In All Fours, Miranda July goes where everyone is too afraid to

It's hard to be knocked down when you're on all fours.

After seeing it everywhere I looked for a few weeks, I finally picked up Miranda July’s All Fours. Now I know why people can’t stop talking about it.

It’s about a 45-year-old mother who takes a three-week road trip from California to New York, which her husband fully supports. But 30 minutes into her drive, the unnamed narrator pulls off the highway, derailing all her plans. While on the detour, she meets Davey, a 31-year-old who works at the local car rental joint, and the two form a very intimate relationship — though the intimacy is not what you’d expect.

Sunset in the Rockies | Albert Bierstadt

What follows is a confrontation of what the narrator considers her mid life. She questions everything — her relationships, her work, her sexual drive, and the physical changes her body is experiencing.

While this book is highly — highly! — sexual, it is mostly sex-adjacent. Not a ton of actual sex happens on the page. But what does happen on the page is spelled out in no unspecific terms. It is an unabashed exploration of sex and masturbation and hormones and how all of those intersect with motherhood, wifehood, and general humanhood.

Petya K. Grady says it perfectly: in All Fours, Miranda July names everything. Petya describes it as a “fine balance of being intentionally over-the-top provocative AND disarmingly tender.”

It is provocative almost to an extreme, but I don’t think she’s doing it just to get a rise out of people. I think July goes where other writers are too afraid to, lifting up the rug for readers to be told exactly what lies underneath. She doesn’t skirt around terms or feelings or thoughts, but rather she names them with sometimes uncomfortable specifics.

In her post about what to do when you don’t like something in a book, Sara Hildreth says there were some scenes in All Fours that she didn’t enjoy reading. And as she outlines in her post, when she comes across something she dislikes, she tries to move from a negative reaction to a critical analysis by asking herself this question: what purpose is this serving within the novel? With All Fours, she came around to the scenes she disliked because she thinks they emphasize the themes in the book: intimacy, hormones, and sexuality.

I tend to agree here. Were I the writer, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to get so specific, particularly not in such a public way like July does. But I think she does it not just for the reaction, but to really hone in on what is happening to this woman who is being confronted with perimenopause.

At one point in the book, the narrator studies a graph depicting sex hormones over a life span for both men and women. The findings set the narrator on a wild spiral of exploration. She makes a bunch of questionable decisions and overanalyzes everything she does, the narration of which I found to be highly enjoyable.

Why the title?

All Fours is indicative of a sex position, and if there were no reference of “all fours” in the book, that is what I’d presume it meant. I’d be okay with that. But I think the title means something else.

Near the close of the book, the protagonist is at her best friend Jordi’s house. Jordi is working on a sculpture of a headless woman. The two look at the green marble figure and Jordi comments on her position: she’s on all fours. Jordi says everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable, but it’s actually the most stable position. She says:

“It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

I think this is a metaphor for the strength a woman gains at this time in her life. This line occurs at the very end of the novel, after the protagonist does some open-sourced recon with her friends who have been through menopause. Our narrator has gained some strength after an absolutely asinine detour, and I like to think the placement of this statement from Jordi is Miranda July trying to tell us about strength.

Do I recommend it?

I’m not going to tell everyone I know to read this book. If you are at all squeamish, maybe pick up Emily Henry instead. But if you are up for an adventure or want to read something different, this is it. It is fun and it’s funny (I found the narrator to be quite hilarious with her manic decision making and justification of everything) and it’s so different from anything I’ve ever read. I applaud the author for so bravely going where nobody else seems to want to go.

What I’m reading: How Fiction Works by James Wood

What are you reading? Have you read All Fours? Dying to hear others’ thoughts on this one!

Love,

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