is a literature scholar AND director of a women’s and gender studies program. So when she reached out about loving this book and leading a discussion with us I was like, YES PLEASE! Emily also writes a badass Substack called Hot Feminism about LGBTQ and women's rights in the South. It’s delightful and I highly recommend giving it a follow here. I’ll link Emily’s full bio and Substack below.
A quick reminder that we are now discussing the book in its entirety, so spoilers may abound! I’m excited to talk about the whole book, and as always THANK YOU for being wonderful discussion partners. I’ll say it again: This is my favorite book club I’ve been in! I will also send out a poll to see if we want to do a final Zoom call and talk about EVERYTHING this book has brought up for us.
Reading this novel has been such a singular experience, as a 45 year old mom of a second grader and kindergartener, and such a relief to see my lived reality reflected and refracted in art. Critics have called it the first great perimenopausal novel, and it’s shocking but not surprising that we haven’t seen more of this transitional time for women represented in art and literature.
I love that the novel goes beyond midlife crisis to use sexual relationships and the mother/child relationship to think about women’s artistic identity. The relationship with Davey is never about sex (literally, they never have it) and although the encounters are erotically charged, I’d argue that the connection only becomes established once she sees him as a dancer. The final scene of the novel when she attends his dance in New York is the embodiment of what she describes when she thinks about middle age or perimenopause: “If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling” (85). Davey rises, rises, rises, but the audience knows he will fall, and the performance will be over, but they experience the ecstasy together, and the narrator reflects that having Davey isn’t the thing, but this art, this dance, that infuses everything with meaning and joy, this is the thing, this is what it all is for, despite endings and death.
In addition to thinking about this novel as a reflection on women artists, we might also consider:
The painting that she shoves under the bed in the hotel room--that she thought represented nothing but by the end she thinks it might be a woman guarding a cave. What does the cave represent? Why is it important that she reconsiders the painting after her meeting with Arkanda?
How is the novel a meditation on death? Especially the way she tries to deal with the trauma of Sam’s birth and experiencing FMH. There are also the midlife suicides of both her grandmother and aunt, who visit her again at the end during her vertigo.
What about the meaning of the title? Most obviously a reference to a sex position, but it also refers to the four years it took her to write the book. I’m wondering how it connects sex and writing, sex and storytelling (thinking especially about her distinction between mind-rooted and body-rooted desire).
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Emily Taylor is associate professor of World Literature and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and has published essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, The Southern Quarterly, Caribbean Literature in Transition, and Ms. Magazine. She writes Hot Feminism: Letters from South Carolina on Substack.
Thank you so much for these amazing questions. The scene with Davey’s performance at the end really broke through my skepticism about the character. It was a time when she seemed to see someone else authentically and also have a moment of genuine reflection on herself. I also wondered about the stories of suicide. What do folks think about her family mental health (including her dad’s) or her thoughts about her own mental health? The character is telling us she comes from a lineage of suffering — her own experience of childbirth has this as well — and I think she sees the precarity of life.
One thing that struck me was how she described severe depression as something ordinary or even banal, like she was numb to it or maybe couldn’t fully understand it, even as she gets closer to the ages her grandmother and aunt died. It’s sort of there in the background the entire time, maybe what drives her to create the room in the first place?
“If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling”
I also think about this quote from the book all the time--on my end more how I can feel the "fall" part start to happen as I'm in my 40's and somehow naming that feels comforting in a way? Like it helps me make peace with it in a way?
I'm glad you mentioned the ending of the book bc I loved it!! I love dance so much and grew up with dance training, and I find the dance scenes in the book sublime. Dance is a language of bodies that is beyond words and that seems so powerful in the context of the book, which is so bodily. One topic of discussion we've had here is whether there is a "transformation" for the character and in the end I felt there really was. She walks out of the dance and into the city as a new woman entering a new phase of life--embracing her ageing, her queerness, her need for connection, her desire. Curious to see what others thought!
Yeah other than not really getting the cave painting metaphor I really liked the ending! I loved that Arkanda came back in the end and also in general thought it was brilliant the way she would drop things lightly throughout the book and then later they would come in and play a major role. Like the dog!
The dog! And the telephotographer!! I had forgotten all about it and when I remembered she started the book w that little vignette and just dropped it there I was like, this is some brilliant writing. Like just little stories within stories that come back to build into a meaningful narrative. Brilliant.
I’m not sure I totally get the painting thing either, tbh! @emily Taylor can you help us here? We could use a lit prof’s take 😅
Okay so I am curious about what people think of the title. I mean yes, doggie style comes to mind right away :) But also doesn’t Jordi bring it up in regards to stability? Something about it being the most stable position or something. It seems to speak to both being prone and vulnerable “down on all fours” as well as stability.
As far as selling books it certainly got my attention. Good sexy title for a perimenopause book!
