Her latest novel, \u201cAll Fours,\u201d unpacks the transformative, sometimes painful process of rediscovering oneself in middle age <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There might not be a mind quite like Miranda July\u2019s in contemporary culture. Regardless of the medium she\u2019s working in\u2014film, art, literature, performance art\u2014she always creates something utterly unexpected. Consuming a piece of her art often comes with more questions than answers, but in a welcoming way. Her take on the world around us has a distinct viewpoint\u2014she looks at garden-variety topics through a kaleidoscope that refracts completely different meanings than the status quo. Her films Me and You and Everyone We Know<\/em>, The Future<\/em> and Kajillionaire<\/em> all explore human connection and relationships, as does her first novel, The First Bad Man<\/em>, <\/em>through a lens only July could render. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Her latest novel, All Fours<\/em>, is no exception. The book follows a 45-year-old semi-famous artist going through a midlife crisis. She\u2019s preparing to take a road trip from Los Angeles to New York\u2014leaving her husband and child at home. It\u2019s the first time she\u2019ll be leaving them both for an extended period of time and she\u2019s stressed by the prospect. But her itinerary changes only 30 minutes into her trip, when she unexpectedly decides to exit off the highway into the town of Monrovia, checks into a motel and sets herself on an entirely different journey. She finds herself smitten with a local younger man, Davey, and they embark on an untraditional relationship. While her husband and son believe that she\u2019s still driving, the only person who knows what\u2019s going on with her is her best friend, Jordi. Through our unnamed narrator\u2019s journey, July, now 50, examines the preconceived notions we have about women aging, their desires and needs, and motherhood. July looks at the places where one can rediscover oneself\u2014and how those places are often ones we\u2019d never expect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, July speaks to Xtra<\/em> about the novel, what midlife crises look like for women and why we all need to queer the marital institution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I started it when I was 45 and I was overwhelmed with the sense that there was suddenly this scarcity of information I was used to from being a young woman\u2014when there was just tons of involvement in your body and all the aspirational ways you could be. I could see that stopping, and more than that, I could feel the perspective shift. Now, when I look forward, it\u2019s death and old age and that\u2019s such a huge perspective shift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I thought: where\u2019s the conversation about [women aging]? The book was the book I wanted and reflected the conversation that I was having with all my friends and with other women I met. <\/p>\n\n\n\n During a midlife crisis, you enter this territory and you think, \u201cI\u2019m being silly. I\u2019m a mess, I\u2019m a wreck.\u201d And it\u2019s like, no, we are meant to transform and we are shamed out of it. We\u2019re always transforming. There\u2019s this sense that every time the narrator and her best friend Jordi meet, they are different people\u2014they\u2019re also realizing, over the course of a lifetime, that there are going to be these major shifts in their lives. So that\u2019s built in for us as a midlife crisis. It\u2019s also a crisis that happens in puberty. I think it\u2019s part of it probably in death too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think if you have a part of yourself that\u2019s starving, it\u2019s usually in your blind spot and you\u2019re concerned with other things. Then when that part\u2019s seen, even by some sort of random, marginal figure, that starving part of yourself leaps out that is suddenly unleashed and not willing to go back in the box. That was very easy to relate to feeling. I wanted this character to not be stoic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I do think the first sex a person has with someone new after having sex with one person for a long time involves a reorientation\u2014a sort of coming out feeling, like, \u201cOh, wait, who was I all along?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s only ever useful writing about sex for it to be a widening process, widening telling of sex. It\u2019s insane how narrow [the definition of sex] is and how much pain that causes. I tried in all different ways to untie those knots and yes, to have some things feel erotic, but then also to have her not have desire in some places or not be sure if she was going to be able to. People sometimes feel bad about feeling that way. It\u2019s like, well, why aren\u2019t you hungry right now? The desire to have [sex] is the hottest thing of all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes I\u2019m reading or watching something and I think something is about to happen and it\u2019s my own insane idea of what\u2019s next. I think that happened in a book or movie [I was reading or watching]. I was like, \u201cOh, he\u2019s going to put the tampon in.\u201d After I get over my disappointment [that it didn\u2019t happen], I\u2019m like, \u201cThat\u2019s mine.\u201d It was a different way for me to think about a period. No one had ever offered to put in my tampon. For me, that suddenly seemed like a great loss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In that moment, it\u2019s funny. It doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not fucking serious as hell. She\u2019s being loony, but she, in her own conception of herself, is dead serious and wants to be understood and seen fundamentally. Certainly as you get older, you\u2019re faced with a sort of disregard almost. In my experience, it\u2019s not like we want to be regarded in the same ways as we were in youth. We have outgrown those and now we have a new understanding. There\u2019s nothing that exists for us, and so we have to make it out of our own minds and relationships. