All Fours
by Miranda July
Pub Date: May 14, 2024
Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC 0f this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.
I loved this book! All Fours is bawdy, funny, and deliciously weird. It’s a tender look at the terror of growing older and feeling that you’re no longer as desirable as you once were. And then the surprise and beauty that comes with realizing that you are constantly changing, beginning again, and writing your own story.
4 stars

I just could not get into this book. It is something I don't normally read and that could play into it. I probably would not purchase this book for the library

I requested and received an early digital galley of this novel through NetGalley, because the plot description intrigued me. Early on, I mused, “What have I gotten myself into!” I did ease into the road trip motif and by suspending belief I could enjoy some of the quirky romance bits. However, this is a book for those comfortable with a lot of sexuality in the storytelling. This portrait of a unique woman’s emotional and physical exploits at midlife might please those readers.

This was sexy and weird and I had a great time. I watched "Me and You and Everyone We Know" right before I started the book, so it was great to have July's voice stuck in my brain. I'd recommend this to anyone who is sexy and weird and looking for a great time.

This book is everything. I absolutely loved it, and I highly recommend it for all collections. It's a new all time favorite. It's like an artistic feminist manifesto that is very inspiring, funny, sexy, raw, and real. I've been a fan of Miranda July's for a long time and this book does not disappoint. Thank you, Miranda, for writing this! This story will definitely stay with me for many, many, moons to come.

My experience with All Fours was up and down. Part one was beautiful and had me in tears. Unfortunately, I didn't feel as connected to the middle, but enjoyed the end. My first rating was 3, but I'm moving it up to 4 because I know parts of it will stay with me; Miranda July does a great job of capturing a certain middle-aged experience.

This work feels very personal to July and I am glad that she shared this experience with us.

Funny, absurd, obscene, and observant. I loved the writing style and the narrator’s internal dialogue as I followed along on cringey misadventures. That said, at some point i started to feel exasperated with her life decisions (although I guess also that’s kind of the point!) thankful to have read an early copy from NetGalley!

Oh dear. I’ve enjoyed July’s work in the past but this time the spark didn’t catch. Trivial, whimsical, indulgent, this new novel just seemed to irritate rather than entrance. Yes, I’ve read other reviews extolling its virtues but for me there was something too gratingly cute about the voice and the preoccupations. Sorry, but no thanks.

At the beginning of All Fours, Miranda July describes two kinds of people.

“In life there are Parkers and there are Drivers,” July writes, “Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring…they get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough… Parkers, on the other hand… need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause.”

The panic of being a Parker is what sets July’s protagonist on a cross country road trip; it is also exactly that set of characteristics that lead her to forgo the journey and stay at a motel 30 miles away from her house. It’s an absurd premise, one that gets a few laughs from my friends as I describe to them the plot of the book. But, July’s novel is a smart reversal of the road novel. It is witty and earnest and finds freedom, ironically, in staying put.

“I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to,” July’s protagonist thinks while driving. “I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season”

As I followed the secluded vacation of the main character, a sort of abject horror overcame me. This is revolting, I thought. Would this be my life? The page I was reading looked like this:


July calls this “the cliff.” The sharp drop of women’s estrogen and libido in between forty-five and fifty.

July’s protagonist is haunted by the image of her grandmother, who “jumped out of the window of her New York City apartment building when she was fifty-five. No warning except she had recently been lamenting all her gray hairs.”

While reading I couldn’t help but feel lightheaded – not at July’s writing, which is evocative and physical and reminiscent of Sheila Heti – but rather at the plummeting feeling of doom that women feel when they realize the culmination of their life is some awful disease that no one cares much about.

The novel began as July’s intent to reframe the aging narrative. “I interviewed many, many gynecologists. I interviewed naturopaths. I interviewed older women about their experience of this time,” she said in a conversation with Elif Batuman. Though little of the research went into the actual book, July was interested in “the idea that there might actually be something kind of hot in [menopause]”

People often write stories that imagine the conception of womanhood; rarely do we write about its fall. July’s novel feels like the mirror of a coming of age novel – a wild and exciting sexual fantasy, a rupture in the self, a heightened awareness of the plight of every other woman. Despite never leaving the greater Los Angeles area, July’s protagonist emerges from her motel chrysalis a changed woman.

July has been criticized for being “strenuously quirky,” which feels like an ill-informed attempt to belittle her characters into a series of personality traits. It is true that often I wondered why any of the other characters put up with the deliriously bad decisions of the protagonist. But to read All Fours like that would be to neglect the contradictions of the female psyche, the holistic care with which July builds her characters.

Where July shines is her endearment to the strange intimacies of women and womanhood. “I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth?” her protagonist asks. After every decision she makes, a call is placed to a different woman in the character’s life – her best friend, her mother, her older friend who is “obsessed with hot flashes.”

At the end, the July’s protagonist makes a group text with every woman above forty that she knows, and asks them about menopause. The women feel like some sort of chorus, as their texts clog up the page. “My chronic migraines stopped completely after menopause…I feel like my true self… What other people do, think, or say has become kind of irrelevant since I stopped bleeding.”

For July, the cliff is a peak – to stand at its brink is the beginning of a great adventure. And the fall may be the most thrilling part of the ride. In the same way, July’s vast universe – her delightful and obscure characters, twists of a completely unpredictable narrative, and incisive wit – can’t help but pull a reader in. Slowly, All Fours becomes a book that you cannot live without finishing.

This book was provided as a NetGalley from Riverhead.

Typical Miranda July, by which I mean spectacular. All Fours is bawdy, funny, and deliciously weird. It’s a tender look at the terror of growing older and feeling that you’re no longer as desirable as you once were. And then the surprise and beauty that comes with realizing that you are constantly changing, beginning again, and writing your own story..

I was initially amused and delighted by this story of an artistic Miranda-July-esque, LA-based protagonist who goes on a cross-country trip but only gets as far as Monrovia. I had no idea the novel would become a deeper dive into trauma, navigating and challenging the assumptions of marriage and romantic relationships alongside complicated life transitions, a midlife crisis from the female point of view, and so much more. It's personal, semi-autobiographical, but universal, too. It's sparked conversations with women in my life who are going through new phases or entering next chapters. A great read, and one of my favorites from Miranda July.

I loved this book so deeply. Every page felt like a revelation. So surprising and wonderful, a book about peri menopause, desire, aging, re-writing the script marriage, motherhood, trauma, friendship. Life. All done in July's stylish, deeply funny and intelligent singular way. Surely a forever favorite.

I’m big fan of Miranda July and I had high expectations for this novel. It definitely met those expectations and more. As someone who is approaching middle age and has been in a LTR I found so much to relate to here. Every page is filled to the brim with great writing and I found myself in a personal battle of devouring it or taking time with it to savor. I will be anxiously awaiting her next book.

Miranda July is so incredibly clever; I don't know how much I related to this particular story, as it centered very heavily on what the perimenopausal experience feels like and I'm not quite there yet. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this dive into such a perfectly rendered character. I felt like I really knew this woman, and I was glad to get to witness her journey.