Yes! And that was so powerful to me! It was Jordi’s sculpture that was a woman on all fours and while it initially strikes you as vulnerable, Jordi points out that it’s the most stable position. You can’t knock someone down when they’re on all fours! Loved that. Sometimes when you’re feeling the most revealed, you have the most strength?
Yes! I was just thinking I forgot to include the sculptures when I mentioned the other art forms. Jordi is so important in the story… the only person the narrator can fully be herself with, so maybe the stability of the sculpture is also a reference to the stability of their relationship?
I also want to thank Emily for treating this book like the piece of art that it is. I loved that you framed this whole discussion around the piece as art and the writer as an artist. Critics titling it as "the first great perimenopausal novel" irked me a bit, though now i do see why acknowledging the need to include women's experience more in art, including perimenopause, is beneficial. But also...it's just a great novel! Period. it's kind of like "chick lit" instead of just...storytelling. I hate to see this book fall into the "pretty good, for a girl" trap.
Like Roth's books are not "the great male midlife crisis novels" --they are just deemed great literature! So is this and better, imo.
I don’t know. I have no need for men to read and appreciate this book. This book feels like it is for us, the middle aged women, the ones who have been there and relate. I almost don’t want men to read it, like it is ours, keep out mother fuckers. That may just be me and the stage I’m in in my life 😌
Jordi's art work only comes into focus near the end of the book when O.N. actually sees what Jordi has been working on for a very long time.
"Is it new?" she asks.
"What do you mean?"
"Have I seen this one before?"
"It's been here for months. You've seen it at every stage."
The green marble figure of a headless woman on all fours is described.
Jordi says, "Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable...but it is actually the most stable position. Like a table. It's hard to be knocked over when you're on all fours."
Jordi's figure on all fours has been in plain sight all along but completely unseen. Her fine artwork has been as unacknowledged as the mass produced motel painting that has been present all along in the remodeled room but hidden from view under the bed, dismissed as "so blandly abstract it was of nothing at all."
Davey, and then later Arkana, each find something interesting in the motel painting, but O.N. closes down any meaningful conversation about it.
The act of seeing is important to O.N. but she exhibits tunnel vision, where she focuses narrowly on certain things and misses other things entirely.
Who is stable in these scenarios and who is vulnerable?
Maybe her friend Jordi isn't too good to be true after all. Maybe Jordi (in her "..unimaginative...boring.." relationship) is using Our Narrator's exploits as inspiration for her own work. A mindless, unthinking body in a vulnerable but stable position, unconcerned with the past baggage or future consequences, might not be an inaccurate description of Our Narrator as she interacts with Davey and Audra and Kris, as well as Harris and Sam.
These conflicted scenes, along with the ecstatic dancing ones make me wonder who exactly the creation of art is for? The unseeing, dismissively gazing and fickle art consumers (remember how O.N. reacted to Davey's first dance?), or the artist themself, who gains a certain immortality with their work in stone/paint/word/memory that survives long past the aging body and death?
Our Narrator only becomes comfortable with herself after she has started working on her own project again, turning the unpredictable, unseeable, unknowable events of her life into a piece of art that is totally within her control.
Wow! I love your take here, Emily, and the places you're pointing us towards for exploration. Your prompt made me realize that I don't remember the end of the book at all! I read it when it first came out (actually listened on Spotify). But just before this book club discussion started I bought the hard copy and started rereading. I was surprised that I actually remembered so much. I haven't reread the last few chapters yet though. Reading Emily's post here I realize I do not remember many things - I don't remember anything about the painting under the bed and more importantly I did not remember that she saw Davey's dance in person! I wonder what it says about me that I just blocked out a lot of the later part of this book. I remember it ending and feeling like I loved it. Like I thought it was truly groundbreaking and necessary and so relatable. I guess I haven't processed all the plot points though. Must go back and finish rereading to the very end. Thanks for this prompt!
Thanks! I reread the book for this book club and, same! I caught so many things I glossed over before. I think the representation of dance is so interesting, because as an art form it is an entirely different language, as Lane mentioned. I love how many different forms of art she includes in the novel (reflects how July herself is a director, actor, writer, dancer, amazing). Including different forms of art also intensifies our engagement with interpretation and meaning. Critics often wrestle with the difficulty of interpreting visual art, music or dance using words (famous saying being "writing about music is like dancing about architecture"). I like how her representation of the painting, the dancing, and her own performance art video (that Harris hates, beginning of the end?!) forces the reader to think about how we create meaning, and how we receive (or don't) the messages from art.
