds a reality that challenges the fantasies that are central to her life. She becomes haunted by a chart she discovers online titled “Sex Hormones Over Life Span,” which she interprets to mean she has only a brief window left in her life during which she might experience sexual desire. Part of her reckoning also includes her grandmother and aunt who both killed themselves in their 50s. So the novel, in many ways, is about how can the narrator avoid destroying her marriage and her relationship with her child while still pursuing the total sexual and creative freedom that her countdown clock requires? And if so, how? It’s a question for us all, really. On that note, Brooke, the book is also being billed as a menopause novel and I wonder what your thoughts are on that, and would you even characterize it as such.
Brooke: I think what’s going on is that the character is in perimenopause and she talks about it. A lot. So people have called it “the first great perimenopause novel.” I would love to know what Miranda July thinks of that because I truly doubt that’s what she set out to achieve here. I think the book is about sex and desire and self-reinvention first and foremost, and this happens to be through the lens of a 45-year-old protagonist who’s aging, and who’s in perimenopause. Ergo. I have talked to women my age who’ve read the book and what they most gravitate toward is the honest conversation and depiction of sex and desire. By the time you’re in your mid- to late-forties, a lot of women have been married for up to 20 years. A lot of women have kids. A lot of women do not feel desirable to themselves or within the context of their relationships. Probably most are not having sex as much as they’d like to, in part because they’ve had all the sex they could ever want to have with their life partners. I have had conversations about this kind of thing with a lot of my closest friends who’ve been married a while. That Miranda’s book explores sex in the way it does‚ not explicit sex but other ways of being sexual and having a sexual experience that isn’t quote-unquote cheating, is something that a lot of women are thinking about. The whole topic is thought-provoking, and the book is also a little unhinged—in a good way. Meaning that the character is a little unhinged, and maybe that’s how a lot of us feel as we’re approaching fifty. So I guess I would say it’s more of a midlife crisis novel than a menopause novel. It provokes one to consider the crazy ways you might blow up your life if you wanted to. It wouldn’t actually be that hard. And I have to imagine a lot of middle aged women fantasize or mind-trip about getting up and leaving. Just walking out the door to go have some wild insane road trip where they renovate a hotel room to the tune of ten grand and have an emotional affair with someone fifteen years younger. It’s escapism fiction and sex fiction and desire fiction and totally crazy but actually maybe not that crazy. Which pinpoints its popularity and why everyone is reading it.
Grant: Yeah, I agree that it’s primarily a midlife crisis novel, and Miranda July makes many gestures in the book in that direction. For example, she overtly compares what she’s doing to the whole tradition of men cheating with younger women, both in literature and life, and she’s very conscious of how what she’s doing wouldn’t exactly be perceived the same way if she were a man. Brooke, I’m interested in what you thought of the last two thirds of the book, where she is creating her new self. She strikes an agreement with her husband that they can see other people, but that doesn’t deliver anything close to what she had with Davey. All of life seems a little dreary, even when she gets in a long-term relationship with another woman. The relationship with Davey held more because it existed so much in fantasy, Miranda July’s preferred state to live in. It’s odd because when her new girlfriend dumps her, she has to nurse a broken heart with her husband and child. It’s odd and somehow a little disturbing. I guess I’m not sure if or how her character could become happier. She has open communication and an open relationship with her husband, but the book ends with a certain disappointed air. We’re left with our aging bodies, in other words, yearning for something more. That’s life: a failing body and yearning. How did you view the ending, Brooke?
Brooke: I appreciated that she brings in the lesbian relationship toward the end of the book, but it was also sad. There’s a desperation there that did make me feel something—about the nature of a new relationship vs. a comfortable one that is known. She’s exploring all the different ways in which we love and are loved, confident in ourselves and completely consumed with self-doubt. I don’t want to spoil the ending so I don’t want to speak to the end-end, but I was happy we see where Davey is. I won’t say that the ending was satisfying to me, but I think the fact that she doesn’t leave her husband is a nice counterbalance to the standard divorce stories we see out there. She chose a different door for her protagonist.
Grant: Before we close, Brooke, can a publisher design this kind of success? Do you think that Riverhead knew just how huge a book this was going to be?
Brooke: I think you can have a book like this—and it checks all the boxes. Miranda July is already a literary darling with a cult following; the book is sexy and it’s about sex and sex sells. Interesting, there was no deal posted on Publishers Marketplace, where sometimes you can find out how much a publisher paid for a book, or if it went to auction. So we don’t have those details. But she’s very public with her work. On her substack she has an ongoing All Fours Group Chat for everyone (not a book club, but a place for readers to talk about their own lives). She had some sort of interactive experience where she encouraged readers to submit their own videos to her on her website. She also simultaneously published in the UK. It was all a very coordinated effort. Still, I think unless you’re Barbra Streisand or Prince Harry or Britney Spears, the publishing world cannot anticipate this kind of success. Miranda is famous but not that kind of famous, and her book is a work of fiction. And Grant, it was just announced last week that Miranda July is a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. So not only is this a zeitgeist book and a book of a generation, it’s a very award-winning book and it’s in fact gorgeously written and propulsively readable, even propulsively listenable.
Grant: It’s been a long time since I’ve read something so consuming, and it’s probably the last novel I’ll go find a hotel room to finish it, so we recommend you not only read All Fours, but read it with others because you’re going to want to talk about it with others. It was definitely fun to talk about this with you, Brooke, and I hope we can take the occasional break when a zeitgeist novel is published. On that note, I want to extend an invitation to Miranda July to join us on Write-minded. We’ll ask the question Terry Gross failed to ask. And more. That’s why we’re here: to ask and honor questions about writing, so please keep tuning into Write-minded.
Contemporary cult classics like All Fours:
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
Rouge by Mona Awad
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
Luster by Raven Leilani
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
Death Valley by Melissa Broder
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ABOUT BROOKE WARNER & GRANT FAULKNER
Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner are the cohosts of Write-minded, and while they usually enjoy interviewing guest authors and industry professionals, they do occasionally commandeer their own show.