All Fours

(by Miranda July)

The unnamed narrator of All Fours is an artist in her mid-forties who, when the book opens, is about to take a trip to New York – a birthday gift to herself where she’s going to stay at the Carlyle and see friends and do things by herself while her husband, Harris, takes care of their kid Sam back at home. She’s going to drive there from California, mostly to prove a point. (Harris thinks she isn’t the sort of person who can drive across the country, because she isn’t someone who can “maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring”, which is, he thinks, the sort of person you need to be for a multi-day solo road trip.) But on her first day of driving, the narrator stops for gas and lunch in a town called Monrovia, at which point the trip becomes something else entirely.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot because it’s such a delight to just watch it unfold. There are funny moments and cringe-inducing moments and sweet moments, and I was there for all of it. One thing that is significant: we learn that the narrator’s grandmother and aunt both took their own lives in midlife, and while the narrator never explicitly considers doing that herself, the book is the narrator essentially figuring out: if not that, then what? One answer to that is reclaiming her sexuality; another answer is making art; the underlying answer is being/owning her whole self (and figuring out what that means/what that looks like).