Okay so this might just be me…but I really didn’t get the painting of the woman w the cave thing. Like I felt like it was supposed to be this important metaphor but it just wasn’t landing and in the Arkanda chapter I tried to wrap my head around it for a second but was like meh… and moved on 😅
Omg no one ever asks lit professors to help, this is making my day! So describing a visual work of art in a written work is an example of ekphrasis (ekprastic poems prob most well known, like Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn"). Ekphrasis is an ancient device, appears in Homer, and is most closely tied to the idea of conjuring or seeing, that the words make the visual image literally appear. It's also been used in works like The Picture of Dorian Gray, among many others, to reflect the main characters' experiences and journeys.
I'd say that's what's going on here--that the painting is about the narrator's journey to fully embracing her womanhood in middle age and forward. At first she doesn't see the image at all, ie doesn't see herself. Through her relationships with Davey and Arkanda, who both are able to see what she cannot, she is able to fully realize both her identity as an artist and as a woman. I pulled all the quotes about the painting here, in case anyone wants to write a paper about it :).
The first mention of the painting:
“Above the bed there was a greenish-gray painting so blandly abstract it was of nothing at all. I lifted it off its clip and slid it under the bed with the original bedspread” (45).
Davey discovers the painting under the bed when they’re saying goodbye:
“‘It’s one of those pictures that’s of nothing, so it won’t offend anyone. I think they’re made especially for motel rooms and doctors’ offices.’
He stared at it. ‘It’s a woman. See?’ He outlined a gray figure with his finger. ‘She’s walking into the woods or some kind of cave or…’
Why were we wasting our precious time on this? I slid it back under the bed.” (132-133)
When she meets Arkanda:
“‘You think this is abstract?’ she said… ‘Or is that a figure?’… ‘It’s a woman at the entrance to a cave that’s sealed up. She can never go back in so she’s just hovering near the entrance for the rest of her life, mourning.’
‘Mourning, hmmm.’ She traced the traced the darkest area, the cave, with a long, lavender nail. ‘She does seem very… set. She’s not going anywhere.’” (304)
And then when Arkanda is leaving:
“‘Maybe she’s guarding it. That’s why she’s not going anywhere.’
I turned and looked at the figure in the painting. Suddenly it was impossible not to see how straight up and down she was, like the guards in front of Buckingham Palace or some other very important, exquisite—almost sacred—place.
Motherfucker, I whispered. I was referring to life itself. Always surprising you, always with the curveballs. Room 321 was the cave and I was its guard. I had made a goddamn womb and I had oneness in it every week. With myself, with God, with my friends and sometimes lovers. And I didn’t own it. Because you don’t. Own anything, not even your onw womb, your own body. It all goes. But every Wednesday I could get back in there, with or without lust, and be—what was the word? Free.” (309-310)
Ah so reading this again, it’s as though the room she created is her “freedom” and she’s guarding it fiercely?
It’s still not my favorite part of the book but this makes much more sense now. And also does seem to be the author pointing to a clear “transformation” for the character.
Re: death I also really picked up on the FMH stuff and flashbacks. I think I wrote in a previous post about a quote from Esther Perel, something along the lines of “the erotic is the antidote for death” and that came to mind for me while reading this book.
The near-death and death in the book served as a nice foil for her wanting to be ALIVE . And not alive in the death field!
I love this reading about the discussions of death/near death — a foil for how much she sought to be alive. This makes a lot of sense to me. Her conversation with Arkana was another highlight for me. I’m not remembering the refrain they repeated but I remember thinking it read like a call and response/healing mantra — trying to make sense of this horrific thing, and building up energy and lifeforce to help do that.
This part made me burst into tears. I felt like it was so powerful and works for a mantra for any trauma that has happened to you. You want someone to see the trauma, sit with you and acknowledge it shouldn’t have happened. It is especially powerful that person has faced a similar trauma. This part of the book floored me.
I have a multi-paragraph, wandering response about the room she made in my Notes app-- the room is the dream, for me (and I'll spare you the essay, but it made a great journal prompt!). Thank you for the book club, and for the impetus to read the book. It's been nothing short of enlightening.
ah, Emily, thank you so much for going back and listing all the instances of the painting. I might write a paper about it, :). Also, as several here have mentioned there's more that becomes apparent on the second read, I think I need to read it again to fully observe what's happening in the book, love the description of it as a work of art.
I’m reading the book again and can’t help notice how often she talks about wanting to be her true self, or her real self and how that won’t, or doesn’t happen around her family. She says she can be her real self when she’s with Jordi and alone in 321. Recently a friend asked me who I’m my most authentic self with and I *think* it’s my husband? But what does that really mean? The person you’re most relaxed with? The person you feel safest around? Does anyone mind that I’m throwing this question out there?? Thanks for helping me digest!!!
My reflections on the romantic-fantasy novel All Fours by Miranda July have been slow in coming because I found the book deeply discomfiting. I loathed the main character while totally relating to her—or at least recognizing a past version of myself in her—and that realization was a bit sickening. The book has been haunting me, and the longer I thought about the ways in which I connected with the story, the queasier I felt. I’m hoping writing it out helps me to move on.
