All Fours: Miranda July’s new novel might derail your life

There was a point during my first reading of Miranda July’s All Fours when I felt nervous to continue. So vividly does she depict the narrator’s spiral into sexual obsession and lust that, as I read, I was maybe a bit too much along for the ride. Flooded with dopamine, my life outside of the book (I suppose what some might call ‘my real life’) began to chafe a little, I started to feel cloistered, restless. I was scarily alive to the transformative potential of the story and its power to capsize seemingly content lives just as the narrator is, in a very literal sense, derailed – drawn off her charted course by a surprising and unlikely romance. I was giddy. 

All Fours, July’s second novel, is about many things. It’s about desire, it’s about romance, fantasy, ageing, relationships, womanhood, friendship, motherhood, work, honesty, self-revelation, domesticity, sex, longing and much, much more. At times, it can feel like it’s taking hilarious yet superfluous detours, but we soon learn that no deviation in life is unnecessary. Arguably, that’s one of the points.

Reading All Fours, I was so swept along in the dopamine of the lust frenzy, I was nervous to continue reading, nervous of what dormant impulses it could unearth. I wondered if we could talk about desire as a transformative power. In both your novels it appears as a force that can galvanise people but also, in some cases, can annihilate or diminish them.

Miranda July: I guess my feeling is that most of us have some part of ourselves that we’ve unconsciously starved. And sometimes someone will come along – it could be the most random person – and they’ll see that starving thing. And so that part of you suddenly just emerges and is desperately hungry. It feels so good, like, ‘I’ve been waiting so long for this’. It’s so intense that I tend to think it usually has more to do with the starving thing needing to come out and take up room than the other person. And if, as you say, your life gets capsized along along the way, then that’s what needed to happen. You are rebalanced, let’s say.

And I don’t think it always has to be destructive, but I do think it’s nearly impossible to not just think, ‘Well, I’m in love and we have to consummate this.’ In part, that’s because of the culture – literally every song on the radio will encourage you to dive into that feeling. 

But, at a certain point, a lot of us have done that enough times that we become curious, almost like detectives. And perhaps, by the middle of your life, you’re really ready for that? That starving thing. It either happens or it doesn’t with the person but the starving thing is now here to stay – it’s fully grown.

You mean you have to just contend with that hungry aspect of yourself?

Miranda July: Yeah, I mean, in terms of the book, here’s the narrator – this fully realised artist who has been so honest in her art. And a fan – someone who doesn’t know her at all but who, as a fan of her art, in some ways sees her more clearly than her family back home who are her bedrock. But she is essentially sort of starved by her home life, so there is a part of her that is maybe more known by this total stranger. 

“We want to be in this very comfortable, agonising but still familiar state of longing” – Miranda July

The novel pivots on the axis of fantasy and reality. There’s a moment where a character tells the narrator, ‘Fantasies are all good but you have to have some kind of lived experience, otherwise you’ll go crazy.’ But the condition in which desire thrives is when you don’t have something, so it feels like the narrator is wrestling with trying to achieve a kind of balance somewhere between all those points of contention.

Miranda July: Yeah, there’s something about longing, right? It’s a state that I think most of us know from childhood – this longing to be beheld and adored. And so it’s not even like we necessarily want to have the thing, as you said, but we want to be in this very comfortable, agonising but still familiar state of longing, which I think is a childlike state. And even if it comes now equipped with all this, like, womanly lust, I think it really is [connected to childhood].

The narrator is figuring out how to be known. And actually, by the end of the book, where she gets to is intimacy with herself and being a full soul; being someone who could actually be known. 

Because if you’re compartmentalising these different aspects of yourself, how can you be fully known? You’re not living in plain sight of people. 

Miranda July: Exactly and, especially as women, it’s like you’re trying to appear stable and consistent. And so you end up presenting a certain part of yourself rather than the truth which is like, ‘OK, this is all of me. And I got to tell you, I’m always changing. I have all these different sides and I don’t always want to be with you, but I always love you.’ But we’re not taught to to ask for what we need as inherently changing, cycling woman, you know? 

“It’s like this insane level of honesty and I’m high as a kite after an exchange like that. I think that feeling was so much in the book” – Miranda July

My editor has this theory that it’s more important to strive for contentment than happiness, because happiness is ultimately hollow and unsustainable. I just wondered what you thought of that and in relation to the journey the narrator takes?

Miranda July: I guess there’s something about the word ‘contentment’ that reminds me of settling and being in a stuck place. That said, I think there can be – I wouldn’t use the word ‘contentment’ – but there can be an OK feeling inside that’s like, ‘I am going to be OK, no matter what.’ I think that that’s something to strive for, this fundamental self-soothing, because there’s freedom in that, when you’re not like, ‘Oh god, I need this to happen to be OK’, which is a state of panic.

Over the course of All Fours, there are so many different forms of sexual encounters and experiences either happening to the narrator or being related to the narrator by her network of women friends. She surveys them for information and it helps her make her own experiences legible to her…

Miranda July: I had so many conversations with women while I was writing this book and, unlike any other book or movie, I felt like I was writing All Fours with and for this massive group [of women] and it was so exciting. I’d have a conversation with someone, maybe someone I just talked to at a party – that weird intimacy that comes with two women, you’re never going to see each other again, you just say the absolute truth. It’s like this insane level of honesty and I’m high as a kite after an exchange like that. I think that feeling was so much in the book. And instead of it being this sort of whisper network, this underground world, I’m just going to come out with it.

Miranda July’s All Fours is published by Canongate and is available now from your independent local bookshop