The Freedom of Falling Action: An Interview with Miranda July on “All Fours”

Miranda July/Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg

As pleasurable as it is subversive, Miranda July’s second novel, “All Fours,” follows an unnamed narrator who intends to drive cross country from her home in Los Angeles to New York City. But after saying goodbye to her husband and child, the narrator makes a last-minute decision that takes the novel away from the road trip story you might expect to explore less-familiar terrain: midlife from the perspective of a woman who is an artist and “minor celebrity.”

Women’s experiences with aging and perimenopause are often depicted as negative or simply overlooked, but “All Fours” shows this may not be the whole story. Akin to July’s other work that spans literature, film and performance art, “All Fours” is full of wry observations, tender humor and endless surprises as the story plunges deep into the narrator’s conceptions of marriage, motherhood and intimacy; how they got there; and how they’ve changed as she enters her mid-forties.

“All Fours” also turns our common understanding of the novel on its head. As the narrator searches for more information on aging, she stumbles upon a chart that shows how a woman’s sex hormones rise until they reach a “cliff,” and then fall around menopause.

Reminiscent of Freytag’s story structure, this chart within the novel may suggest that the narrator’s life in “falling action” is just as meaningful as “rising action,” and that the “climax” may not be the “crisis” we might assume. In fact, the term “crisis” comes from the Greek “krinein” (to decide), and that’s what we see in “All Fours:” a woman maneuvering through “great new swaths of freedom and time” as she decides how to live her best life, for the rest of her life.

This interview has been edited for length and was conducted via Google Meet while Ms. July was recovering from a cold at her studio-office in Los Angeles.

You’ve mentioned your debut novel, “The First Bad Man,” came to you in a “flash” over a long car ride. What was it like writing your second one, “All Fours?” 

I was actually really avoiding having an idea in a flash—I used to always hope for that—but, in a way, there’s a price to pay for knowing too much in the beginning. If you can handle not knowing for as long as possible and expand the breadth of what you’re interested in without knowing what the actual story will be, then maybe you’re able to explore new territory.

So, what I did, even before I shot “Kajillionaire,” was start a file called “Novel Two” and put in this folder thoughts I’d had, or conversations, or bits of other people’s writing, and then didn’t think about it. When I was done making the movie, I looked at it all and noticed pretty substantial themes: aging, femininity, marriage. A lot about the body. I knew these themes were vast, and the idea of the road trip that doesn’t happen came later in the process, which was kind of a new thing for this second book.

While the two books’ origins are different, was the writing process the same? 

I would say the first novel helped me get through a hard time in my life. This book utterly transformed my life.

How so? 

I think, with my career, I’d always felt free to invent it, that it didn’t matter if I’m self-taught, or in different mediums, but it never occurred to me that your whole life can be that way. Relationships, marriage, even parenting, in a way, don’t have to fit in this whole preexisting conception, which generally an artist doesn’t do, but also, a wife doesn’t need to do.

I don’t want to get too literal as a fiction writer, but while the narrator’s story isn’t my story, the questions she was asking were a lot of my questions, and things I was talking about with other women. This book was filled with these other voices besides hers.

We hear these other voices in the latter half of the novel when the narrator interviews her friends on their relationships and their desires, which were all over the map. How does desire, or the concept of desire, operate in your book?

One thing I wanted to show was that I don’t think women are consistent as to their desires, which shouldn’t be a radical thing to say, but I’m trying to get the word out there. I also wanted to show the narrator’s desire as her own thing. She’s masturbating throughout the book, and I wanted to be honest about what that even looked like.

You also write screenplays, and I was wondering what it’s like writing a scene for film versus a scene in fiction. 

They’re similar probably because I learned how to write them from each other. I don’t think my first movie would have had playable dialogue if I hadn’t been writing the short stories [in “No One Belongs Here More Than You”]. I’d also been performing and doing both sides of two characters where I learned what was playable firsthand.

So, your scene work is more like acting? 

I’m not standing and acting it out, but I am kind of whispering as I go.

“All Fours” is not the type of road-trip story where the protagonist goes off to find herself. Instead, there’s this refrain of hiding or compartmentalizing “the real me” and the road trip reveals she can’t keep doing that once she’s back home. Were you playing with this hero’s-journey archetype to say something about women’s identity?

It’s hard to speak generally, but I’d say that the protagonist had been acting like who she is for a long time but hadn’t become intimate with herself in the same way you marry someone and declare your devotion. She hadn’t done that for herself. And it’s more like not only being allowed to be herself but also to enjoy who she is—which would mean not hiding, not feeling apologetic, not feeling ashamed.

“All Fours”
By Miranda July
Riverhead Books, 336 pages, $29

Miranda July will be in conversation about “All Fours” as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival on Saturday, May 18, 5pm–6pm at Hermann Hall at 3241 South Federal. Tickets and more details here.