I went into the book blind, picking up the audiobook from libro.fm because this Substack was doing a book-club discussion on it. Having never heard of Miranda July, her description of the main character as a “famous-adjacent,” multi-media artist seemed odd and pretentious. I now realize the unnamed protagonist is a semi-autobiographical character based on July herself, who is, apparently, a semi-celebrity, multi-media artist. She has made films, acted, and written books, and she uses her own distinctively hoarse voice to narrate her audiobooks, as well.
The book focuses on this “artist’s” marital discontent. (I have artist in quotation marks because the character in the book never works on her art, thinks about her art, nor tells us what art she produced in the past.) She seems fairly happily married to her husband Harris, a stable, reliable guy who suffered with her through the near-death of their infant, who was stillborn but revived and eventually made well. They still have hot sex, though getting into it is a bit of a job, and they are excellent, committed co-parents to their non-binary child, Sam. Then the protagonist decides to take what she claims will be a creatively enriching, cross-country journey by herself, about which Harris is totally supportive and encouraging.
Instead of driving from L.A. to New York, though, O.N. (our narrator), who is 45, stops an hour outside L.A. in a small town and checks into a cheap motel, where she proceeds to have an almost-affair with a young guy who works behind the Hertz rental-car counter. When she first starts thinking about this young man, she is sure she is too old for him, though she imagines he might have found her attractive just a few years earlier. The character is consumed with thoughts of her own desirability, of how she is aging out of being fuckable (please see: this hilarious sketch on women aging out of being fuckable). O.N. loves her child dearly, yet nearly all of her waking thoughts are about sex, her crushes, her compulsive masturbating, and her body. (She is made even less likeable by having a bottomless expense account and time to work out obsessively with a personal trainer as soon as she notices her ass is falling.)
I am ashamed to say I, too, was once completely obsessed with my looks, consumed by fear that my sexiness was waning as I aged, convinced the flirting I did in a dance club might be the last chance I ever had to flirt with hot, young people. For me, these ridiculous thoughts took over my brain when I was still in my 30s, but the result was the same: I blew up my own life, betrayed my supportive, encouraging husband, and used up an absurd amount of my creative energy lost in a fantasy world. I made videos of myself and photographed myself to prove to myself I was still hot; I wrote reams of erotica that I never sent anywhere because it was too anti-feminist, and I talked about sex in chat rooms before talking about sex online was a thing. Like the protagonist, I had almost-affairs with unworthy, young guys; these involved a lot of intense gazing, dancing, almost touching, nearly kissing, etc., and sometimes actual making out. Also like the protagonist, I kept imagining I was in love every time I was in lust. I imagined these encounters made me feel alive, when in reality they merely allowed me to be distracted all the time, as O.N. is. I asked my husband to consider having an open marriage, but there my story diverges: he said no, while Harris says yes.
This is where the story really verges into fantasyland, as O.N. and Harris tell little Sam that they are now going to be romantic with other people and not with each other but are still going to stay married, and then they proceed to do exactly that with no apparent negative consequences to their home life or Sam’s charmed childhood.
In reality, my own bright, optimistic, secure children were broken when my husband and I started talking about splitting up. The end of our marriage was the end of their innocence, and on looking back at their childhoods, I can see, for my son in particular, that his entire life was a before and after of when our marital issues were revealed to him. At 10, my son sobbed, “Isn’t our love enough for you?” and I told him that no, it wasn’t. The thought of this can still drop me to my knees with regret.
Of course, all of my guilt over the choices I made is compounded exponentially by the fact that my son became addicted to hard drugs at 23 and died of an overdose when he was 26. I understand plenty of children survive their parents’ divorce without being irreparably shattered, but because my son did not, there is no way for me to avoid feeling tremendous shame over how I managed my life during the end of my marriage. Although I really was a wonderful, devoted mother, when my children were young and needy, innocent and clingy, desiring nothing more than more time with me, I was often lost in a haze of sexual fantasies or stealing time to sneak off and be with someone (in person or online) who was not part of our family. (Ouch! The truth of that is so awful!) Reading an entire novel in which these consumptive, unhealthy obsessions lead merely to an easy-breezy life of pleasure and play (and, eventually, to the artist writing a book about it all) is galling in the extreme.
I’ve read a lot of reviews of the book, including the online conversation between smart, thoughtful women taking place in the Matriarchy Report chatroom, and I appreciate that for many women this novel is empowering, demonstrating how a woman can seize control of her life, articulate her own desires, create a room of her own, and manifest everything she wants. The novel has also been pitched as a book about perimenopause and how it physically drives women to have this kind of midlife crisis. But for obvious reasons, I didn’t read it that way.
It’s convenient that the novel ends while the protagonist’s child is still young. We don’t have to see the child develop emotional problems in adolescence that trace back to the mother shattering the child’s belief in love, fidelity, and family.
