A cross-country road trip is an excellent thing to announce. It has a beginning, a destination, and enough distance in between to suggest that something significant will happen. Miranda July gives the unnamed narrator of All Fours such a plan: leave her husband and child in Los Angeles for a while, drive to New York, and do something with this portion of her life.
About half an hour later, she pulls off the freeway. She checks into a motel in Monrovia. Then she begins taking a remarkable interest in the room.
There is an immediate joke here. The grand departure has barely cleared the neighborhood. There is also something more intriguing than a joke. A person who has made the arrangements to go away has discovered that what she wants may have very little to do with mileage. Home remains close enough for an easy return. She simply does not return yet.
Published in 2024, July’s second novel builds from this absurdly short journey. Its narrator is forty-five, an artist with some recognition and several kinds of work. She has people she loves and things she has chosen. Whatever is bothering her cannot be cleared up by explaining that she has been living the wrong life.
The woman who gives herself away
The public opening chapter provides a useful introduction to her voice. A neighbor leaves a warning that someone may have been photographing her home. Alongside concern, the narrator feels a small pleasure at the thought of attracting attention. It is an embarrassing response, and she lets us see it.
That disclosure establishes an unusual intimacy. We watch her preserve an image of herself, and we also hear her report the effort of preserving it. She can be vain and perceptive within the same thought. Her perceptiveness does not magically cure the vanity. It makes living with it more interesting.
The comedy asks for a particular kind of company from the reader. You need not approve of the thought. You do need to allow that a person can have it without becoming nothing but a vain person. The narrator has already noticed some of the evidence against herself; she keeps talking anyway. That is one reason this opening offers more than the pleasure of catching someone out.
Her affection for her family complicates any easy account of escape. There is tenderness in how she watches Harris and their child, Sam. There is also the mundane work of keeping a household going. July places these things close to the narrator’s creative life, close enough that the distance between her studio and the house is small. Moving between them still takes something out of her.
Many people will recognize that discrepancy. A walk of a few seconds may require a change in who you are expected to be. You leave an unfinished thought and arrive where someone needs breakfast. Later, the household task is over, but the thought does not automatically return. No one involved has to be a villain for the interruption to matter.
The question becomes harder because love remains present. If she were simply indifferent to Harris and Sam, departure would be easier to explain. Instead, she needs to discover whether wanting more room for herself necessarily means taking love away from them. The answer cannot be settled by counting the rooms.
An unreasonable amount of attention to a room
The money for the trip has a wonderfully improbable source: a whiskey company pays twenty thousand dollars to use a sentence she wrote years earlier. It arrives with less of the usual moral weight of earnings already assigned to ordinary expenses. Here is money that seems available for an experiment.
A young man named Davey also helps pull her off course. He works at a rental-car business and cares about dance. He is married. His wife, Claire, is an interior decorator, and it is Claire whom the narrator enlists to transform the motel room.
The resulting arrangement is awkward before anything else happens. The narrator wants a private space; another woman’s work helps make it possible. That woman has a life with the man occupying the narrator’s imagination. The people around the project are already connected to one another in ways that do not begin with her.
In her conversation with Meghan O’Rourke for The Yale Review, July explains that she chose to follow the pleasure of making the room beautiful. Decoration could sustain narrative attention. It was not merely background to the important event.
That choice gives the premise some of its charge. A temporary room normally asks very little of us. We put up with its colors, leave our bag somewhere, and expect to go. This woman takes its surroundings seriously. She spends on a place she does not own, treating what she likes as sufficient reason to begin.
It is easy to dismiss such a project as frivolous. It is also easy to congratulate it as liberation. The more interesting possibility lies in staying with the practical oddness. How does a woman discover what she wants when so much of her day consists of finding an arrangement everyone can live with? What becomes visible when she does not immediately negotiate the first impulse down to something sensible?
Money gives her unusual freedom to pursue that experiment. It pays for privacy, materials, and someone else’s time. It does not buy Davey’s feelings. It cannot guarantee that the significance she finds in him will be the significance he finds in her. A room can be designed to her specifications; a person cannot.
That difference keeps the fantasy from becoming entirely sealed. Davey has his own work, marriage, and wishes. Claire is doing more than furnishing someone else’s revelation. Their presence makes it possible to take the narrator’s longing seriously while remaining alert to what it asks of others.
Forty-five is not an epilogue
Perimenopause matters to this novel partly because of the future the narrator imagines. She fears bodily change and dwindling opportunities. She fears that something she has not yet lived will become unavailable before she has worked out how to live it.
These are her fears, and her talent for imaginative escalation is part of them. They should not be promoted into universal statements about women’s bodies. The interest is in what a changing body means to this woman, with her particular history, vanity, imagination, and impatience.
Speaking to Chelsea Bieker in Portland Monthly, July describes moving away from the ambition to make a comprehensively informative novel. She found a way forward through one woman’s experience, allowing that woman to handle it imperfectly.
That permission matters. A composed, well-informed character who expressed every need fairly would produce a different book. This narrator can misunderstand herself. She can want something before she possesses a respectable explanation for wanting it. Fiction gives her the time to be inconveniently unfinished.
We often allow that time more readily to younger people. At twenty, dissatisfaction can count as a search. At forty-five, with work and a family, it can sound like ingratitude. The implication is that the major choices are over and the remaining task is maintenance.
The motel makes that assumption look less settled. The narrator is surprised by how intensely she can still anticipate something. Desire brings news about her own capacity to be moved. It may also encourage her to place far more weight on another person than he can bear. Both possibilities belong in the picture.
There is no need to choose between dismissing her desires and approving every action they produce. Reading can make room for a feeling before making a judgment about a decision. The distinction is useful here: being heard should not depend on having behaved impeccably, and being heard does not erase anyone else’s claim to a life of their own.
Who gets to leave, and who is left arranging things?
The twenty thousand dollars keeps returning to mind. Many people cannot pause their working lives, take another room, and renovate it. A reader caring for a dependent relative, working an inflexible shift, or worrying about rent will have reasons to notice that.
Those reasons need not end the conversation. They can make it sharper. The narrator’s material freedom shows one way a buried wish might become an action. It also exposes the resources that action requires. Her experience may illuminate a need without offering a usable plan for everyone who shares it.
The same care should extend to the people near her. If we resist judging the narrator entirely by how well she performs as a wife or mother, we should also resist treating her family as an obstacle supplied for her development. A person’s discovery about herself becomes more difficult, and more substantial, when it has to meet people who cannot be edited to fit.
This is an appealing reason to enter All Fours. Its frankness, sexual imagination, and discomfort will not suit every reader. The opening voice is deliberately close company; it may be irritating as well as funny. But it gives us a woman who has not polished her needs into a socially acceptable case before letting them appear.
The motel door holds the premise together. On one side is a room she has taken extraordinary care to make her own. On the other are people who already know her, people she is only beginning to know, and arrangements that will not change just because the room has changed.
New York was going to make a good story. Now a much smaller location has become difficult to leave. The distance home is still half an hour. Deciding what home can contain may take rather longer.