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Great art makes us question the received ideas we’ve internalized
| UN peacekeeper | 05/10/25 |
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Date: May 10th, 2025 7:55 AM Author: UN peacekeeper I’d just finished and loved Miranda July’s novel “All Fours” last year when my colleague Marie Solis wrote a profile of July with the headline, “She Wrote the First Great Perimenopause Novel.” This was the first time I’d heard the book mentioned in these superlative terms. “All Fours” is about a woman in her 40s who sets off on a road trip from California to New York but gets waylaid a few miles from home, rents a motel room and stays there for three weeks, during which time she reconsiders all the received ideas she’s internalized about being a wife, mother, woman, artist. I’d read the book the way I consume most of July’s work — quickly, excitedly, marveling at how her brain works, how she’s able to take seemingly ineffable experiences and make them explicit.
“All Fours” spoke to me, but it didn’t dawn on me until I read Marie’s article that this was going to be such an important book to so many people. Soon, everyone I knew was reading it. It became “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40,” The Times said. The Book Review named it one of its 10 best books of the year.
And the conversation has continued. July has since started a Substack. There’s a mini-series coming. Surely even more people will be reading and chatting about the book when it comes out in paperback on Wednesday. A couple of weeks ago, July was a guest on the Modern Love podcast. She reflected on the success of the book, how it was no accident that it became as big as it has. She deliberately set out to write a book that would “change our conception of older women and their sexuality and just their lived lives and what goes on in their heads.”
I was struck by one portion of the interview in which she mentions that, when she was working on “All Fours,” she and her friend Isabel would “meet once a week and eat and talk about the idea that we were always changing.” This set my mind racing: I meet up regularly with friends, but we seldom have an agenda beyond catching up. How exciting and productive to have a regular meetup with a theme!
July and Isabel specifically focused their get-togethers on the biological changes they were experiencing during perimenopause — “that we were actually pretty different at different times of the month and that we were kind of putting on an act of sameness” — but if that isn’t applicable to your own circumstances, you could just talk about how you’ve changed generally, your outlook or your routines or your tastes. Imagine inviting a friend to coffee and telling them you’d like to focus the date on how you’re “always changing.” It’s weird, but it would direct your conversation in a way that might be interesting. Who knows what you might discover?
This is what I love about July’s work: She seems to see the world as a canvas for creativity, her life as a space of possibility where just because things have always been done a certain way doesn’t mean they have to continue along those lines. In the 1990s, she created a videotape chain letter of movies made by girls and women. In 2014, she created an app that allowed you to enlist a stranger in delivering an in-person message to a friend. And I was recently thrilled to find that one of my favorite pieces of July’s audio fiction, “School of Romance,” from the late, great WNYC radio show “The Next Big Thing,” is available on SoundCloud. It’s gorgeous, delightful, heartbreaking, and, like “All Fours” and her other fiction and films, it makes me want to live my life a little more creatively. Like all good art, it makes me want to question things. |