Other analyses I’ve seen talk about how motherhood itself with its intense physical and emotional demands may be what drives women to compulsively fantasize and/or act out. This makes sense to me; when one is responsible 24/7 for the life or death of a dependent human, fantasy is often the only release one can find. But this idea is poorly explored in this book, which demonstrates no natural consequences, which is why I call it a fantasy novel.
In sum, All Fours is about a mom in her 40s foolishly imagining she is losing her sex appeal (just as I did in my 30s, though this seems absurd to me now that I’m 58 and still feeling sexy) who feels compelled to act out her every sexual impulse while she still can, which leads her to more art and a happier, more fulfilled life. She is lonely and desperate to be fully seen and loved, yet the man she has at home seeing and loving her is dismissed as inadequate with little explanation. The book misses the opportunity to explore how the character’s childhood trauma and family history of suicides (another connection point I had) may have led her to blow up her stable home life in adulthood so she could recreate the chaos and drama that felt more familiar to her. I am also not sure if the author was saying that she is a freak in her ravenous desires (which means so was I) or if she is saying that many women feel this way, which seems to be the larger takeaway readers are having. In this, I suppose, I can take some comfort, as I definitely thought I was an anomaly in how I thought and behaved back then, and this book suggests otherwise.
Here's my review of the book. I had a very strong reaction to this novel, different from what many of you wrote, and I'd love to talk about it with all of you. Thanks for reading and letting me know your thoughts.
Thank you so much for these amazing questions. The scene with Davey’s performance at the end really broke through my skepticism about the character. It was a time when she seemed to see someone else authentically and also have a moment of genuine reflection on herself. I also wondered about the stories of suicide. What do folks think about her family mental health (including her dad’s) or her thoughts about her own mental health? The character is telling us she comes from a lineage of suffering — her own experience of childbirth has this as well — and I think she sees the precarity of life.
One thing that struck me was how she described severe depression as something ordinary or even banal, like she was numb to it or maybe couldn’t fully understand it, even as she gets closer to the ages her grandmother and aunt died. It’s sort of there in the background the entire time, maybe what drives her to create the room in the first place?
“If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling”
I also think about this quote from the book all the time--on my end more how I can feel the "fall" part start to happen as I'm in my 40's and somehow naming that feels comforting in a way? Like it helps me make peace with it in a way?
I'm glad you mentioned the ending of the book bc I loved it!! I love dance so much and grew up with dance training, and I find the dance scenes in the book sublime. Dance is a language of bodies that is beyond words and that seems so powerful in the context of the book, which is so bodily. One topic of discussion we've had here is whether there is a "transformation" for the character and in the end I felt there really was. She walks out of the dance and into the city as a new woman entering a new phase of life--embracing her ageing, her queerness, her need for connection, her desire. Curious to see what others thought!
Yeah other than not really getting the cave painting metaphor I really liked the ending! I loved that Arkanda came back in the end and also in general thought it was brilliant the way she would drop things lightly throughout the book and then later they would come in and play a major role. Like the dog!
The dog is so interesting... the grooming scene reminds me of her earlier work and even the tampon scene--she is not afraid to use abject details!
Yes! The line bw disgust and intimacy is so thin!
Or *line rather :)
The dog! And the telephotographer!! I had forgotten all about it and when I remembered she started the book w that little vignette and just dropped it there I was like, this is some brilliant writing. Like just little stories within stories that come back to build into a meaningful narrative. Brilliant.
I’m not sure I totally get the painting thing either, tbh! @emily Taylor can you help us here? We could use a lit prof’s take 😅
Okay so I am curious about what people think of the title. I mean yes, doggie style comes to mind right away :) But also doesn’t Jordi bring it up in regards to stability? Something about it being the most stable position or something. It seems to speak to both being prone and vulnerable “down on all fours” as well as stability.
As far as selling books it certainly got my attention. Good sexy title for a perimenopause book!
Yes! And that was so powerful to me! It was Jordi’s sculpture that was a woman on all fours and while it initially strikes you as vulnerable, Jordi points out that it’s the most stable position. You can’t knock someone down when they’re on all fours! Loved that. Sometimes when you’re feeling the most revealed, you have the most strength?
Yes! I was just thinking I forgot to include the sculptures when I mentioned the other art forms. Jordi is so important in the story… the only person the narrator can fully be herself with, so maybe the stability of the sculpture is also a reference to the stability of their relationship?
Oh I love this! The power of female friendships!
Oooh I like this and it def speaks to the work of art that is the book itself!!
I also want to thank Emily for treating this book like the piece of art that it is. I loved that you framed this whole discussion around the piece as art and the writer as an artist. Critics titling it as "the first great perimenopausal novel" irked me a bit, though now i do see why acknowledging the need to include women's experience more in art, including perimenopause, is beneficial. But also...it's just a great novel! Period. it's kind of like "chick lit" instead of just...storytelling. I hate to see this book fall into the "pretty good, for a girl" trap.
