All Fours

by Miranda July

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A fever dream of a coming-of-middle-age novel by the celebrated artist and author, Miranda July. It is a reminder of everything we love about her, starting with the questions she asks about how we live and what we value. This is a reawakening and an examination of domestic liberty that readers will fly through.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP 10 FICTION BOOKS OF 2024

ONE OF NPR’S “BOOKS WE LOVE” 2024

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY:
THE NEW YORKER ● VOGUE ● FINANCIAL TIMES ● OPRAH DAILY ● VULTURE ● VOX

The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life

“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect . . . nothing short of riveting.” —Vogue

“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

“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.” —The Cut

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.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593190265
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	2,041
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and artist. Her debut novel, The First Bad Man, was an instant New York Times bestseller, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. July lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for All Fours:

“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

"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 —Vogue

"An irreverent and brilliantly touching story of a woman's quest for freedom." —Oprah Daily

“[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

From the Publisher

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

Library Journal

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

JULY 2024 - AudioFile

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.

Kirkus Reviews