When I was making my last movie, Kajillionaire, I was pretty much done with that when I began to have all these ideas, these just questions. Even on the set of that movie, I was talking with Deborah Winger and my producer about aging in this very nervous, dumb way. But yeah, just fascinated slash horrified by what was to come. And so I was, you know, I wrote down things they said in my notes, you know, and I knew
this isn't Kajillionaire. This is novel two, which is what the file was called for a long time.
Novel two that's write a filmmaker and artist Miranda July. And novel two that's her latest book now, going by its proper name, All Fours. You almost certainly already know July. Her debut two thousand and seven collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was a publishing sensation. She has a voted even rabid following through her writing, her work on the screen, and her collaborative art projects. The unnamed female narrator in All Fours shares some biographical
details with July. She's forty five, She's a semi famous artist and at the outset of the novel, she's contemplating her midlife with some dismay. She sets off on this cross country road trip from Los Angeles to New York, looking to find herself, but she doesn't make it very far. She drives for about thirty minutes before she pulls off the highway and holds up in a dingy motel. This is a book about intimacy and desire, about how we connect with others and how we make sense of ourselves.
But it also goes deeper and broader, exploring an experience, specifically perimenopause, that has largely been left on the cutting room floor of literary fiction, and the result is brilliant. It's touching, and as always with Julyi's rye, I think extremely funny. I'm Michael Williams and this is read this the show about the books we love and the middle
age behind me. I might kick things off at the very beginning, based on an Instagram post you had not that long ago, where you said that the very first sentence of the book experienced some rewrites over a single word, the choice of the word trouble.
Yeah, originally it was sorry to bother you, and then you know, actually full disclosure. I think it was that the movie there's a movie called Sorry to Bother You. It came out, and it's like, this isn't really an issue, because that's a phrase in the world much more than it is just a movie. But it did make me think like, well, you know, I often try and take those things as like, is it an opportunity to actually look at this sentence you haven't looked at? And I
was like, is there another thing people say? Well, sorry to trouble you? And yeah, And then the word trouble is such a great word to have in a first sentence of a book that's about kind of transition and crisis and upending. And you know that the waters are troubled, you know, throughout.
The waters are troubled, and your protagonist is willfully troubled. You know, actually choosing to trouble things is one way of kind of saying her journey.
I think right right to resist a kind of peace that has become dishonest.
How often I mean, as a fan of your work in different media, how often is that impetus the desire not to settle, not to have an idea settled, the character settled, to find a way to trouble it. How often is that an engine for art for you? Hmm?
It is true that there's a kind of unrest that you begin to realize is very valuable despite the discomfort of it. And it's certainly you know, there are major characters in this book that didn't start out that way, and I often would be like, well, why is this woman selling this quilt? Why is she still in here? Why is that scene even here? You know, and to live with that sort of unanswered question until she's either
cut or in this case no, she becomes important. And then with myself, I mean, you know, with this book, I resisted the poll of having a good idea. You know, usually I'm just down on my knees looking up at the sky, being like, whenever you're ready, I'll take the lightning bolt of my next movie or book. And it comes. It actually does. I think it's through a long process of sort of openness and soul searching and research, but eventually there is this kind of moment where the story
rushes in. And with all fours, I had the sense that if I just put notes on what I was interested in into a file for as long as possible, and each time a story idea came knocking that could hold all these notes, and these notes were about gender, aging, femininity, marriage, sex, desire. You know, each time a story came knocking, I'd be like, too soon, too soon, This territory has to grow, it has to deepen. And I think the book reflects that.
Like to me, I'm like, oh yeah, this book is wider and deeper and encompasses more voices and more other women than I could have done if I'd just happily gone into a story from the get go. So it is living with that sort of troubled, unsafe feeling.
When does voice come in? When do you find your character as a discreet human being with their own voice and their own who is capable of surprising you?
Yeah, that can be a hard part. And I actually had sort of a cheat with this one because I wrote a story called The Metal Bowl that was in The New Yorker a little while before, and that was the difficult work of discovering a new voice. And it was a voice that was sort of embarrassingly normal in some ways, in the sense that like, she could be
someone just like me. I could play her, you know, less distance between me and her than with my other characters, and this felt very like, I don't know, sort of short story ish in a normal way that I wasn't used to. But the effect that it had, you know, the conversations that I had after it with my women peers was so raw and interesting that I was like, oh, well,
who cares? This is a great voice and if I could just keep going, so I had, you know, more or less, she's a little bit different than that character, but it's quite fun just talking about it now, I'm like, I want to keep going. I have. Actually, I was writing something the other day and I was like, is this just like all fours? Two? Is this all fives?
