TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Miranda July, was a bit afraid of what people would think of her after publishing her second novel, "All Fours." The book is partly about sexuality and has some very explicit sexual scenes but that's true of many books. Her larger fear was the theme of a woman reaching midlife and entering perimenopause, the time in a woman's life when she is transitioning into menopause and is experiencing some of the many symptoms associated with that time of life. For her main character, it's the fear of losing her libido, dealing with mysterious moods and anxiety and the thought of being seen as an old woman.
But the book has gotten the opposite reaction she feared. It's on many of this year's 10 best lists, including The New York Times, in which it was described as this year's literary conversation piece, and in The New Yorker, where it was described as a study of crisis - the crisis of being how middle aged changes sex, marriage and ambition. July's moving, very funny book is at once buoyant about the possibilities of starting over and clear eyed about its cost. When our critic John Powers reviewed it, he said, I gasped in surprise at "All Fours," Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel.
"All Fours" is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. John goes on to describe the book as perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty and often laugh-out-loud funny. "All Fours'" story revolves around a 45-year-old woman, a slightly famous artist, writer and performer who decides to take a break from the routines she's stuck in and drive from her home in LA to New York. Her husband thinks it's a good idea and even suggests the best route for the drive. But about 30 minutes away from home, she stops at a gas station and feels this electric connection to a young man there. And he seems to feel it, too.
They end up having an affair in a motel room she rents and redecorates, and she spends the entire three weeks there. Their affair is both sexual and chaste. They're both married. He won't engage sexually, which would be disloyal to his wife. But they touch and dance, and the intentional eroticism becomes all-consuming for her. But then the three weeks are up, she returns home and has enormous trouble reentering her life as a wife and mother. Miranda July is also a filmmaker, actor, performance artist and visual artist.
Miranda July, welcome to FRESH AIR. It's such a good book. I really enjoyed reading it, and I'm looking forward to talking with you about it. So you were afraid to write this book and what people would think of you. Elaborate on what your biggest fears were.
MIRANDA JULY: I mean, I think fear in general was also why I wrote the book. Like, upon turning 40, which was a few years before I started writing it, it seemed like this grim time was suddenly approaching that was very vague, like, this time of a woman who's no longer young. And I wanted to not write about that because so many women I admired, so many writers had written about more important things, right? Like they had not focused on the people trying to shame them or the shame they felt themselves. They focused on important subjects. But the more that I got older - and I started writing this book at 45 - and the more that I talked to other women and gynecologists and naturopaths, the more I felt that this subject actually wasn't separate from those more important things.
GROSS: Well, one thing about getting older is I think Wikipedia has relieved the burden of that, because for most people, their birth date is on the Wikipedia page. And so you can't really hide it even if you want to anymore. And I resent the fact that women especially are supposed to hide their age. Like, why can't we own it? Why can't we proclaim it? You know, why should we have to reinforce the idea that a woman getting older is a really terrible thing?
JULY: Right. I mean, we shouldn't have to reinforce it, for sure. But it does, like, I think people - I don't totally want to blame women when there's real repercussions, you know, economically, just in the sense of what's possible in the world, you know? So it's a tricky line. Like, yes, I sort of - obviously, I'm on the side of declaring it. But I am kind of often - I'm just being honest here because so much of the book is about, like, not trying to be less ashamed than I actually am.
GROSS: (Laughter).
JULY: Not trying to seem less ashamed.
GROSS: Yeah.
JULY: Because I feel like then you can't evolve. Like, if you're hiding the place where you're actually at, then it's hard to get to the next place. So when I say I'm 50, I am always a little disappointed when the person doesn't look shocked (laughter).
GROSS: Oh, like, oh, but you look like 35 - that kind of thing.
JULY: When they just sort of are like, yeah. Like, I still have that in me, despite having declared all that stuff a massive construction, you know, like, a best construction ever that we become less interesting, you know, so early, so young - right? - 45. I mean, like, why was I thinking about this at 45? But I was.
GROSS: There's a line in your book where you're buying something from an older woman. And you think about how you sometimes really hate old women. And so...
JULY: Let's not - yeah, we're going to have to decide are we saying you.
GROSS: Oh, I'm sorry - the character.
JULY: (Laughter) I mean, we can get into that.
GROSS: Yeah.
JULY: But, you know, the narrator is saying - yeah.
