Graphic and Prolific Sex Scenes
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This book is my introduction to Miranda July. Evidently, she is a prolific artist in many fields. She is a film director, screenwriter, actress, and author. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations, and live performance art.
As I write this review in July, 2024, there is a museum exhibit dedicated to all of Miranda July’s work – short films, performance, and multimedia installations. It is taking place in Milan, Italy from March 7th through October 14th, 2024. It spans three decades of her work from the early 1990’s until today and is her first solo exhibition.
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It is interesting to “meet” the artist via this book. I identify with her in many ways and in many ways not at all. I’ll tell you about that in a moment, but first, here is a brief synopsis.
An unnamed woman – forty-five-years-old – is the narrator. She is married to a man named Harris and has a child – seven-years-old – who is being raised in a non-gendered manner. The child is named Sam. (The book is a great lesson in they/them usage.) Wanting to travel from her home in California to New York City, she sets out to drive there planning to be gone from home for two and a half weeks. Not even an hour into her trip, she stops for gas and for a meal in Monrovia. In this short amount of time, she meets a handsome younger man named Davey. There is an instant attraction. She ends up staying in Monrovia for the entire length of her vacation time, making up stories about all the sites she is seeing for Harris when they check in with each other day by day.
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Where the book is a complaint of how limiting wifehood and motherhood can be, and where it is in agreement with the book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, I was completely onboard. Here are a couple examples:
- The narrator is some sort of celebrity and does her work out of a converted garage at her home. She says, “At five o’clock I have to consciously dial myself down before reentering the house, like astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon. Don’t talk about the moon, I remind myself. Ask everyone how their day was.”
- Her birth experience with Sam was horrific and leaves her shaken still. In fact she has flashbacks about it. When she had the first one, she said, “Eventually I told Harris about the flashback and this was like pouring a cup of water down the drain, no comfort whatsoever.”
When such comments appeared, I lapped them up and loved the book. But other parts of the novel (?) were not on my wavelength at all. Specifically, the “affair” she has with Davey. And then the affairs she has after Davey, mostly same-sex relationships. The sex scenes are graphic and prolific and over the top for me.
Fortunately, there was another way that I really liked this book – and that is in the back story of the narrator. You will note I put a question mark in the paragraph above when I called this a novel. From things I have read online, I think this is autobiographical instead. Thus I am sympathetic to the author for all the difficulties in her and/or the character’s life:
- Her grandmother jumped out of the window of her New York City apartment at the age of fifty-five.
- Twenty-three years later, her aunt jumped out of the same window.
- Her father lives in what he calls “the deathfield.” She assumes this is his way of saying he is depressed. But he also says his mother was in the deathfield when she jumped.
- The narrator’s mother left her and the father for a time during menopause.
- And the narrator is perimenopausal, fearing the loss of her sexuality due to it, and acting out on that fear.
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In the Washington Post, reviewer Ron Charles says, “Although All Fours is labeled a novel, the space between the authors’ life and the story’s protagonist is often no wider than a bra strap.” I agree with him completely and that is what I liked the best about this book.
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