Like?
When is this? Do you need to get out of this voice? But it's hard to kick her.
Now you've got the name all fives. You really can't resist that either.
It's literally the worst name that.
Is your girl band version of the Fabulous. It's a kind of ludicrously fun. The Middle Ball is an amazing story, and there's a great line in it when the main character is reflecting on the piece of amateur pornography that she's shot, and she reflects that her payment is not for her beauty, it's not for any personal talents of any sort. It's for her naivety, and that's what they buying from her, is that innocence that she can sell once.
And that relationship between kind of naivety and reflection after the event seems to me to run powerfully through all fours. Right.
I really I'm glad you used that word naive, because I do often say that the character is a bit more naive than me. And that was because I mean, you have to have seen around the corner of a feeling to write about it, you know. And I changed over the course of writing the book. You know. I started when I was forty five. I'm fifty now, and there were things I really outgrew. But I thought, oh,
it's so valuable. It's so valuable, like her kind of borderline misogyny, you know, in a moment like it's awful, and I you know, I I worry sometimes, you know, people quote books a lot these days online and it's just some horrible thing that the narrator thought, and then
it just says Miranda July. I was like, you know, don't think about that, obviously, you know, good writer would, But to let her be wrong, you know, because I think having like a woman talk about her real, honest feelings about aging and desire and her own body and all these things like, well, if you're not going to be honest, like what are you doing? What is the new ground that you're breaking here? And that was the project was to like write the book I couldn't find
that I wanted and to have real kinship. I don't want to be shamed. I don't want to feel more vain than the writer, you know. I also want to feel like the writer grows, you know, and that there is more for me beyond anxiety.
You know. You talk about honesty. I think that's where the power of the book lies is that I think all your characters, I think, have this capacity for extraordinary honesty of the sort that you don't read very often. But it's not necessarily honesty with self knowledge. They're reflecting something You're one step ahead of them at all points, but they're kind of opening up to us. And I think that's an incredible trick.
Yeah, it feels really good at the time too, you know, to be writing and just to be unknowing, you know. It's a kind of openness to not try and be smart about everything, because that's not really how things are alive, like people are trying, you know, trying to figure stuff out. It's not like she's not trying, but kind of like the dumbness of us, you know, the dumb ways we try to connect or transform or those are interesting, right, like that that's very human.
I think that's right. And I think getting that relationship right between allowing for uncertainty while at the same time not letting it be coupled with shame, like that that idea of getting past shame, or that sometimes the business of living or making choices or taking risks requires you not to be kind of motivated by shame, and that seems again one of those things that's really important in this book.
Yeah. I mean I started out writing it frankly just kind of embarrassed to even have to show how old I was, like talk about shame. I really like, you just start where you start. And in the first few months I was like, is this really a good idea because then I can't sort of fudge my age for a long time as people do come. And then I was like, well, but really that's such a small reward, And what the book offers is a much richer life
than this kind of. I mean, it is really what's offered to women past a certain age is really so little that risk taking it starts to feel less risky. It's like, what am I losing? You know, I'm going to be ignored less meanly if I don't do this. I mean, now in retrospect, I'm like, I kind of I think almost in every interview I sort of state my age, just because I'm trying to help people kind
of orient themselves. And I also, you know, there's also quite a lot of young women reading this book, and that's part of the project too, is to allow young women to have something to connect the dots to in
the future. You know, there's a cliff on the cover of the book that's sort of quite resonant, and I think part of the reason that this time of life like a sudden cliff, like you've suddenly entered a mapless place, is because it's so underdescribed, you know, because it's I guess implicitly humiliating or something that you have nothing to connect the dots too from younger ages, so you just come upon it very suddenly and you're like, I don't know what I was assuming. I guess just more like
more of this, more of my young self. But I just somehow it was all going to work out, and so that that emptiness, you know, just lack of kind of imagery and even basic information about your body, you know, your hormones and stuff, which literally just a few years ago, there was like endless information about your reproductive system, like everyone wanted to be involved. So it's it's actually quite useful to kind of peg these ages just to allow young women to have something to.
Move towards in preparation for writing this book or and they'll laid up to it. Spoke to a whole lot of gynecologists. You wound up doing a kind of manipause deep dive. Yeah, tell me a bit about that process and its relationship to the writing of the book at the.