GROSS: So this is where the character has gone to the hotel. She's felt this, like, erotic charge from this younger man - she's 45; he's 31 - who she met at - who she looked at, at a gas station, and he looked back at her. And then they met briefly in a diner. So she's unpacking her suitcase at this motel. And the reading is about what she's thinking as she's unpacking her clothes, and which one she's going to leave in the suitcase, and which one she's going to actually unpack and wear.
JULY: Right. Yeah, so she leaves the sort of more androgynous styles in the suitcase. (Reading) I left these things in my suitcase in favor of my more overtly feminine and form-fitting clothes - heels and pencil skirts, cropped sweaters, shirtwaist dresses with tight belts around the smallest part of my waist. Every old thing had a modern counterbalance. Past age 40, you had to be careful with vintage. I didn't want to be mistaken for an elderly woman wearing the clothes from the 1960s of her youth. Young people especially had trouble making distinctions between ages over 40.
(Reading) When I got my first Patti Smith tape, "Horses," at 22, Smith was only 49, but I didn't think of her as a contemporary person. I wasn't even sure she was still alive because the cover of "Horses" was a black-and-white photograph. Instead of knowing this was a stylistic choice, like vintage clothes, I unconsciously associated the record with the deep past of black-and-white movies. If anyone asked, I would've probably managed to assign the album to the right decade. But most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations never brought to light. A good way to check your outfit is by running past the mirror, or better yet, make a video of yourself running past your phone. How old was that blur of a woman?
How old was that blur of a woman? Was she from the past, or was she modern? And where was she going in such a hurry? I walked around Monrovia in a red shirtwaist dress and white wedge heels. The commercial areas weren't really built for walking, but there were some nice residential neighborhoods. Several times I passed teenage girls wearing backpacks, their breasts inflated by the hormones and cow's milk and barely covered by tank tops. Whenever I saw them coming, I pretended I was from another country, projecting the air of someone so foreign she could not understand or be hurt by anything American.
GROSS: Did you share a similar almost fear of older women or a dislike of them that your character has?
JULY: I think I was catching myself - around this time, I kept sort of noticing what I was thinking about older women and noticing the way that I might dismiss someone or not give them sort of the full benefit of an interior life or an erotic life or think of them as, like, a sad character kind of for no reason, right? Like, this is just, like, someone I'm seeing in passing. And by the time I was writing the book, I was aware like, oh, that fear or hatred of older women is, of course, self-hatred, you know, because I will become that, and to some degree, I already am that to people younger than me, you know? So it's, like, a kind of slippery zone.
GROSS: Your character is experiencing things and fears that relate to perimenopause. But some of the things she's experiencing she doesn't know relate to perimenopause until she actually goes to her gynecologist. Was it that way for you - that you had symptoms of perimenopause that you were attributing to other things?
JULY: Well, I had a different experience from the narrator. I actually had this amazing doctor, Dr. Maggie Ney (ph), who started talking with me about it in my early 40s. I may have been just 40. And she's like, look. We're going to take your blood and see where your hormone levels are at, and that's just to get a baseline so that as you get older, you know, and things - your hormone levels drop, we'll kind of understand, like, the speed at which that's happening and when you might want to do bioidentical hormones, if you want that.
And I always remember, at the end of describing all this, which was a longer conversation, she said, I'm so excited for you. And she didn't mean that, like, as a joke. And I - not knowing anything else about this, never having had a conversation about it in any other time in my life, not having had a conversation about it ever before with anyone, I just smile. I just dumbly smiled and was like, huh, yeah, you never know what's coming next, you know? Like, this is exciting - like, go from ballet slippers to point shoes, you know? Like, it's always something - I don't know. It didn't seem inherently bad. But then, you know, as I would talk to my friends, I was, like, the only one who knew anything.
GROSS: Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Miranda July, and her latest novel, "All Fours," has been on many 10-best lists for 2024. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEASTIE BOYS' "TRANSITIONS")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Miranda July. Her new novel - well, it's about six months old now, but it's reappearing on many 10-best lists. It's called "All Fours."
So one of the things the book is about is the feeling that you need to change your life but not knowing how to do it and knowing that there will be consequences and rewards if you do. And part of the consequences will be for the other people in your life if you're leaving a marriage, if you're breaking up a home in a way that will affect your young child. And I know you've experienced similar things. And this might be too personal, but was there a lot you had to weigh before changing your life, knowing that it might be the right thing for you but there would also be consequences that everyone in your family would be facing, including you? - 'cause there - I'm sure there'd be a downside as well.
