How many times have I heard
You've got to get out of your head! but
Miranda July gets about as deep into her own as anyone probably ever has, turning this unique novel into performance art of the most introspective kind.
As I texted Magda, with the same uncontainable enthusiasm I shared for
I May Destroy You, "I feel like I'm a spy in the secret world of women." At least the kind I've always enjoyed befriending: smart, funny, questioning, empathic, sexual and most of all perceptive.
The novel's narrator--a semi-famous "creative" (
There was nothing on my person that revealed I’d just been paid twenty thousand dollars for one sentence about hand jobs) clearly based on July, recently separated from filmmaker
Mike Mills, who directed
Twentieth Century Woman, an unheralded masterpiece--embarks on a road trip with the blessing of her husband, who theorizes people can be categorized as either "parkers" or "drivers." Counterintuitively, she seeks to become the former.
Her quest takes her a lot of different places, almost none of them geographic, through a series of ups and downs, including the rarely depicted world of perimenopause, a subject that proves to be extraordinarily fertile ground for July's unflinching imagination or perhaps just the actual reality of her own extraordinarily rendered life. What resonated most for me, as a gay man a generation older than she, is her revelation upon meeting the woman who claimed the virginity of her much younger fantasy lover.
It seemed unlikely that my entire view of older women could be changed by Audra. On the other hand, people were always referring to the one person—the gay teacher, the animal rights activist—who had changed everything. Wasn’t this the great hope and folly of humans? That we were all so influenceable? Not weak or flimsy but actually interconnected at the root level, like trees—we took everything personally because it was personal.
I instantly identified with Audra's role because of an encounter I had had decades ago while walking on the beach in
the Pines. A younger man whom I didn't recognize approached to say hello. "You probably don't remember me," he said, but
you and your boyfriend changed my life. You told me to read
Anna Karenina and our three-way showed me there was a different way to be gay, that monogamy didn't have to be essential to a relationship." Alrighty, then. Little did
he know!
There's so much to unpack in this book. Although I was known for posing provocative questions to housemates and guests to liven up things in the Pines (i.e. who was your female role model growing up?), here's one I never thought to ask: are you body-focused or fantasy-focused during sex? Good news: All Fours insists you don't have choose.
The metaphor behind the title, alluded to by Jordi, the narrator's best friend, a sculptor, also harkens back to the Pines, because of the exploration that promiscuous environment fostered. Often anonymous sex required assigning nicknames to partners, at least in my head. Among the most memorable was "Fucked On All Fours," my au courant homage to an unforgettable Native American hunk sometime after Dances With Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture. Fortunately, perimenopause did not loom on my horizon and the party lasted almost 30 more years thanks to my two best friends, darkness and distance.
I'm not entirely sure about July's open ending, after an edging session that lasts almost for the book's entirety, because it suggests that people can change, that parking may be in your future even if you do go through hell finding a space. But that's a small quibble given how much fun I had reading this exhilarating account of a woman's sexual journey.
Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated [sex].
* * * *
His name was Davey. I offered the chair across from me and he sort of half sat on it, while biting heartily into the sandwich and describing the history of the Hertz franchises his uncle owned. He usually worked at the counter, so moving cars was comparatively fun, “especially when I can time it with my lunch break!” He didn’t question whether any of this was interesting; I supposed all handsome young men enjoyed a minor-celebrity treatment that they were unaware of.
* * * *
Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires. I knew many women (like my own dear Jordi) who simply couldn’t handle the feeling lying gave them—it wasn’t their bag.
“What you see is what you get,” these women said about themselves. For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.
* * * *
We would touch a little bit more each day, drawing it out as long as possible, and then one day we would allow ourselves to be overcome. And it would be real life. Real smells and wet tongues and cum and pubic hair and this would be astounding. The crossover into this land of physical intimacy would be like breaking the sound barrier or a plane lifting off, babies learning to walk. A new world would open up and yes it would be rife with new problems but oh the joy that would come from pausing, midsentence, to kiss.
* * * *
She was doing that thing that women do; begging for what you want by not asking for it.
* * * *
I only need my lesbianism held and kept, like a person who buries little bits of money all over the world—it’s never on me, but it’s never far.
* * * *
I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.
* * * *
It was the kind of climax that needed another one right after to scoop up the leftovers and then another to lick the plate clean.
