Miranda July - All fours (2024)

"Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” Jordi said, “but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

Miranda July – 

This is an unusual novel, it's about desire, artistic and emotional freedom, deep relationships, ageing and modern family life.

I very much liked it, I loved parts of it, but I  kind of didn't love the whole. I think it is an important novel. The title gives the idea that it is a sex novel, but it explores way more.

The main character is a woman in the second half of her forties. She is married to Harris, a nice, reliable guy, with whom she has a non binary child. She is a medium successful/known artist and Harris is in the music business, they have a nice home and don't have to work crazy hours.

She is trying to manage family life and keep pursuing her interests in arts, performance and beauty in her garage studio. We don't really get to know a lot about her artistic projects, but she has an agent and gets appointments with pop stars in the arts and performance world.

She has a work trip to NY coming up and randomly decides to drive from LA instead of flying. She thinks about enjoying this time away from family life, have an adventure. She loves her family over everything but knows that her work is essential for her mental health, allowing her to be a better mother.

Harris, her husband comes up with Drivers and Parkers as a metaphor for people who either are very stable and reliable but kind of boring or very good in special, but exceptional, precise or creative tasks. Clearly he is a Driver and she a Parker. I liked this thought experiment.

"Well, in life there are Parkers and there are Drivers,” he began. “Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don’t need applause for every little thing—they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough. This kind of person can do cross-country drives

Parkers, on the other hand”—and he looked at me—“need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause. ‘Bravo,’ someone might say after they fit the car into an especially tight spot"

She goes for her Drive but ends up having a Parking experience. So she ends up staying in Monrovia, in a cheap motel, half an hour drive from home in LA, where she spontaneously refurbishes the room in ancient French decor, with 20 000 dollars she just earned. 

She meets this young man called Davey, who is the reason she stopped her trip. He works at a Hertz auto rental but is a passionate dancer.

She falls in love head over heals with him, they seem to be soulmates, he knows who she is. He too, is married, so they do everything together except having sex. Knowing that eventually they have to separate, they spent every day as if it was the last.

The best of all in this story is the protagonist's best friend Jordi who is always there, available, and with the right words of advice. 

--- stop here if you don't want to read spoilers----

When she goes back to her family she doesn't tell them she didn't go to NY. Readapting to family life is hard for her, she even records a dancing performance for Davey and puts it on Instagram, but he doesn't respond.

She then randomly finds out she is perimenopausal, which makes her Google her symptoms and thinking about how to manage this new epoch in her life. She starts to work out and take care of her body, always thinking about Davey. It troubles her that she doesn't have this romantic exaltation with her husband, because she loves him very deeply especially as they went through the severe health issues of their newborn together, but it is a different kind of love. The childbirth trauma left her with serious flashbacks which come up even years later.

After very much debating with herself she feels she needs fill in the need for living out her sexual desires before hormones and libido vanish. For her mental and physical health and peace of mind. She then happens to find a female lover who kind of also meets that need.

You could say she has three key sexual experiences before starting to come to term with this crisis the perimenopause caused to her. She comes to an arrangement with her husband who get himself a lover as well, they affirm to each other to keep married and even talk to their child about their new special friends. 

The novel clearly has some autobiographic elements, Miranda July's best friend is a sculptor as Jordi in the book. She has a non binary child. She is a filmmaker, author and performance artist. I think I will read more by her even though I feel I'm a very different kind of person, more of the Driver's kind, not at all interested in dancing or fancy designer pop stars.

Somehow spoons are a recurring symbol of taking care of someone, in this novel. 

I think it's cool how contemporary novels treat modern marriages, normalizing separate bedrooms and having partner to raise the child and lovers on the side. And yes, even in 2025 female desire and menopause are not enough talked about publicly. 

.

Ultimately, there's not so much an ending or a closure to the novel, although she does come to manage her symptoms and emotions with the right conversations with her woman friends who are going through the same. A couple of years later she even meets Davey again.

It's a smart novel. I personally think I would have liked it more if we would have known more about her work. She comes over as a but posh. But I definitely can imagine being in her shoes and feel the tension that built up and the emotional and moral dilemma.