JULY: Yeah. I mean, my changing-life moment, it wasn't like I alone - and my head was coming up with - that I had to do this. It was, like, an ongoing conversation with my husband at the time and very slow. And we both - I think as much as we didn't want to traumatize our kid, we also didn't want to traumatize ourselves (laughter). And we were very attached to ourself and the triangle of our family. So what exactly had to change and could stay the same? I feel like it's still changing. I mean, kind of, as long as we're a family, which will hopefully be forever, you know, you've got three changing people in it whose needs are changing and who are trying to be honest. And I guess that was the big shift - was like, oh, we're not going to pretend we're not changing anymore and that a lot of those changes have nothing to do with each other, you know, or this thing that we've built.
But, you know, as much as you worry about the kid, my biggest worry was that they wouldn't get to see me as I really was - and I say they because they're nonbinary; there's just one kid - because I started to realize, oh, there's a whole lot of myself that happens outside the home with my best friend, or in my studio alone being creative, or just me alone in the world. Like, I feel like - I'm starting to feel like this part that used to just be, like, me on a break or, you know, at work, this may be the lion's share of me. This might be kind of what I have to offer them as far as one way to live, one way to be. But actually, when I go home, I'm being like a smaller version and not - kind of like just less interesting to even to myself, because I was biting my tongue a lot.
And no one was asking me to do this, by the way. Like, it's very personal. I know a lot of people who the freest they feel is in their home and, you know, the world is terrifying. And so it began to feel like something I had to do for my child. Like, I need to change these circumstances so they can see who I really am.
GROSS: So this may be too personal, but please don't answer it if it is. You and your former husband - is that the right way to describe it? - lived together for a while with your child, but more as friends than as a married couple. How did that work? I think a lot of people would be curious about that because I think there are a lot of couples who separate, who remain friends, but they don't want to be romantically involved anymore. And they want more freedom outside of the home. But I could see where there'd also be a lot of discomfort and tension and nervousness around each other. So if there's anything that you can offer about how that arrangement worked out?
JULY: Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. I feel a little different since the book came out. Like, I've now read so many emails and messages and comments on my Substack about women at this point, or women doing things differently or trying to figure this out that I no longer - I'm like, is there a way to answer this question that isn't specific to me? - because I actually don't feel like - I think at the time, I felt very unique and very like no one's doing what I'm doing, and both worried by that and sort of proud. And now I'm like, no. This is incredibly widespread, at least lots of thoughts about it, and then people trying to figure out how to do it.
I mean, the thing of living together, it's what you're used to. Obviously, that's not going to work if you're incredibly embattled, you know? But if you're not, then it is kind of an opportunity to see who the other person is a bit more. Like, wow, this person who's like my longtime pal, like, but I never could quite see what they were like when they're dating, you know? Not that, like, you're necessarily getting any details or anything but just, like, their energy, you know, because you were the person they were dating. And now you're not. And, like, yeah, there might be some sadness or strangeness about that. But you're also like, look at you. You're a person. Like, I never really gave you all of that.
And meanwhile, you're also getting it, too. Like, they're seeing you as a person more completely. And nothing you do is threatening in the old way, you know, the way every new thing and change is, like, sort of threatening when you're in a couple sometimes. And if you know it's going to be a lifelong relationship, you know, partly because of the child but also because, you know, life isn't that long, and you've already invested so much time and energy with this person, like, maybe that's sort of interesting, to get to see and be seen, you know, in this different way.
GROSS: My guest is Miranda July. Her novel "All Fours" is on many best books of the year lists. We'll talk more after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JESSICA WILLIAMS TRIO'S "(BEAUTIFUL GIRL OF MY DREAMS) I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with writer and filmmaker Miranda July. Her films include "You, Me And Everyone We Know" (ph) and "Kajillionaire." Her new novel, "All Fours," is on many 2024 best-of lists. It's about a woman wanting to shake up her life. She's thinking of leaving her marriage and is having a very erotic affair. When she discovers she's entering perimenopause, she fears the best part of her life may be ending and she may lose her libido. She worries about getting older. There are parallels to Miranda July's life.
I want to ask you about being the parent of a nonbinary child, which is the position more and more parents seem to be in. How old is your child now?
JULY: Twelve.
GROSS: Yeah, so they use the pronoun they/them. What are some of the things you have to deal with as the parent of a nonbinary child in terms of - even questions like, do you want your child to take hormones? Do you want them to have a puberty block, or do they want to have it? Like, is your voice going to take precedence over theirs, or do you hope to be on the same page? Do you want to just follow what they want, knowing that they're not an adult yet, that their mind could possibly change? There's so many questions, I think, that the parents of nonbinary children have to deal with, and especially now in a world where that's being, like, demonized in politics.
