That’s what the New York Times wrote this spring about Miranda July’s book All Fours, and boy, did they nail it. I’m only halfway through, but I’ve been reading it compulsively since last night. Not even knowing the ending, I want to declare: anyone going through perimenopause HAS to read this book.
The novel begins with the protagonist (an artist who sounds not dissimilar from July herself) preparing to drive solo from her home in LA to New York. She doesn’t get far, though, when she stops in a small town and spends two and a half weeks creating a numinous, and entirely separate space for her life. When she returns to her regular life back at home with her husband and child, she struggles to figure out an impossible question: how can she have everything she wants?
I think the book is resonating so deeply with readers is partly because July does such a fantastic job of entwining the main story with the protagonist’s unfolding perimenopause. The perimenopausal symptoms and questions are in the background in the same way they are in so many of our lives: as a side character who may or may not be fucking up our main quest.
On the surface, the central character (who is not dissimilar from July herself) is not particularly relatable to readers. Her wealth, profession, sexuality and marital dynamics separate her from many of us. But the subtleties of her experiences caused me to gasp and grin several times throughout the book. There is both a nuanced and vibrant sensibility that I could not help but identify with throughout. For example:
“Maybe it all began now, my life as a wife comfortable in her own home, a real wife. I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I had done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.” [Me bolding for emphasis]
I never would have expected the reflections on this stage of life to come through so powerfully and beautifully from a novel, only from personal essays or other non-fiction. I’m terrifically grateful to July for creating this book. I will report back later this weekend when, no doubt, I’ll have finished devouring it.