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There was this question of how much weight [should her relationships with women be given]. Given she was in this straight relationship, relationships with women, with friends, are \u201csupposed\u201d to be secondary. The bet she begins to place or the way she starts to shift her weight is like, what if this is actually more? What if I put all my weight here? Could I build a home weighted in this direction? There are a lot of little moments that aren\u2019t so little. They could be tossed away, but I think just trying to figure out, is this enough? Is this substantial? Because nothing in the world will tell her that this is sturdy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m just staggered that on the whole, we\u2019re still doing marriage the same way. Even taking something like poly relationships out of it, it\u2019s like just marriage<\/em>. There are a whole bunch of different ways that marriage could look. Anything other than the norm is still all seen as pretty radical. I was having conversations with other people and it almost immediately became seen as a kink if relationships were in any way different than traditional. I was interested in presenting that less like, \u201cOh, aren\u2019t we so radical?\u201d I wanted to look at different relationships in practical terms\u2014with all the fears too. There\u2019s a sort of surrealness when you\u2019ve been attached to a typical structure\u2014it may not have worked, but it felt real because obviously it\u2019s there in the culture. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Her latest novel, \u201cAll Fours,\u201d unpacks the transformative, sometimes painful process of rediscovering oneself in middle age<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1175,"featured_media":265473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editorial_slug":"7","_editorial_slug":"7","exclude_from_latest_block":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"contributors":[2856],"topic":[75,2257],"clients":[],"series":[],"timeliness":[61],"editorial_format":[2417],"type-of-work":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265478,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265456\/revisions\/265478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"contributors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributors?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"clients","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/clients?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"timeliness","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/timeliness?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"editorial_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial_format?post=265456"},{"taxonomy":"type-of-work","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-of-work?post=265456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}All Fours<\/em> is so incredible. I was just constantly delighted and shocked by it. What was your initial inspiration?\u00a0<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
It feels like we rarely see representations of women having midlife crises. You see that with men with their sports cars and younger women. But you really show the narrator going through her own midlife crisis as a way to find herself again.\u00a0<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
This character clearly needs and wants to create space for herself\u2014you see that in her abandoning her road trip to New York and then spending a bunch of money sprucing up her hotel room in Monrovia. Making space is a way to find herself. But she also seemingly finds herself through a relationship with a new lover, Davey. He seems to see something in her that she forgot\u2014why did you want to explore her crisis through that emotional affair?\u00a0<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What role does sex play in that type of discovery?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
You explore desire in All Fours<\/em> in so many different ways: from the narrator\u2019s decadent attraction to a pink bedspread she buys for her hotel room, her relationship with Davey, her sexual fantasies, her search for finding herself again. Why was it important to look at it from many viewpoints?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
A very unexpected exploration of desire in the book is a scene where Davey inserts a tampon in her. They can\u2019t be physical in a more traditional way\u2014because they don\u2019t want to have a full-fledged affair\u2014so this is the way they explore that attraction. I\u2019ve never read anything like it.\u00a0<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a line that really stood out to me in the book where the narrator says about the people in her life, \u201cYou\u2019ve all missed the point of me.\u201d I love that line so much, and I feel like that really kind of gets into the way that women are as they get older. We\u2019re supposed to almost disappear.\u00a0<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
I love the way that the relationships between women are shown both with the narrator\u2019s deep friendships and also her sexual relationships with women, when her marriage opens up. She says she just wants to be seen, and throughout a lot of the book, when she\u2019s most seen it\u2019s by other women.\u00a0<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The narrator starts out in a fairly traditional marriage before she goes on her meandering journey to self-discovery. By the end of the book, she\u2019s in a much different arrangement. Why did you want to dismantle the marital institution in that way?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n