JULY: (Laughter) Yes. I mean, that's, like, a whole other book that I didn't write. The child in the book is nonbinary, and I remember sort of wrestling with, like, should I have the child be he? And it would be he for a while. Then she - hmm, none of these things are feeling right. You know, it is a fiction. I'm making up all kinds of other things. Surely, I can just - the gender of this child doesn't have to map onto the gender of my child.
But I went home one day and asked my child. I just described this situation. I said, what do you think? Should I just have them be they/them? I mean, I don't want - you know, it's not you, you know, so I don't want that to feel invasive to you. And they said, I think everyone in the book should be they/them (laughter), which was such a kind of 2.0 answer, like, sort of, like, just questioning the construction of gender in general. Like, and I said, like, OK, yeah, I'm not there yet (laughter). Point taken. And then I just went with they/them.
And I - there's maybe one point in the book where it's kind of acknowledged that, potentially, it's the same hormones, that the narrator is taking estrogen, you know, that a nonbinary transfeminine child would - might one day take. But beyond that, you know, as a mother, it's not my story to tell, especially because, as with any child, it's a changing story. And you don't - like, you - none of us want to put something out there that's going to haunt the child, you know, which is not to say, like, they're ever not going to be trans. I don't mean that.
But it's like, it's a private journey. My own, you know, deep inner gender and sexuality journey is a private journey. So I - it's tricky. There's so much information and conversation that is missing and that I would love to give any parents or grandparents who are listening. But it's just - it's too public for just me as a mother, not an educator, not a writer. Yeah, I'm just too protective of the sanctity of their childhood.
GROSS: Of course. Yeah. Have you changed a lot, having more space in your life on your own? - because I would imagine you co-parent with your former husband and that you don't have your child every day to take care of. And in some ways, that's a real loss, and in other ways, it gains you some independence and personal time. And I wonder what that shift in time and that shift in the balance of independence versus having somebody dependent on you all the time has changed you, for better or worse - has changed your life - or for better and worse.
JULY: So, yeah, the four days - every other four days I'm alone, you know, or wherever -whoever I choose to sleep with, like in my 20s (laughter). Like, it's really - like, you really have to stop and think when you have that time alone where you're not responsible. Like, what actually am I doing here in this life? Like, what do I feel? Like, and you keep - just 'cause you've unburdened yourself practically, you know, with - from this construction or these real responsibilities doesn't mean they just automatically lift off your shoulders. Like, most of my issues come from within, right?
So suddenly, you're like, oh, it wasn't all the construction of marriage or the patriarchy or those - it was those things, but they're inside me. And I'm still running for dear life or replacing those constructions with new ones - you know, anything that I'll fill up my time. Take my time, please - you know, Instagram, whatever. Like, and so to actually be willing to take on that freedom, it's a real practice. Like, it's - and I don't mean to make it sound hard or scary. It's only hard in the way that, like, a new habit is hard.
GROSS: My guest is Miranda July. Her latest novel is called "All Fours." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOAN JEANRENAUD'S "DERVISH")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with writer and filmmaker Miranda July. Her latest novel, "All Fours," is on many best-of-the-year book lists.
So I want to talk about your formative years. You gravitated toward punk as a teenager. And what drew you to it? And what were your first experiences listening to punk rock or, you know, going to clubs?
JULY: I mean, I think I wasn't ever, like - I'm not, like, a music head. So the thing that drew me to punk, especially as a teenager, was, first of all, it was an all-ages scene. Like, the clubs - like, I could go to them. They weren't - they didn't have alcohol. And not only that, but the whole premise was you don't have to be taught. Like, you can figure it out yourself. And that was great for me, who did not want to be taught by anyone anyways and wanted access to a - like, a space, a world, a literal - I mean, I put my first plays on in a punk club, in 924 Gilman, a sort of seminal all-ages punk club in Berkeley. And that was so great. Honestly, I would wish that on any teenager to have the freedom to do something outside of school that - while punk seems sort of lawless, it actually was a structure. You know, it did formalize what I was doing.
GROSS: You actually moved to Portland to be part of the riot grrrl scene.
JULY: Well, I moved to Portland to be with my girlfriend at the time, and riot grrrl kind of had just happened. I'd say I sort of missed it slightly. But certainly, the - like, the feminist underpinning was all there.
GROSS: One of the jobs that you had early on while trying to support yourself, I guess, while you were doing your art was working at a peep show. How and why did you get that job?
