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The wildly acclaimed novel about a perimenopausal woman going on a journey of erotic awakening has left a wave of women following in the protagonist’s wake
‘I don’t read books that literally,” says Abra, 49, from Arizona. “I don’t read literature as self-help.” But we’re talking about All Fours, the second novel by the American artist and author Miranda July, which came out this year, and the way it changed her life. The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel” and “the talk of every group text”, having started “a whisper network of women fantasising about desire and freedom”. This is a novel that made women blow up their lives; every book group had a friend of a friend whose life had been shaken to its foundations.
If you’ve not read the book, the plot can be summarised thus: an artist – wife to a Good Guy, mother to an under-10 – sets off on a road trip and gets distracted by a dancer. She moves into a motel room to stay near him, and remodels it in sumptuous fabrics. She can’t sleep, can’t think, definitely can’t go home, maddened with longing. The libidinous intensity of what’s later floated as a perimenopause effect is magical. I’d never seen that on a page before.
At the start, online reviewers would refer quite elliptically to its influence: “This book was a lighthouse that called me home”; “This book sorta gave me a mental breakdown”; “This was a stick of dynamite disguised as a book.” I guess when you’re turning your life upside down, you don’t necessarily want to tell the whole internet. Other reviews were stridently angry. Sometimes that was because it was so explicit: “This book made me feel icky. Like, super-duper uncomfortable and nauseous. It’s extremely sexual, graphic, raunchy and disturbing.” But other times you could feel a vibrating, much more fundamental moral fury: how could the protagonist act on her ardour without thinking of the consequences? How could she destroy her happy home, not realise that her actions affected others? The anger was fascinating – readers were responding not as if to a character, but as if it were a manual they were being asked to follow. The author wanted them to sell out their loved ones for a glimpse of a stranger’s nipple, and really, how dare she? The haters were almost more locked in than the fans.
Then, at the start of this month, July started an All Fours discussion chat on Substack and this became a muster point for women who were upending their lives. They didn’t all get a divorce – Abra switched to a much less well-paid, more rewarding job. “Marriage isn’t the only institution that is willing to dismiss us,” she says.
Imogen (not her real name), 40, is a photographer who lives in a very conservative part of the US. “I read the book for the first time in September. I’ve got it right here,” she says, holding it up for me on the video chat. “It’s my bible.” Imogen grew up in a strict, evangelical household and married aged 21. “In the region I’m from, if you want anything other than the normal life, you feel a little crazy.” She’d been peeling apart from her faith for a decade, and finally broke from her church after Covid. She and her husband have two children under 10, and she felt “I never got to have my own time to discover who I am.”
When she read All Fours, it described her feelings so precisely that she tried to get her husband to read it. “He’s not really a book reader, so it was awkward … I think that my sudden change hurt him, and his response was: ‘I don’t really want to understand, I need you to understand me first.’ I get that.”
But she also got that she wanted to separate from her husband. “We’re in the beginning stages of uncoupling. It’s a big, scary thing. No woman in my family has ever been divorced. It’s hard. You feel strong and powerful one day, and the next day, you can’t eat. Any woman that’s going through this transformation, if you don’t have a community of other women, you’re going to be lost.”
Lauren, 41, is a dance curator who lives in London. Her three-year relationship ended shortly after reading All Fours, “for other reasons”. But it had unearthed insistent questions about sex and ethical non-monogamy: “I didn’t come out till I was 33. I haven’t explored myself sexually. I started another relationship that has got a lot more space in it, sexually. I really appreciate the value of that tender connection, but also the wildness that comes with it.”
For Lilly, who is in her 20s, All Fours wasn’t her first brush with non-monogamy. “Especially living in LA, I feel it’s in every topic of conversation,” she says. “I know so many people experimenting with it. But Miranda July, older and cool, makes it way more legitimate and less like a bunch of my peers trying to do Woodstock.” Besides, the question the book poses isn’t really about whether to be polyamorous; rather, whether a woman who walks out on a partner who is “perfect in all these ways” is just too radical to stomach. Like Imogen, Lilly tried to get her partner to read it. He listened to the audiobook, “on double speed, probably. And he said: ‘I loved this book, but a lot of this is concerning to me.’ And then we ended it pretty much that week.” She moved into a new place a few weeks ago and the first thing she bought, just like All Fours’ protagonist, “was a pink coverlet for my bed”.
The quest for truth, Imogen says, “is hard. I don’t know whether Miranda July would want to be responsible for a lot of people blowing up their lives. Right now I’m really in the scary, anxious part, but you have to hold your head up and know that in the end, looking back, everybody needs to live their most authentic life.”
‘This book is my bible!’ The women who read Miranda July’s All Fours, then blew up their lives
