"All Fours" by Miranda July

An audio book.

LA. A woman (45; mult-media artist? Slightly famous) with partner Harris (record producer) have a kid Sam (they/their). When she watches them from a distance she wishes she felt the same way when she's with them. Her child was still-born, then recovered. She stil gets flashbacks about it - lots of blood. She and Harris sleep apart, having sex weekly. She's had ex-girlfriends.

She's planned a career-changing meeting with Arkanda, a superstar, but first she has a meeting in New York. She decides to drive - over 2 weeks away from home. She pays for an emergency $20k refit of the first room she stays in (room 321 of a motel), and fancies Davey, the 31 y.o. thick but pretty male partner of the female interior designer. Usually her male lovers are older than her. She realises that sex is a way to communicate with beauty. While pretending to continue her schedule, she stays in the room. The affair with Davey is slow. He doesn't want to be unfaithful. No sex, but some intimacy - he helps her change her tampon. He shows her his hip-hop dancing. She realises that he likes her because she's a bit famous. She wanted to be liked for what she was. He doesn't want to be liked just for his looks. She meets his mother who he shares his sex details with.

She returns home, having left the hotel room intact. She remains obsessed. She has signs of menopause and panics that she won't be able to have sex with Davey before her sex drive dips. They get a dog, Smokey.

She meets Audra, the best friend of Davy's mum. Davy had an affair with her for 2 years. She gets Audra to tell her the details of sex with Davy. They end up having sex together. She thinks that Harris is having an affair with 28 year-old colleague Kara. They argue. She has sex with a photographer. She and Harris agree to have a night away from each other once a week. Together they make the dog better. They explain to Sam about their lovers - the narrator's Chris and Harris's Page. Friends congratulate them on how well they've managed.

Arkanda, who'd called the meeting off, gets in contact again. She'd wanted to talk to the narrator because they'd had the same birthing experience. They plan to meet in Room 321 but it's occupied, so they meet next door.

Chris breaks up with her abruptly. A friend is doing a sculpture of a headless woman on all fours - not a vulnerable position, she says, a stable one.

4 years later she flying to New York as part of a book tour. She discovers that Davy is performing there - he's broken through as a dancer performing with a friend. She watches, wishing the rest of the audience wasn't there, or that the "performance" context would somehow be disrupted.

There are noteworthy passages -

• like Buzz Aldrin unloading the dishwasher
• "we walked clumsily close"
• "If I had tried to cash that word, the teller would have said 'we don't have enough money'. There was not enough money in the world"
• "One day when we were both ready I would reveal my whole self to Harris. This would be like presenting a sweater knitted in secrecy. 'Oh my God' he would say, 'how did you find time to do this?' 'Just here and there, whenever I could. Sometimes even with you right there beside me'. 'I didn't even know you could knit'. 'There are a lot of things you don't know about me. That's the whole point of this sweater metaphor'. Of course if you're knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so huge that it simply can't be hidden"
• "She replied like a customer bot"

Other reviews

• Lara Feigel (July’s characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty
• Emily Gould (It’s impossible to overemphasize how debilitatingly horny the narrator is during this period of the novel. When she isn’t with Davey, she does little but jerk off to fantasies of him that become increasingly baroque. ... For every micro-loss, the narrator gains something more valuable on the other side of her break with convention.
• John Self (What becomes clear on this voyage of self-discovery is that our narrator’s past is not past. Both her grandmother and her aunt died after throwing themselves out of a window – the same window – and she worries “that I was next in this matriarchal lineage”. But most of all, she has never recovered from the trauma of Sam’s birth ... within one idiosyncratic story, this is a book of vast scope, taking in men and women, the mind and the body, and society and solitude. By giving her narrator some of her own biographical details, July is playing with the reader’s expectations )