By Miranda July
Canongate Books, Paperback, £9.99
“I’d whipped myself into a froth of longing — or worked, created fictions…. Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, ways to muddle through?”
I’m jealous of you if you are yet to read Miranda July’s All Fours, now out in paperback. It has been no less than a literary sensation, with women in book groups around the world having a near-spiritual experience upon reading it, upending their lives due to July’s masterpiece that looks at all the M’s – motherhood, menopause, monogamy. They are effortlessly discussed in a hysterically funny narrative where the protagonist decides not to drive across the country (as she maintains she is doing) but instead rents a room in a nearby motel and decorates it. The reader is party to a midlife crisis which propels our protagonist into a somewhat affair. As the book goes on, she learns to free herself, say “F*** you” to what is deemed normal and culturally appropriate, to find her voice and to be herself.
I myself, having done the upending five years ago, read it and almost exclaimed out loud on 73 bus with all the other later in life lesbians: “YES! This is what I’m talking about!” However, although the first two thirds are funny, brave, no holds barred and brilliantly cringe-worthy they sometimes feel frustratingly heterosexual. Hold on queers! We live in a patriarchy and so our narrator’s fictional bisexual life follows real life and the payoff is worth it, I promise. It’s like one big coming-out story of a forty-something, menopausal, extremely privileged artist (like Miranda July herself) that never takes itself seriously but is always serious about the light it sheds on the female experience.
“I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.”
All Fours is classy, well written erotica at times, while at other times it’s a moving call to action. Even if the call is from the privileged one per cent living in one-point-eight-million-dollar houses in Los Angeles. Personally, I can forgive it for that because July calls herself an ‘Artist’ and this novel is part of her using herself as the subject (check out her Instagram) to draw light on what is the most universal of subjects: that it is healthy for women to have a sex drive. That there is no shame in being sexual and asking for our needs to be met, even if that sexual doesn’t fit into the ‘norm’ of what is expected.