We Must Discuss…Miranda July’s All Fours
Virtual book club with Mandy Len Catron
What to say about Miranda July’s luminous, astonishing novel All Fours? That it rattled my insides? That it may have changed my life? That I nearly gripped the arm of my airplane seatmate when I finished it, tearfully, enroute to a girl's trip?
All Fours’ unnamed narrator gave me a lot to think about: desire, marriage, childbirth, and perimenopause are among the lighter topics. Too many things to process all by my lonesome (and my Air Canada seatmate was deep into her own book, so I chose not to bother her…).
I have agonized over this novel since I cracked it open last month. June was a menacing month for me and this book propped me up. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours, became the mantra. By day, I dealt with my bullshit, by night I was firmly in Monrovia, California, rolling around an esoteric motel room.
I wasn’t the only one who was enamoured by this book: All Fours received glimmering reviews and applause with publications calling it miraculous and larger than life. The Good Reads comments are almost biblical.
I’m so thankful Mandy Len Catron – author of the critically-acclaimed essay collection How to Fall in Love with Anyone, creative non-fiction lecturer at The University of British Columbia, fellow Substacker at the Loneliness Project, and my idol – was able to stop by for a visit on my virtual couch and talk this book out with me in a Google Doc.
I imagine that we both have big feelings and much to discuss. 📚
Warning: Spoilers about! We go all in.
BRIT: Mandy, I have to be honest: I am so obsessed with talking about this book but I also feel sheepish due to…the obvious. I’m child-free by choice, I’m a decade or so out from perimenopause, and I’m deeply monogamous. Does anyone really care what I have to say!? But I suppose life is long, and should we all be so lucky, my estrogen will plummet soon enough.
MANDY: Hahaha yes, savour that estrogen! I am also obsessed with talking about this book. I guess I am the target demographic in almost every way: a parent, a creative, a woman in a monogamous relationship with a man, and someone on the cusp of perimenopause (I’m 43!). Reading this book felt wildly transgressive to me in ways that I am excited to unpack.
B: Now that I’ve stated what I don’t have in common with our beloved narrator I suppose I should reveal what I did deeply resonate with. If you’ve been a reader for all of five minutes of We Must Discuss you will know that I love a story about a horny, deranged woman although that descriptor feels reductive. What punctured the cockles of my heart was the intensity of her desire. Her desire!!! Her yearning, her thirst, her need: for love, for sex, for creative freedom, for agency. For answers.
I need to know what about this book got you. And where did it get personal? (For me it was the devotion to Davey’s nipple hairs).
M: This book arrived in my life at a moment of pure domestic chaos. I got it as an audiobook, which Miranda July reads herself and which I highly recommend. I have two year old twins who, bless their sweethearts, learned how to escape from their cribs about a week before I bought this book. Other twin parents had warned me that this transition—from cribs to toddler beds—was a tough one but good god they weren’t kidding. Let me just paint a picture for you. It’s 10:00 p.m. I’ve been in a dark bedroom for going on two hours, picking up toddlers and putting them back in the beds they are desperate to escape from (because why sleep when you can rip down the blinds or climb up your dresser drawer handles like they’re a ladder). Literally fifty, a hundred times: pick them up, put them back in bed, try not to chat with them, try not to snap at them. And then, finally, they are showing signs of fatigue! I’m lying between them, rubbing their backs, desperate for them to fall asleep. I’ve got my earbuds in and suddenly I’m listening to THE scene—you know the scene, the one with the tampon—and I’m thinking, oh my god, this is the most subversive moment of my life.
B: Mandy — I’m howling.
M: There was something so surreal about the tension between the two scenarios: the maddening toddler bedtime routine and the barely-controlled eroticism between narrator and Davey. I’d never felt so unwillingly trapped in my own life as I did those first few weeks of trying to get my kids to sleep in their new beds. And here was someone who had just abandoned her domestic life in favor pursuing pleasure, beauty, movement, and curiosity. That’s where the book started to feel too personal for me.
B: The timing of this read/listen almost feels…divine.
M: Divine or problematically destabilizing, depending on your perspective!
When the narrator decides to spend Wednesday nights in her studio so she can have a long, unbroken stretch of creative freedom—she chooses to leave her husband and kid for one night a week without regret or complication—it almost broke me! How I longed (still long!) for that kind of freedom. It was like I suddenly understood why people think books are dangerous and should be banned. I wanted to walk out of that bedroom and never look back. I didn’t, but in that moment the book felt genuinely dangerous to me.
B: My god, while our home lives are different at the moment, I can completely understand. The thought of abandoning responsibilities for sexual and personal exploration feels like a luxury only a Los Angeles creative has access to (no offence to our beautiful narrator, I love her so, so much).