Claire Keegan - Foster (2010)

 

Foster is a short novella, which can be read in one sitting, almost like a short story, set in rural Ireland some decades ago. The writer Claire Keegan has become more internationally known as the author of the novel Small things like these. In Foster she picks up a similar topic, that of children rejected by their families for one reason or another, and fostered by grand-hearted others, it is very moving.

She writes this immersive fiction that in very few pages makes it possible for the reader to be there, to see and smell and hear the story. Foster is written from a child's perspective. The girl is send to spend the summer with a better-off family, the Kinsellas, while her mother gives birth to another sibling. It is not clear if they are related as her aunt and uncle or not.

While in the beginning everything is a bit strange for her. No one tells her exactly how long she is going to stay there, if she has to work, or if there are other children. The bathwater is as hot as she has never had it, people come over at night to play cards and laugh. She just tries to behave her best, but soon she settles in and develops a very special relation with the foster Dad and also with the foster Mom, they cook together, buy clothes, go fetch the post, walk on the beach and generally respect each other.

She soon discovers the secret of the family which is not so much a secret but a tragedy they kept from her in the beginning, which is that the Kinsellas have lost their own son in a terrible accident which explains the children's clothes and wallpapers in her room. In the end of the summer she has to say goodbye and return home for a new school year, probably keeping what happened at the Kinsellas a secret to her own family, it would be difficult to put in words.

The great thing about the novel is as I said, the social and emotional atmosphere which soaks you in, you can see the neighbours gossiping, imagine walking down the fields to the well, or pulling the vegetables out of the garden beds.

Megan Nolan - Acts of Desperation (2010)

 

Acts of Desperation is a novel about a women with self-destructive tendencies, in a very dysfunctional relationship with a boy she falls in love with. Set in Dublin, in the 2010s with some reflections back from the future, when the main character is in Athens some years later. It has sharp short chapters, it's a quick and intense read. She explores all the phases of this relationship, how it starts as almost too good to be true, and eventually tips to becoming toxic. Written in first person, the unnamed protagonist falls in love with the handsome Ciaran, who we perceive pretty soon as a very “bad” person, he is controlling and cold and immature and even gets violent, he clearly has some unresolved issues even if he manages to hide them pretty well. She moves in with him, tries to make him love her even though it becomes clear that he is still in love with his ex. All the while we understand that both of them are making mistakes, behaving disrespectfully and abusing confidence, until it gets to a point when the reader just wants her to stop it.

The female character is interesting, romantic love “is her religion”, however she is very conscientious and ironic about her compulsions, she drinks too much, and basically she gets off on being humiliated even as she knows that's wrong on a deep lever, lack of self worth.

“If I could disregard myself first, then what did it matter if he did too?”

They live in Dublin, and her social life is close to the literary milieu, the novel is basically ticking all the Sally Rooney boxes. Which I think is great, I don't feel the novel was repeating patterns, she got her own voice through.

The author Megan Nolan writes for a living, essays and columns. It shows that she has a lot of experience for her age – it just feels crazy that nowadays authors can be younger than me, and excels in expressing nuances. Why am I reading so many Irish authors at the moment? I don't know, I guess it has to do with the algorithm of online bookshop recommendations and the taste of my favourite Youtube book reviewers. I even learned that there is already a name for this genre (it's early to call it a genre, in my opinion), it's Millenial Women Fiction (contemporary novels like My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and books by Sally Rooney, to name the most popular, featuring millennial life and relationships with often a very self conscious protagonist). 

In Acts of Desperation Megan Nolan reflects on the power of men, in general, it made me actually wanna date girls, but well, not if the girls were like her protagonist. It's a a study about abuse in relationships, even sexual violence, but also about self hate and psychological abuse.

“The act of unwanted sex was not was angered me the most, but rather the tedious reminder that men can often do whatever they want and that some of them will.”

“Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids.”

For a novel of my taste it is a bit too simple structured narrative wise, but I enjoyed it nevertheless and I do recommend it. The challenge for me as a reader with this novel was maybe a personal one, even though we read to experience situations and character traits that are not our own, for the pleasure of empathy and curiosity, it's usually easier if we share certain things with the characters. In this case the main character is literally everything I'm not. It's difficult to explain but I'm kind of glad I read it, I think it's part of an important public discourse to be had.