Like Roth's books are not "the great male midlife crisis novels" --they are just deemed great literature! So is this and better, imo.
I don’t know. I have no need for men to read and appreciate this book. This book feels like it is for us, the middle aged women, the ones who have been there and relate. I almost don’t want men to read it, like it is ours, keep out mother fuckers. That may just be me and the stage I’m in in my life 😌
Agree, they have enough books for them!
Jordi's art work only comes into focus near the end of the book when O.N. actually sees what Jordi has been working on for a very long time.
"Is it new?" she asks.
"What do you mean?"
"Have I seen this one before?"
"It's been here for months. You've seen it at every stage."
The green marble figure of a headless woman on all fours is described.
Jordi says, "Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable...but it is actually the most stable position. Like a table. It's hard to be knocked over when you're on all fours."
Jordi's figure on all fours has been in plain sight all along but completely unseen. Her fine artwork has been as unacknowledged as the mass produced motel painting that has been present all along in the remodeled room but hidden from view under the bed, dismissed as "so blandly abstract it was of nothing at all."
Davey, and then later Arkana, each find something interesting in the motel painting, but O.N. closes down any meaningful conversation about it.
The act of seeing is important to O.N. but she exhibits tunnel vision, where she focuses narrowly on certain things and misses other things entirely.
Who is stable in these scenarios and who is vulnerable?
Maybe her friend Jordi isn't too good to be true after all. Maybe Jordi (in her "..unimaginative...boring.." relationship) is using Our Narrator's exploits as inspiration for her own work. A mindless, unthinking body in a vulnerable but stable position, unconcerned with the past baggage or future consequences, might not be an inaccurate description of Our Narrator as she interacts with Davey and Audra and Kris, as well as Harris and Sam.
These conflicted scenes, along with the ecstatic dancing ones make me wonder who exactly the creation of art is for? The unseeing, dismissively gazing and fickle art consumers (remember how O.N. reacted to Davey's first dance?), or the artist themself, who gains a certain immortality with their work in stone/paint/word/memory that survives long past the aging body and death?
Our Narrator only becomes comfortable with herself after she has started working on her own project again, turning the unpredictable, unseeable, unknowable events of her life into a piece of art that is totally within her control.
Wow I really love this!!
Wow! I love your take here, Emily, and the places you're pointing us towards for exploration. Your prompt made me realize that I don't remember the end of the book at all! I read it when it first came out (actually listened on Spotify). But just before this book club discussion started I bought the hard copy and started rereading. I was surprised that I actually remembered so much. I haven't reread the last few chapters yet though. Reading Emily's post here I realize I do not remember many things - I don't remember anything about the painting under the bed and more importantly I did not remember that she saw Davey's dance in person! I wonder what it says about me that I just blocked out a lot of the later part of this book. I remember it ending and feeling like I loved it. Like I thought it was truly groundbreaking and necessary and so relatable. I guess I haven't processed all the plot points though. Must go back and finish rereading to the very end. Thanks for this prompt!
Thanks! I reread the book for this book club and, same! I caught so many things I glossed over before. I think the representation of dance is so interesting, because as an art form it is an entirely different language, as Lane mentioned. I love how many different forms of art she includes in the novel (reflects how July herself is a director, actor, writer, dancer, amazing). Including different forms of art also intensifies our engagement with interpretation and meaning. Critics often wrestle with the difficulty of interpreting visual art, music or dance using words (famous saying being "writing about music is like dancing about architecture"). I like how her representation of the painting, the dancing, and her own performance art video (that Harris hates, beginning of the end?!) forces the reader to think about how we create meaning, and how we receive (or don't) the messages from art.
Okay so this might just be me…but I really didn’t get the painting of the woman w the cave thing. Like I felt like it was supposed to be this important metaphor but it just wasn’t landing and in the Arkanda chapter I tried to wrap my head around it for a second but was like meh… and moved on 😅
Can someone help explain? 😅
Omg no one ever asks lit professors to help, this is making my day! So describing a visual work of art in a written work is an example of ekphrasis (ekprastic poems prob most well known, like Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn"). Ekphrasis is an ancient device, appears in Homer, and is most closely tied to the idea of conjuring or seeing, that the words make the visual image literally appear. It's also been used in works like The Picture of Dorian Gray, among many others, to reflect the main characters' experiences and journeys.
I'd say that's what's going on here--that the painting is about the narrator's journey to fully embracing her womanhood in middle age and forward. At first she doesn't see the image at all, ie doesn't see herself. Through her relationships with Davey and Arkanda, who both are able to see what she cannot, she is able to fully realize both her identity as an artist and as a woman. I pulled all the quotes about the painting here, in case anyone wants to write a paper about it :).
