What happens when a curious, creative, sexually active woman reaches the midpoint of her life and questions her direction? Is there a dissonance to being queer yet finding yourself in a heterosexual marriage and a nuclear family? And what does it mean when said woman embarks on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York to recalibrate, but finds herself heading no further than Monrovia, on the outskirts of the city; holing up in a dingy motel off the highway; and feeling inexplicably drawn to a young man who works at a local branch of Hertz—and his interior decorator girlfriend?
All these questions (and a few more) are weighed in Miranda July’s masterful upcoming novel, All Fours—and the answers July finds, however tentative, are just as brilliantly funny and strangely touching as you might expect. (Announced today, All Fours will be released on May 14, 2024, and marks her first book in almost a decade.) For while July has always been fascinated by the most extreme and instinctual parts of how people interact—whether probing the liminal regions of sex and desire or exploring the nuances of loneliness and connection and the gray areas between friendship, love, and family—the razor-sharp prose of All Fours also offers a warm, generous blend of heartache and humor. Unsurprisingly, it’s already received cosigns from George Saunders and Emma Cline, with the latter hailing it “a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind.”
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Given the close parallels between July’s own life and that of her protagonist—both are in their mid-40s, married with a child in Los Angeles, and have a multihyphenate creative career—there will inevitably be speculation about just how autobiographical the novel truly is. July understands where this impulse comes from (“I always do that too; I’m always flipping back and forth to the author photo,” she admits), but she emphasizes that she is not her protagonist.
“I think I get conflated with my characters even more because I’ve made movies and I’ve been in some of those movies,” she says. “I knew it would be a woman my age who has a child like me, and has a husband, and like all my other work, it would be fiction. But I thought, well, maybe instead of going out of my way to say she’s not me—she has straight hair and she’s a dentist, you know—it would be more interesting to just kind of head into it and borrow that auto-fictional ambiguity that I enjoy in Sheila Heti and Dodie Bellamy. Maybe I could be sort of generous and actually share my position with my narrator. Maybe that’s a more fun way to address this problem—to use it as a tool to help tell the fictional story and hope it adds some energy.” Thankfully, All Fours fizzes with the kind of offbeat spark that only July can conjure.
Here, she shares with Vogue the book’s backstory, how it led her to meditate on the meaning of the “midlife crisis,” and the deep meaning behind the cover art.
Vogue: Given it’s been a decade since you published your last novel, tell me a little bit about the genesis of this book. Did it come to you all at once or slowly develop over time?
Miranda July: I guess some of the first ideas I put into a story for The New Yorker called “The Metal Bowl.” That story was different from anything I’ve ever written—it was much closer to the bone. It felt really embarrassing, to be honest, and very vulnerable. But when it came out, all these women, other writers and artists, who had never written to me before, responded to the story with very personal emails with their stories that were also raw and honest and embarrassing. To me, they were vivid and exciting. And I thought, Hmm, maybe none of us needs to be embarrassed. And that feeling kind of planted the seed for All Fours.
Did you think about genre at all when you were deciding where to channel that feeling?
I wanted to write a romance. To try and capture that sort of drugged-out, longing feeling when someone’s completely under your skin. And that seemed to fit very well with this new vantage point that I didn’t have 10 years ago, when I wrote my last book. I started this book when I was 45. I’m 49 now, and it’s like, for the first half of your life, you feel like a young person—for quite a long time as a woman, you’re just young—and then very suddenly, that flips. And instead of looking forward to some kind of open-ended apex, you’re in that place in the middle, and when you look forward the same amount, you’re looking toward death. That’s a very different story, and I wanted to write about what that means sexually, in terms of intimacy. It’s a mapless, unknown, mysterious place.
The book also seems to play with the idea of a midlife crisis, which is something that, historically, has mostly been written about from a male perspective. Was that a trope you wanted to subvert in any way?
I mean, that phrase midlife crisis is such a punch line—you never really say it with any empathy or faith in that person’s process, you know? But when I look around at people my age, whoever isn’t having some kind of crisis at this point in their life, I wonder if they’re asleep at the wheel. Or maybe they have some kind of insight that we can’t see. Midlife crisis feels like too small a phrase to take into account that perspective shift and how that affects your body and your desires. And I think, especially for a woman, you’ve just gotten done being a young woman, being so heavily marketed to and represented in this particular way in film and TV and everyone having such involvement in your reproductive life, and then that information kind of abruptly stops—like, you’re actually hunting for basic facts about what happens next. But I guess the gift of this time in a woman’s life is that, being represented in such a narrow way, if at all, there’s all this pleasure and mystery and surprise, and this real heat and pounding excitement that you would have no idea was coming. Whereas the first half of your life, you were kind of told what to expect, and hope for, and maybe have been disappointed.
The protagonist starts out in this fairly conventional family setup, and obviously that shifts in unexpected ways as the book goes on. Were there any ways in which you wanted to challenge those norms of marriage or monogamy, or show that alternatives can be healthy and productive?
I mean, I sort of can’t believe we’re still doing marriage more or less the same way it’s always been done—it’s actually kind of weird. Especially since it was invented for purposes that we don’t have anymore, like land ownership and dowries and someone to milk the cows. There’s no reason it still needs to go that way. It absolutely can be made according to your specific circumstances and desires. But depending on where you sit in the culture and who your parents were, or are, that is either more or less available to you. If you’re like me, reinventing what a marriage might consist of—and as the narrator does in this book—it’s kind of like painting over the Mona Lisa or something. It’s not that hard, it’s kind of exhilarating, but you think you might go to jail for it? Every second, I feel like the guards are coming.
There is a lot of really brilliant and frank and funny writing about sex throughout the book. Was it a challenge to get that right?
It’s funny you say challenge, because I did actually write so many sentences about sex that just flowed out but weren’t actually true? They kind of just relied on this unhealthy, unhelpful framework that I have about sex that is so insidious—and, actually, that I think has created a fair amount of pain and distance. And so I tried for this book to just throw out all my assumptions, even the ones I wasn’t aware of—I had to become aware of them and be really, really honest. So yes, I tried to describe real female desire, but also the stress of not desiring or becoming aroused in a way that you think isn’t hot. And in this book, the sex kind of doesn’t happen where it should, and then suddenly, there it is. It’s erratic, because I don’t think women are actually very consistent sexually. Like, why should we be? There’s no reason we should be consistent. And so I tried to write to that.
Tell me a little more about the cover art, as it feels like an unexpected choice. Why did that image feel correct?
Right? You would expect for a book about women and sex and intimacy that there would be, like, a woman’s body on the cover or some artful, cropped thigh or something. [Laughs.] But I wanted something that expressed a larger, more profound feeling. There’s an image that recurs in the novel of a cliff that suddenly appears in the middle of a woman’s life, and the narrator is kind of preoccupied with this. But more broadly, as we talked about, not much is mapped out past midlife for a woman, so it can feel like you’re nearing the edge of a terrifying drop. When faced with how you represent that, I started thinking about the idea of a cliff and the first paintings of the American West that men painted in the 1800s. The nature had existed forever before it was painted and framed this way by them, just as the cliff has existed inside women forever with almost no framing whatsoever. So I found this Western expansion–style cliff and stole it for its grandeur and majestic, luminous beauty. And my hope is to apply that to this cliff that I’m writing about—to our wilderness. It’s sort of a reclaiming.