Time, you know, in the time that I've written the book, things began to change. So for example, near the end of writing the book, there was a New York Times magazine cover article called Women have Been Misled about Menopause. Huge article, you know, very important. A lot of the information in that I knew not to not to toot my own horn, but I had also come to the
same conclusion. But that article hadn't come out yet. So I did for a long time think that I needed to be the one to explain that women had been mislaid about menopause. And so I had the task of writing this very informational, educating book that was really hard. Let me tell you. Then, Actually what happened was a book called what fresh hell is this? A book about perimenopause, came out like during the pandemic. And it's a great book. It's relatable. It's the book I would want. I would
not want Miranda July poorly educating me about it. And so and I actually hunted down that writer and I talked to her and she was like, how great that it's a novel. You know, you're free and I from that point on I took out an incredible amount of pages. And then I realized, like, oh, all these things that happened to our body are so shape shifty, you know. I Mean, the reason we get influenced by googling something online and whatever ailment is because like we really have
no idea. It's just filtered through all our own needs and plans and is we can't see inside ourselves. We don't even really know where our organs are I don't, and so I let Perry amenopause be like that, and the information to be this kind of fun house mirror for the narrator, Like things loom huge at certain points and then they get smaller and shrink when you know she's shifted through a certain phase, and that has its own strange accuracy.
We'll be back in a minute. The kind of other parallel thing for your character and orforce. That's I think really important to the way she's experiencing perimenopause and and aging more generally, is she has experienced a difficult birth of her child years earlier.
Yeah.
The nature of that means her relationship to her own body and her relationship to mortality, I think is defined in very different terms. Was that always there in the story?
Yeah? I did have in those early novel two notes stuff about how trauma stays in the body. First of all, like if this is a book about this woman's body and desire and dance and all these things, also it also holds this. It also holds this not just trauma, but like sense of mortality, where it's like death has entered your life at a certain point and it's not leaving you have to form a relationship with it. And maybe that's okay. You know, maybe that is leading you
as much as lust to different relationships. It's tricky, you know, and a book about aging is going to have mortality in different ways. But I didn't. I'm not ready to face you know. I don't. I'm not thinking about my own mortality enough. And yet I think by this age, you've usually been through something where you kind of get it.
You get you. You have a basic empathy for anyone who's been through a tragedy, like you've touched it, or you've come close, or you whatever, spent some time in hospitals, and so that seems so important because it's part of what's meaningful about getting older, too, is that you have that to connect with, even connecting with someone you know very unrelatable otherwise, you know, if you had that in common, that would be like a very spiritual joining.
One of the ways it functions for your character, partly because it's tied with parenting, is the ways in which it locks her into a sense of responsibility as well. You know, when you know the agility of the people that you love, you feel the impossibility of letting them
down or being away from them. And I think particularly I think you make the case in the novel in myriad ways, but particularly for women, that limiting of possibilities after a certain point, because of the ways in which life a cruise, a sense of responsibility to others is it makes for a beautiful dramatic tension in the book.
Yeah, yeah, it's sort of a constant crisis to be holding all of that. And and I guess I've I felt like maybe you could root for her to have some relief or some spaciousness and freedom, knowing that she was like holding death in one hand and like this precarious living child, you know, as all children are precarious like in the other And yeah, and then I didn't I want to just kind of rehash the never boring to me the plight of the modern working woman mother.
But I guess, you know, you try and do it in your own way, and it's piercing. It's like not a there's nothing mundane about it for her.
But there is also the flip side of it is there is also this incredible joy to release, to risk, to weirdness, to breaking frame that becomes this absolutely kind of joyous thing.
I mean, I think any parent, certainly any mom knows that the sort of almost psychedelic feeling of like a childless you know, night or chapter. But the question is, like how much do you trust that, like if it contains some important part of you, you know, some part that you perhaps need to learn how to incorporate into your life. You know, this essentially like drug trip feeling, Well, how is that done? You know? And how is that done responsibly? And is that allowed? You know what? What
are the examples of how you do that? How you you bring that free sense of yourself into this family structure? Does the structure have to change?
Yeah, and you know, not just letting go of shame, but letting go of guilt, trying to work out the role for selfishness in a family unit as well the ways in which, as you say, that structure might need to change to accommodate the various ways in which people grow and change.
Right, Yeah, it does to me still always seem staggering that we're doing marriage and the same the same way since it was invented. I mean, not going to cite a date there, I'm not sure that's yeah, in eighteen sixty two, that's definitely wrong. But when you think about how different our lives look, especially as women, you think this is a funny thing to commit, like we're going to sleep in this bed together in the same house for the rest of our lives, because that is a
core tenant of the marriage, you know. And it's like if you pull it one thing, if you're like, well, are we like is that best? Is that what everyone really wants? You know, then it's sort of like, well, the whole thing is up for grabs, like why are we doing this? What do we really like about it? And what is just stuff we felt we had to do? And I mean the honesty though that's that's required for that. It's not that my narrator and her husband are particularly
up for the task, you know. That's the other thing. It's it's I love fiction compared to real life, especially when it comes to these things, like to not have to write a single scene that took place in like couples therapy, but to get across nonetheless some of the some feelings, some truths from a changing marriage in a way that can could only happen through fiction, that could only happen in a scene that wasn't what happened.