M: Yes, the narrator is clearly a kind of avatar for July herself, which of course had me stalking her online to try to identify exactly which parts might be rooted in real life.
B: I too did some serious stalking…
I hate that we as a society are constantly leaning on “we don’t talk about __ enough.” I think we talk about a lot of things (some of y'all need to start listening up!); but what I do think is that in the culture women’s desire is often written or portrayed poorly. It’s like writing or acting drunk or on drugs – there is a mark and it’s almost always missed. July nailed it for me. I felt our narrator's hunger, it pulsed through the dim light of my e-reader demanding to be felt.
M: Yes! This New Yorker article (which I loved) calls July one of “the great sex writers of our time.” And I totally agree, but also I think it’s not just sex that she does so well. It’s desire and all the complications that come with desire: guilt, a need for validation, longing for freedom, a feeling of being in the body or failing to be in the body.
B: And impulse control!!!! So much of part two was about her self-bargaining regime. When to text, when to send signs, the discipline of her exercise routine to sculpt a dance-video-appropriate-body. July articulated this feeling, this mania, so well it kept me up at night sometimes.
M: So much of the media I’ve encountered around motherhood—especially creativity and motherhood—falls short for me. And this book captured something I haven’t quite seen elsewhere, which really has to do with desire. Desire to be with your kid in a way that can be absolutely overpowering at times and—simultaneously—the desire to be free from all obligations and to devote your whole self to intellectual and creative freedom.
B: Yes, absolutely. As a person who’s in the tortuous should we have kids phase, it both soothed and terrified me.
M: I guess another thing the narrator and I have in common is traumatic pregnancy and birth experiences. There was a pretty good chance both of my children would not survive the pregnancy. And I naively assumed that the fact that they made it through, healthy and thriving, would somehow inoculate me from the stress and drudgery of early parenthood. In other words I thought I would just be so grateful for the miracle of their existence that I wouldn’t let the hard parts of parenting weigh me down. But of course both things are true: I am still, every day, grateful and amazed that they exist. AND I am exhausted and frustrated and I long for the freedom I had before I became a parent. July captures this so accurately.
B: I actually thought about you a lot when reading this book. I think our narrator would be floored by your brilliant essay, The Octopus, just sayin’. She might’ve even wanted to have a one-on-one with you in her room at the Excelsior.
M: What I wouldn’t give to see that room in person!
B: I need it to exist in real life so badly. Okay, switching gears for a hot moment!!! Because we are in the house of We Must Discuss who is playing our narrator, Davey, and Harris, and Jordi in the movie? I need your fan cast.
I am lost on our narrator. But for me, Davey must be Harris Dickinson. Jordi, I think must be played by Lizzy Caplan.
M: Oh I do like Lizzy Caplan for Jordi. I could also picture someone like Tessa Thompson or Natasha Lyone. I can’t picture the narrator being played by anyone other than July herself (probably because she narrated the audiobook so that’s what I was picturing the whole time). Her husband is obviously Michael Sheen. I had to google Harris Dickinson because I am very out of touch with pop culture—and I still have no idea who he is! But for me Davey is a totally unknown actor/dancer who gets his big break in this film—kinda like Channing Tatum in the first Step Up movie (this is where my pop culture knowledge really shines, haha).
B: Mandy……the Step Up reference is incredible, I knew there was a reason we are friends!
M: Yes! Only the best Channing Tatum movie of all time. I will not take feedback on this claim!
B: No feedback required. Jordi –and Natasha Lyonne is also such a good call here – is also one of my favourite characters in this book. Everyone deserves to be loved and cared for by a patient, patient friend like Jordi. I am blessed with wonderful friendships but I don’t know if any of my girls could handle me with the same love and care that Jordi did for our narrator.
M: Jordi is incredible. I was really moved by how she shows up for the narrator at times when, honestly, I don’t know that I would’ve been able to show up for her in the same way. She makes so many chaotic choices, then she panics about and questions and doubles down on those choices! It’s the kind of mid-life flailing that could wear on a friendship, but Jordi is there for it.
I loved that Jordi is based on a real friend of July’s, artist and sculptor Isabelle Albequerque (again from the New Yorker profile). Their conversations are, for me, the soul of the book, the thing that ultimately animates it and moves it from a story about escape to a story about reimagining how to be in the world.
B: Jordi grounds her, but never shames her. Her love is infinite and gentle but also so practical and methodical. I just love her!!
M: I also want to say that I love that this book is not some bleak, solitary ramble through an existential fog, like the bazillion novels about men’s midlife experiences. I think for women, what makes midlife bearable is friendship: relationships that transcend the nuclear family structure, and which make space for versions of ourselves that are not so tightly circumscribed by obligation and caretaking. These days, those friendships keep me going. More novels about this, please!
