I first heard of All Fours (2024) by Miranda July when my husband began reading it. In hindsight, it might be a little bit surprising that my husband started reading "the perimenopause" book before I'd even heard of it, but he's always getting recommended new books by various online sources. Although he gave up on it about one third of the way through, I kept on hearing about All Fours. It was popping up on all kinds of lists and there were glowing reviews all over the place. Interestingly, when some friends from my book club read it, they hated it. I was intrigued. When I tried a sample, it seemed unique and funny, so I downloaded it from my library.
***SPOILERS*** The protagonist of All Fours is a 45-year-old woman who is a moderately famous artist in various unknown mediums. She just received an unexpected bonus and has decided to go on a solo, cross-country drive to New York City. Her husband is supportive and will be watching their child. She takes off and almost immediately gets derailed about a half an hour from home--distracted by a young gas station attendant. She takes a room in a motel, and spends the next two weeks extravagantly decorating her motel room with the gas station attendant's wife, lying to her husband and child, and having a highly charged but mostly nonsexual affair with the gas station attendant. When she finally returns home, she is incapable of having the same relationship she had with her husband. The two slowly split up.
I have so many thoughts about this book that I'm not even sure where to start. First, this book was very unique and very well written. I don't think I've ever read a book like it. I'd never seen anyone describe actions and feelings in the way that July did. I had no idea what was going to happen, and it sometimes felt absolutely bonkers. Second, I can understand why my friends hated this book, and it was because they intensely disliked the main character's actions and could not understand her. To them, it seemed like she was breaking up a stable marriage for arbitrary and selfish reasons.
I agree with my friends to some extent, but even when the character's actions made me deeply uncomfortable, the writing kept sucking me in. And this book was often funny. When the protagonist runs into her lover's mother at the gas station, and the two have a crazy conversation, I was almost laughing out loud. It was bizarre, but entertaining, and made me want to keep reading.
ln addition, I am almost the same age as the main character, and even though our lives are completely different, July hit on some hard truths about how I've been feeling lately:
“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. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.”“Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.”
I've heard people describe All Fours as a perimenopausal book, and that the protagonist used perimenopause as an excuse for her actions, but I didn't see it that way. Sure, she talks about the crazy hormone changes, but she had also felt a disconnect from her husband for quite a long time. Her decisions had more to do with her personality and circumstances. I definitely did not see this as some kind of handbook for perimenopause.
In the end, I thought All Fours was unique and memorable, and I'm glad I read it. I will leave you with some more favorite quotes from the novel.
-“Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.”
-“in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.”
-“I feel such tenderness toward them. Try to remember this feeling, I say to myself. They are the same people up close as they are from here.”
-“The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved.”
-"It's hard to be knocked down when you're on all fours."
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