JULY: Initially - let's see. My girlfriend and I broke up. She moved out. We had to cover her rent, and I remember my friend at the time like, how are we going to get this money really quickly, you know, that we were missing? And she said, well, one of us is going to have to strip, and it can't be me because I have glasses. And I was like, OK. And so initially, it was this club that I think is still there called Mary's and - in Portland. But then I've had these kind of lifelong problems with my eyes, so - and there was smoking in the bars back then. So I couldn't really handle the smoke. So that's why I moved to the peep shows, which is just, like, a box. You're not really sharing air with anyone.
GROSS: And you're separated by glass, right?
JULY: Yeah.
GROSS: What did you learn doing that about sexuality or about men, about yourself, about what it means to get really turned on looking at somebody who's basically on exhibit behind glass?
JULY: Yeah, I mean, my main goal was to make as, you know, much money - it still wasn't that much, but to make this amount of money in a short time so I could work on my - you know, what ended up being, like, my first book of short stories, my first feature film. You know, I needed the time was how I was thinking about it. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't recommend that job to my child or anyone else's child, but on the other hand, like, most jobs at that age are not so great.
GROSS: Were you able to see the peep show as a form of performance?
JULY: No. No, I don't think - I thought of it as my job, my not-great job that was - I think when I quit that job, I started working unlocking car doors for a company called Pop-A-Lock. You know, when you lock your key in your car - and that doesn't happen so much anymore. And that job really - I really hated because I had a beeper, and, like, I could be beeped in the middle of the night to, like, have to go unlock someone's car, which I was - you know, I'd been trained, but I always managed to get it open. But sometimes it took, like, a while.
GROSS: I have one more peep show question. So when men were staring at you and telling you their sexual fantasies, did you find it at all flattering or really creepy? Like, what was your experience of that watching them? Like, they're there to watch you, but you're watching them.
JULY: I mean, at the time, like, for some context, like, I was lesbian. I had, like, very, I think, like, bleached out, short hair, and I would wear a wig that was, like, my normal, pretty girl wig that was, like, longer brown hair. And so the whole thing was like, I am so far from this. You have no idea. Like, I'm - yeah. So it just kind of...
GROSS: Like, I don't know if even me (ph)...
JULY: Like...
GROSS: You think you're looking at me. You're not - that kind of thing.
JULY: Yeah. Just, like - yeah. And I could see exactly how - like, I remember at the - at Mary's knowing that there was, like - that there was a kind of guy - like, if I put on - what's the song? Like, (singing) in your eyes, the light, the heat - like, what is that - Genesis or something?
GROSS: I don't know.
JULY: "In Your Eyes," I think it's called - that that would really just be like, oh, my God. Like, this song, which is so great, and this girl - you know, like, that that would sort of generate this, like, man feeling. And then there was another song, "Brown Eyed Girl." You know that song? Like...
GROSS: That's Van Morrison. Yeah.
JULY: Yeah. Even though I don't have brown eyes - that it, like, cultivated a feeling of, like, just a brown-eyed girl up here, you know, like, girl-next-door kind of feeling and that that was another thing that the customers liked to feel, you know - was kind of, like, a homey feeling. So I think - but, you know, these things aren't so different than life itself - like, noticing qualities in the rest of life, which I was doing all the time anyways. I mean, like, in my first collection of short stories, I think there's only one story that has a peep show in it. So the amount of noticing I was doing at that - in my 20s was across the board, and most of what I was noticing was not in that club...
GROSS: Right.
JULY: ...Or in Mr. Peeps.
GROSS: What were some of the conversations that you know about about your book that you found most interesting? Like, what were some of the themes that you're glad your book provoked - you know, the themes and the conversations?
JULY: I mean, the things that make me most happy to read are, like, women who, while they were reading the book, felt kind of exposed. Like, oh, no, this is, like, my whole inner life exposed here in this book. And, you know, I've had people tell me that, like, they were reading it on the plane, and they felt like they, at a certain point, had to put it away not because of the sexual content but because, like, they were sitting next to their husband, and it was all their true feelings that they weren't saying.
And that's always kind of astonishing to me. Like, oh, writing can do that. Like, I get a lot of messages from older women who say like, oh, this all happened to me. My "All Fours" time was 20 years ago, but I'm stunned to realize that I wasn't alone. I thought I was uniquely crazy or irresponsible or something. And so they're just - it's, like, a reframing of their life to have the community from the book.
GROSS: Well, I look forward to your next book. Thank you so much for being on our show.
JULY: Thank you so much, Terry.
GROSS: Miranda July's latest novel is called "All Fours." This is FRESH AIR.
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