The first mention of the painting:
“Above the bed there was a greenish-gray painting so blandly abstract it was of nothing at all. I lifted it off its clip and slid it under the bed with the original bedspread” (45).
Davey discovers the painting under the bed when they’re saying goodbye:
“‘It’s one of those pictures that’s of nothing, so it won’t offend anyone. I think they’re made especially for motel rooms and doctors’ offices.’
He stared at it. ‘It’s a woman. See?’ He outlined a gray figure with his finger. ‘She’s walking into the woods or some kind of cave or…’
Why were we wasting our precious time on this? I slid it back under the bed.” (132-133)
When she meets Arkanda:
“‘You think this is abstract?’ she said… ‘Or is that a figure?’… ‘It’s a woman at the entrance to a cave that’s sealed up. She can never go back in so she’s just hovering near the entrance for the rest of her life, mourning.’
‘Mourning, hmmm.’ She traced the traced the darkest area, the cave, with a long, lavender nail. ‘She does seem very… set. She’s not going anywhere.’” (304)
And then when Arkanda is leaving:
“‘Maybe she’s guarding it. That’s why she’s not going anywhere.’
I turned and looked at the figure in the painting. Suddenly it was impossible not to see how straight up and down she was, like the guards in front of Buckingham Palace or some other very important, exquisite—almost sacred—place.
Motherfucker, I whispered. I was referring to life itself. Always surprising you, always with the curveballs. Room 321 was the cave and I was its guard. I had made a goddamn womb and I had oneness in it every week. With myself, with God, with my friends and sometimes lovers. And I didn’t own it. Because you don’t. Own anything, not even your onw womb, your own body. It all goes. But every Wednesday I could get back in there, with or without lust, and be—what was the word? Free.” (309-310)
Ah so reading this again, it’s as though the room she created is her “freedom” and she’s guarding it fiercely?
It’s still not my favorite part of the book but this makes much more sense now. And also does seem to be the author pointing to a clear “transformation” for the character.
Re: death I also really picked up on the FMH stuff and flashbacks. I think I wrote in a previous post about a quote from Esther Perel, something along the lines of “the erotic is the antidote for death” and that came to mind for me while reading this book.
The near-death and death in the book served as a nice foil for her wanting to be ALIVE . And not alive in the death field!
I love this reading about the discussions of death/near death — a foil for how much she sought to be alive. This makes a lot of sense to me. Her conversation with Arkana was another highlight for me. I’m not remembering the refrain they repeated but I remember thinking it read like a call and response/healing mantra — trying to make sense of this horrific thing, and building up energy and lifeforce to help do that.
“I can’t believe this happened!”
That’s my entire experience of childbirth and parenting.
Have you read this essay? It’s really stayed with me, and I was thinking about it again reading the novel: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/14/mothers-as-makers-of-death/
Haha! Yes!
This part made me burst into tears. I felt like it was so powerful and works for a mantra for any trauma that has happened to you. You want someone to see the trauma, sit with you and acknowledge it shouldn’t have happened. It is especially powerful that person has faced a similar trauma. This part of the book floored me.
Yes, exactly!
I have a multi-paragraph, wandering response about the room she made in my Notes app-- the room is the dream, for me (and I'll spare you the essay, but it made a great journal prompt!). Thank you for the book club, and for the impetus to read the book. It's been nothing short of enlightening.
I have also envisioned the room! Or what I imagine it would look like :) Maybe I'll post it!
Would love to hear what you envisioned for yours!
The Lit prof has entered the chat!! I LOVE this! 🔥 I feel like I just got smarter!
ah, Emily, thank you so much for going back and listing all the instances of the painting. I might write a paper about it, :). Also, as several here have mentioned there's more that becomes apparent on the second read, I think I need to read it again to fully observe what's happening in the book, love the description of it as a work of art.
I’m reading the book again and can’t help notice how often she talks about wanting to be her true self, or her real self and how that won’t, or doesn’t happen around her family. She says she can be her real self when she’s with Jordi and alone in 321. Recently a friend asked me who I’m my most authentic self with and I *think* it’s my husband? But what does that really mean? The person you’re most relaxed with? The person you feel safest around? Does anyone mind that I’m throwing this question out there?? Thanks for helping me digest!!!
My reflections on the romantic-fantasy novel All Fours by Miranda July have been slow in coming because I found the book deeply discomfiting. I loathed the main character while totally relating to her—or at least recognizing a past version of myself in her—and that realization was a bit sickening. The book has been haunting me, and the longer I thought about the ways in which I connected with the story, the queasier I felt. I’m hoping writing it out helps me to move on.
I went into the book blind, picking up the audiobook from libro.fm because this Substack was doing a book-club discussion on it. Having never heard of Miranda July, her description of the main character as a “famous-adjacent,” multi-media artist seemed odd and pretentious. I now realize the unnamed protagonist is a semi-autobiographical character based on July herself, who is, apparently, a semi-celebrity, multi-media artist. She has made films, acted, and written books, and she uses her own distinctively hoarse voice to narrate her audiobooks, as well.