B: I completely agree. My friendships, especially as I’ve gotten older, have become deeper, and more vital. The gruesome twists and turns of life are manageable because I have a kind group of friends who will listen to my podcast-length voice notes recorded while crying in my car outside the gym. Bless their hearts!
M: Yes! I now have a lengthy group chat where we’re sharing perimenopause resources, all inspired by this book.
B: Mandy, I want to talk about Audra, the sex shaman who was once Davey’s lover. There are points in the book where the kook is turned all the way up: when the narrator hires Claire to transform her motel room, and when she meets Audra. I am here for both – but damn, it’s a lot of visuals to take in and try to make sense of. What I loved most about the narrator's experience with Audra is how that night pulled back the curtain on age, and exposed another layer of beauty, curiosity, and possibility. There’s nary a negative adjective in their whole vibrant sexual encounter – everything is soft, plush, and vast. It checked my own age and body biases. I need to know your thoughts!
M: The scene with Audra was one that totally caught me off guard! Having the narrator finally consummate her desire for Davey with this older woman was such a brilliant move. It’s funny because when you look back you can see that Audra was, in some ways, the person who inspired this pursuit of beauty and pleasure in the first place when she sold the narrator the coverlet that became the center of her redecoration project.
We all know that we live in a world that generally views women over fifty with either contempt or disregard. Desirability is supposed to be our main form of social currency and we’re expected to maintain it (through great effort and expense!) for as long as possible. Even the narrator has internalized this way of thinking. So when she discovers that, as you put it, there is beauty and possibility and power in age, it really feels thrilling.
B: It was also so incredibly hot. July’s ability to write steamy, gorgeous sex scenes is once again…masterful.
M: One thing I’d love to hear your thoughts on is the ending. A friend of mine pointed out that seeing Davey suddenly become famous for his dancing felt a little…I don’t know, false? As if July assumes that everyone who is talented is rewarded with fame and success.
One part of the novel that I loved was her resistance to seeing him dance for the first time. I could so relate to that fear of someone else's sincerity. Like: what if he’s actually terrible?? And I liked that it was never totally clear whether he was genuinely talented or her attraction to him made her believe he was talented. And I liked that the distinction wasn’t important in the end—because the freedom they find in moving together is exhilarating. Talent is ultimately beside the point. But the ending kind of undercuts that ambiguity to me. What did you think?
B: I’m so glad you asked. This ending…I was so moved by this book, so I can’t be too upset, but it wasn’t an incredible finale for me.
Have you ever seen an ex and years after the breakup been so completely repulsed by them? I was scared that was where we were heading for a sec.
M: Yes! Literally every person I have ever been seriously into.
B:It’s interesting what your friend said – that this conclusion is a little too tidy. I was happy to see our narrator's life mirroring July’s: a book birthed out of a transformative experience, career redemption, and all of that. And I’m glad we ended with Davey. The journey started with him, it should end there too. I don’t know…I guess I didn’t really care about Davey’s dancing? Which sounds so harsh and rude and not very poetic, especially as a former dancer myself! But! I’ve thought hard about how else Davey could have been tied into the ending. Appearing at her book launch? Too corny. Finally having sex with the narrator? No, that would spoil it all and undermine their growth. Running into him on the street? No time to process! They needed closure that was fluid and electric and totally immersive and his dance show was it, I suppose. And I’m glad that his movement, four years later, didn’t give her the ick. That would’ve been too real!
What I did love was how harried our narrator arrived in New York–she instantly had an ailment that needed guidance and googling from Jordi on the phone – and how aqueous she became in his glow.
This sentence from the last few pages is one of my favourites: “If 321 was everywhere then every day was Wednesday, and I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.”
M: Such a great passage! There are so many we could quote but this one captures the spirit of the book for me.
B: Right? I don’t think our narrator needs anyone, especially a man, to become inspired or self-actualized but I do think she needs art, genius, and vulnerable authenticity to find her way. And that’s what Davey brought to her life – a genuine freak flag waving around with good intentions and a lot of sexual energy.
Maybe after talking it out, I liked the ending more than I thought.
This is probably a good place to land. There’s so much still to discuss…their family life and home dynamic, the shitty girlfriend, the weekly sex schedule between Harris and our narrator (insane to me), and the slog of initiation (real). But, I fear we could go on for pages and pages.
So, I’ll leave you with one last question:
Is Arkanda Beyonce, Rihanna, or Cardi B?
M: Arkanda is 100% Beyonce. That is who I was picturing the whole time.
For more All Fours dialogue, check out the Critics At Large episode, The New Midlife Crisis.
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Came to read this immediately after finishing the book because I had to know what you two thought. This dialogue did not disappoint!