Yeah, can I ask you about dance and the ways in which dance is important to you?
Yeah, I mean it's kind of crept up on me. I'm often surprised to see like a really early work and realize like, oh, I'm dancing, or there's something very physical happening or wrestling, or it's odd because I think of myself so in my head just like these two eyes peering out of a brain, and this is just
the thing I carry it around in. But I guess increasingly like the feeling of kind of having a brain all over your body, and that that the different parts of you might have different things to say and might be able to speak better. Yeah. And in writing the book, I often just stood up and danced, and it was it was like a very good way to give up. It was like saying, like, I don't give up on myself or my ability to feel joy, which often you feel when you get up from your desk or create
joy or make meaning. I just don't know anymore with language, And I think I've had times in my life when dancing with other people has felt just exquisite, you know, like something kind of alien almost, you know, at least to my kind of brain where I'm like, what is what is this? What are we doing? It's not sex, it's maybe not even romantic, and yet it's beyond that.
It's it is that. And then I think I also used dance in this book as a kind of stand in for all art, including writing, in the sense that art of maybe coming to midlife for me, Miranda July is realizing like, oh, I've dedicated my whole life to this, like to making things and to taking in the things
other people have made, and what is it like? And can I now, at this age, have I earned the right to speak about it, to describe what it is for me and what it is that happens when we're together watching something and I in moments it is specifically about dance, and at moments you could swap out music or art or you know, like it's those moments are probably the least fiction y, you know, if people want to accuse me of writing for myself, I think it's
really those moments more than anything about like marriage or anything. It's that I just decided that was interesting enough.
You know, the other thing that strikes me about dance is about that idea of release, Like professional dances, skilled dances. Obviously there's incredible control, there's incredible kind of but dance as a space that goes beyond the eyes in the front of the brain is just about letting go and not not being controlled. Seems very singular to me.
I know, right, and I do feel like like so for me anyways, the way I dance, it's it's always improv right. I mean, I probably couldn't do the same thing twice if I had to, which no one's asking me to. And for me, the best of writing is
that too. Like when people comment on like the humor or something, I always want to trainlan like, well, it's improv right, I mean, it's only funny because it came to me in the moment it was improv and then it whatever, you rewrite it and whatever, but it still remains keeps the energy of the sort of live thing that is funny, and dance is always like that, you know, maybe not funny, but it's always new like this kind of like carving and endlessly.
You've been creative in the public sphere for a long time now, and so when thinking about questions of aging when writing this book, how do you feel about having creatively aged? Do you engage with your earlier work. Do you look at it and think, I would never write that the same way now, or do you look at it with a sense of kind of wonder at who you were when you produce that earlier work.
Yeah, what a nice question. I don't look back much, to be honest, but if there's an occasion that, like, you know, one of my early short stories, I need to look at it. I think, for one thing, with those stories in particular, I kind of marvel that I just wrote them. They were the kind of easy, like I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know
that it could be hard. I did them pretty quickly, you know, not to say I wasn't rewriting and stuff like that, but the initial first drafts, and that will always be kind of special to me to know that, like, well, only could happen like that for a little while, but you got it, and it's here in a book. And I've never made a perfect thing, so I'm always very aware of the like sort of percentage of what's right to wrong. I don't really watch my movies ever again
after they've premiered, because who can bear it? But I'm I'm just so happy that I've gotten to keep doing it. I mean, that was all I wanted. So I think looking back is often just a feeling of that of like, ah, like some road behind you indicates like you got what you want it. Yeah, to keep going.
Miranda Julia's new novel All Fours is available wherever you buy your books. Her short stories have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, and are also worth checking out. And that New York Times piece you mentioned, women have been Misled about Menopause. That was by Susan Dominus. There's a link to it in the show notes. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and it has been an unmitigated delight to sink into column.
Toybin's new novel, Long Island. It's a sequel to his beloved two thousand and nine novel Brooklyn, and returns to his heroine Eilish Lacey decades later. It is every bit as beautiful as its predecessor. And while we're talking Toybin, if you've never read his early novel The Heather Blazing, do so immediately. It's a personal favorite. He's so good. You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this
week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. Next week, I'm Read This I chat with Bruce Pasco about his new novel and the Vagaries of History. Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcho. Thanks for listening, See you next week