Praise for All Fours:
“All Fours has spurred a whisper network of women fantasizing about desire and freedom...It’s the talk of every group text."—The New York Times
“An irreverent and brilliantly touching story of a woman’s quest for freedom.” —Oprah Daily
"Atmospheric, sexy and totally unexpected." —People Magazine
“July’s candor, her fearlessness, in describing the unwieldy emotional and biological nuances of this time of life is refreshing...reading her new novel, as a so-called woman of a certain age, I felt seen in a way that is rare. It was invigorating.”—Wall Street Journal
“An intimate, fearless, and sexy coming-of-middle-age story . . [a] wonderfully weird adventure.” —TIME
“It’s not just that Miranda July’s latest novel is so propulsive you might have to cancel plans or set aside PTO just to scarf it down. It’s that her dazzlingly horny intelligence wrestles with marriage, queerness, and desire by turns sweet and hilarious, making even the smallest pangs of desire sizzle.”—Vulture
“All Fours possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible...Miranda July has given women in their 40s something totally new to want, plus permission to want it.” —Emily Gould, The Cut
“Deeply funny and achingly true….Reading All Fours feels like being seen, like being caught and held, making those connections and realizing that our experiences are not so isolating …July’s commitment to widening the space when it comes to our sexuality is joyfully radical.” —LA Times
“All Fours cast a spell on me and was hard to emerge from."—The Yale Review
“Showcases July’s wry observational powers about marriage, sex, aging and creative workaholism, along with her bawdy and philosophical sense of humor.”— San Francisco Chronicle
“With All Fours, perimenopausal readers finally have their own Portnoy’s Complaint. But even that comparison doesn’t capture the immediacy of July’s prose, its infallible timing, its palpable sense of performance.” —Washington Post
"The frankness with which the narrator delves into perimenopause and menopause is a revelation…at once hilarious and dead serious. Girls who grew up in the '80s passing around Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, now midlife women, should share All Fours for its attention to many of the same questions."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Miranda July may be one of the most interesting writers working today...All Fours announces itself as a scream and an uncontrollable laugh, shining a light on the absurdity of the left turns one takes on their way to midlife. But underneath the strangeness and irreverence rests a notable sense of vulnerability that will leave readers awe-struck of July’s daring.”—Chicago Review of Books
“My favorite book of the summer…this funny, quirky, and emotionally transformative novel is a must-read.”— E! News
“July’s novel is hot and weird and captivating and one of the most entertaining, deranged, and moving depictions of lust and romantic mania I’ve ever read.” —New York Magazine
“Funny, sexy and irreverent...with wry wit and curiosity about human intimacy, All Fours is about the reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist.”—PureWow
“I found myself reading All Fours in solitude, because as I read I’d started making sounds that were recognizably laughter but were also expulsions of heartbreak and what I’ll call a cleansing sorrow. If the United States had the good sense to name national treasures, I’d nominate Miranda July.” —Michael Cunningham, author of Day
"A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers."—George Saunders, Booker-Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo
"Profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown-open and fearless mind."—Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest
“Sharply funny...All Fours focuses on the boundary lines of human connection and sexuality, in this case, while exploring the desires and creative instincts of a woman in the transitional time of middle age. July enters this territory with humor and heart, leaving readers with plenty to chew on.” —W Magazine
"Characteristically witty, startlingly intimate. . .This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the ‘prefab structures’ of a conventional life is quintessentially July.”—Kirkus
“A brilliant, sexy, funny, ludicrously entertaining primal scream of a coming-of-middle-age story… Beyond-dazzling, eyes-wide-open fiction.”—Booklist, STARRED review
“Hilarious, sexy, and wonderfully weird... a revelation.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“There have been few works of contemporary fiction about menopause, and even fewer that are as erotic and funny…All Fours is undeniably victorious.” —BookPage, STARRED review
"A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect….the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.” —Vogue
"A sexy and sharp exploration of middle-aged sexuality and one woman’s thirst for liberation while still performing her role in a nuclear family.”—Alta
“[July] altered my ideas of what kinds of stories were possible—something Sally Rooney and I have in common. In her second novel, July brings her singular brand of sardonic melancholia and wide-eyed wisdom to bear on this tale of a semi-famous middle-aged artist who decides to take a left turn from the left turn she had already planned.”—Electric Literature
“This is a gut-punch of a novel, a must-read for every woman nearing or over forty, confronting the malaise of midlife, fertility, marriage, and menopause, packaged in July’s delirious style.”—LitHub
05/01/2024
This second novel by filmmaker July, following The First Bad Man, centers on a unnamed 45-year-old woman, a semi-famous artist married to a man with whom she has one child. At the outset, this everywoman has planned a solo road trip to NYC from her home in Los Angeles. However, she only gets as far as Monrovia, CA—about 20 miles away from home—before stopping. She proceeds to rent a room in a roadside motel and then sets about not only renovating the room but also reinventing herself. Her localized adventure features a growing attachment to Davey, a younger man whose wife also happens to be the decorator of the protagonist's motel room. The protagonist's relentless self-awareness pushes her to question the conventionality of marriage, to explore her queerness, lust, and sexuality, and to examine whether the expected paths laid out for middle-aged women are the only paths. VERDICT While the protagonist's self-obsessions and erotic escapades won't be to everyone's liking, July's novel is a quirky, funny, even tender feminist tale that defies expectations about the lives women can lead.—Faye A. Chadwell
Miranda July perfectly delivers the overanxious voice of a quirky, unnamed protagonist who realizes, too late, that she's having a midlife crisis. After planning a cross-country road trip from L.A. to New York City, she impulsively takes an exit a half-hour from her house and stays in a tiny motel. This one decision sends her on a perimenopausal coming-of-age adventure full of awkward sex and a host of complex feelings. July's intimate narration teases out the complex emotions the protagonist is just now realizing she's always kept under wraps, drawing listeners into this relatable story of longing. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
2024-02-03
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
