“If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half.”
To what extent can a woman / mother / wife afford to spiral in her middle age? Can she spare the time? Does she have the energy? What about the money to just…take off? Miranda July’s 2024 novel, All Fours, considers the delicious possibility where everything is just right and anything is possible – and all that the woman has to do is take a chance.
So when the 45-year-old narrator, a semi-famous artsy-type with an ungendered child and a practical outlook on her marriage, exits the freeway and checks into a motel no farther than 30 minutes from her home, she knows she’s about to do something she never would have imagined.
A Parker takes off
Her relationship with Harris, her husband, is like that of two warring diplomats – neither is sure if the other has poisoned their drink. Nevertheless, the marriage is a well-oiled machine and even without any real affection, there is regular sex and they have managed to be responsible parents. At a party, Harris theorises that most people can be broadly categorised into two kinds: Parkers and Drivers. Drivers are “able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring”, whereas Parkers need “a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause.” He looks at her while describing the latter.
On her part, she has revealed little of her true self in these intervening years. She lies without reservation and considers art to be her true medium. When a work opportunity turns up in New York City, she is encouraged by Harris to take a week-long road trip to ground herself. She has the money to afford it. And if not now, when? The road adventure lasts less than an hour when she goes off route and decides to play house in a motel room.
She squanders a handsome amount of money to get a local interior designer, Claire, to redo the room. She orders new tiles and a mattress, and even purchases a hundred-year-old quilt from a nearby thrift store. The room is stripped bare of its cold motel décor and replaced with whatever aesthetic she can afford on short notice and a limited allowance. In addition to the redecoration project, her time is also occupied by Davey, the local stud. His boyish looks and simple outlook on life charm her, despite the fact that he’s married (quite annoyingly to Claire). Every afternoon in her three-week-long sojourn in the motel is spent with him. His unusual past and his dancer’s body add to his small-town allure, and soon enough, the narrator believes she is in love with him. While she’s not too committed to sticking by her wedding vows, Davey hesitates to violate his. With sex becoming an impossible finality, the two hover around each other, pursuing other tactile expressions of their attraction.
After touchdown
At the end of three weeks, when it’s time for touchdown, the narrator has little choice but to quit Davey cold turkey. However, the incompleteness of their association bothers her – and she pursues him like a woman possessed. Her text messages go unanswered, so she tracks down the older lady Davey used to sleep with as a teenager. The descent from ecstasy to madness alarms her, and it is exacerbated by her perimenopausal state. She remembers her grandmother and aunt, two women in her immediate family who died by suicide in their fifties.
Spiralling from the loosening control on her own body and desires and her dying marriage, she decides to “open source” her troubles. Her girlfriends of various age groups swoop in with advice and anecdotes to debunk myths and allay her fears. Instead of hiding out in motel rooms, the answer is perhaps in accepting the mortality of the foundations of our lives – children, marriages, and even short-lived affairs.
Like in most midlife crises, sex here is also the central dilemma of existence. As a queer woman who has been with both men and women, the (ir)rationality of desire, heightened by the body’s rejection of sexual desire and the mind’s indifference to sexual motive is suddenly confronted when an opportunity strikes to do something totally out of the normal confines of age, sexuality, and social position. An insatiable hunger for sex surprises the narrator, almost rebooting her system.
One could read All Fours as a menopause novel or a novel about midlife crisis – yet, neither would suffice. What makes All Fours so fun, so sexy, is the outrageous possibility of a woman behaving like an untethered man – driving off without a map, pursuing one’s animal desires, and pretending the storm that you have kicked up is hardly of any inconvenience. When the family and home are upended by the narrator’s transgressions, she’s not made to pay a price for it – instead, she negotiates by reshaping her marriage. Harris and she are now open for business, with other parties, of course.
Battered and on all fours, she cannot be knocked down anymore. But, crawling is moving too.
Virginia Woolf advocated for a room of one’s own, and Miranda July’s protagonist puts her life at stake to build one – even if it is outside the familiarity of her home, even if it is by a dusty freeway where no one makes a stop.
All Fours, Miranda July, Canongate Books.
