"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 )

"The first bad man" by Miranda July (Canongate, 2015)

It's perhaps easiest to read it as comedy. Cheryl, 43 years old, the 1st-person character, has fancied Phillip, 22 years her senior, for years. He at last invites her to his place for a meal. He has something important to tell her - he's fallen in love with a 16 y.o. girl. Have they had sex? Phillip says "Well, I want to, and she wants to - but the attraction is so powerful that we almost don't trust it. Is it real or is it just the power of the taboo? I've told her all about you and our relationship. I explained how strong you are, how you're a feminist and you live alone, and she agreed we should wait until we got your take on it" (p.47).

The company she works for produces self-defence DVDs, which might explain her role-playing tendencies. Cheryl discovers that her two therapists are in a relationship, that they role-play too. She lets a colleague's daughter, Clee, stay with her. Clee disrupts her careful routines. They role-play scenes than involve violence. Cheryl fantasises the sex fantasies that she thinks Phillip has, playing the male. She's offered a place on the board by Clee's parents, to replace Phillip who's mysteriously disappeared. Clee becomes pregnant, wants a home-birth, wants to give the baby for adoption.

After the birth, Clee decides to keep the baby. Clee and Cheryl begin a physical relationship and Cheryl becomes a co-mother. Clee's parents aren't happy with the inappropriate relationship and demote Cheryl. When baby Jack is 7 months old, Clee leaves by mutual consent. Then Phillip turns up.

Along with the comedy there are passages of inspired writing, as on p.38-39, p.153, and p.162 when a one-dollar bill is used during childbirth.

Other reviews

• Laura Miller (Nearly everyone in the novel justifies their capricious narcissism with the lingo of self-actualisation, all while treating the lonely Cheryl as either a convenience or an encumbrance. ... It’s true that if you dig deeply enough, you can find something bizarre about almost anyone. When, however, the focus for nearly 300 pages is on a relatively small cast, the multiplying weirdness becomes unamusing absurdity)
• Lauren Groff (Challenging work tends to incite readerly resistance, and I’d bet that “The First Bad Man” will not be exempt from this rule. ... The book ends in precisely the way any perceptive reader who reaches Page 8 would predict. By then, the novel’s conventional shape has neutralized some of its early strangeness and potency. The story is a smaller one than it promised early on.)

"No one belongs here more than you" by Miranda July (Canongate, 2007)

Stories from Harvard Review, New Yorker, The Paris Review, etc.

Here are 3 extracts (the first being the story's beginning) from the first story, "The Shared Patio"

• It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person. But down there in the well, where there is no light and only thousand-year-old water, a man has no reason to make mistakes (p.1)
• People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you (p.2)
• Please come! the invitation said. We'll have a whale of a time! and there was a picture of a whale. It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly (p.9)

Such quirkiness, humour and similies pervade the stories. I like "Majesty", "Mon Plaisir", the 1-page "The Moves" and the 5 page "The Man on the Stairs". In "Majesty" a woman has lost a dog - "Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato" (p.25) ... "This time she was in a little red car. She had not even put on her clothes; she was still wearing the robe. And she was yelling 'Potato' so desperately that she was forgetting to stick her head out the window, she was yelling into the interior of the car uselessly as if Potato were within her, like God" (p.27)

Sex of various types (M+F, F+F, age-gap, commercial, casual, submissive, imagined) gets linked to self-discovery, though what's discovered isn't always good news. Self-transformations are hoped for, and these may involve one's partner - in "Mon Plaisir" a couple become film-extras, acting in mime a couple in a restaurant who are happier than they are.

I thought that "I kiss a door", "The Boy from Lam Kien" and "Birthmark" were less good. "Love in 2003" was interesting psychologically though less successful as a story.

Other reviews

• Josh Lacey (The Guardian) (Although a few read like experiments that didn't quite work, the majority of the 16 stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are blisteringly good)
• Shelah Kolhatkar (New York Times) (The book is a series of vignettes in which lonely, disconnected characters try to find communion with others, often by acting out in bizarre ways. ... A handful of these stories are sweet and revealing, although in many cases the attempt to create “art” is too self-conscious, and the effort comes off as pointlessly strange.)
• Emma Trelles (Pop Matters) (July ends several of her stories with her characters’ humble efforts at change. But they are enough; we buy into them because the voices behind the act are so commanding. This is probably the collection’s biggest gift but also its most obvious flaw. ... It’s all the same narrator immersed in her own wanting.)