The book focuses on this “artist’s” marital discontent. (I have artist in quotation marks because the character in the book never works on her art, thinks about her art, nor tells us what art she produced in the past.) She seems fairly happily married to her husband Harris, a stable, reliable guy who suffered with her through the near-death of their infant, who was stillborn but revived and eventually made well. They still have hot sex, though getting into it is a bit of a job, and they are excellent, committed co-parents to their non-binary child, Sam. Then the protagonist decides to take what she claims will be a creatively enriching, cross-country journey by herself, about which Harris is totally supportive and encouraging.
Instead of driving from L.A. to New York, though, O.N. (our narrator), who is 45, stops an hour outside L.A. in a small town and checks into a cheap motel, where she proceeds to have an almost-affair with a young guy who works behind the Hertz rental-car counter. When she first starts thinking about this young man, she is sure she is too old for him, though she imagines he might have found her attractive just a few years earlier. The character is consumed with thoughts of her own desirability, of how she is aging out of being fuckable (please see: this hilarious sketch on women aging out of being fuckable). O.N. loves her child dearly, yet nearly all of her waking thoughts are about sex, her crushes, her compulsive masturbating, and her body. (She is made even less likeable by having a bottomless expense account and time to work out obsessively with a personal trainer as soon as she notices her ass is falling.)
I am ashamed to say I, too, was once completely obsessed with my looks, consumed by fear that my sexiness was waning as I aged, convinced the flirting I did in a dance club might be the last chance I ever had to flirt with hot, young people. For me, these ridiculous thoughts took over my brain when I was still in my 30s, but the result was the same: I blew up my own life, betrayed my supportive, encouraging husband, and used up an absurd amount of my creative energy lost in a fantasy world. I made videos of myself and photographed myself to prove to myself I was still hot; I wrote reams of erotica that I never sent anywhere because it was too anti-feminist, and I talked about sex in chat rooms before talking about sex online was a thing. Like the protagonist, I had almost-affairs with unworthy, young guys; these involved a lot of intense gazing, dancing, almost touching, nearly kissing, etc., and sometimes actual making out. Also like the protagonist, I kept imagining I was in love every time I was in lust. I imagined these encounters made me feel alive, when in reality they merely allowed me to be distracted all the time, as O.N. is. I asked my husband to consider having an open marriage, but there my story diverges: he said no, while Harris says yes.
This is where the story really verges into fantasyland, as O.N. and Harris tell little Sam that they are now going to be romantic with other people and not with each other but are still going to stay married, and then they proceed to do exactly that with no apparent negative consequences to their home life or Sam’s charmed childhood.
In reality, my own bright, optimistic, secure children were broken when my husband and I started talking about splitting up. The end of our marriage was the end of their innocence, and on looking back at their childhoods, I can see, for my son in particular, that his entire life was a before and after of when our marital issues were revealed to him. At 10, my son sobbed, “Isn’t our love enough for you?” and I told him that no, it wasn’t. The thought of this can still drop me to my knees with regret.
Of course, all of my guilt over the choices I made is compounded exponentially by the fact that my son became addicted to hard drugs at 23 and died of an overdose when he was 26. I understand plenty of children survive their parents’ divorce without being irreparably shattered, but because my son did not, there is no way for me to avoid feeling tremendous shame over how I managed my life during the end of my marriage. Although I really was a wonderful, devoted mother, when my children were young and needy, innocent and clingy, desiring nothing more than more time with me, I was often lost in a haze of sexual fantasies or stealing time to sneak off and be with someone (in person or online) who was not part of our family. (Ouch! The truth of that is so awful!) Reading an entire novel in which these consumptive, unhealthy obsessions lead merely to an easy-breezy life of pleasure and play (and, eventually, to the artist writing a book about it all) is galling in the extreme.
I’ve read a lot of reviews of the book, including the online conversation between smart, thoughtful women taking place in the Matriarchy Report chatroom, and I appreciate that for many women this novel is empowering, demonstrating how a woman can seize control of her life, articulate her own desires, create a room of her own, and manifest everything she wants. The novel has also been pitched as a book about perimenopause and how it physically drives women to have this kind of midlife crisis. But for obvious reasons, I didn’t read it that way.
It’s convenient that the novel ends while the protagonist’s child is still young. We don’t have to see the child develop emotional problems in adolescence that trace back to the mother shattering the child’s belief in love, fidelity, and family.
Other analyses I’ve seen talk about how motherhood itself with its intense physical and emotional demands may be what drives women to compulsively fantasize and/or act out. This makes sense to me; when one is responsible 24/7 for the life or death of a dependent human, fantasy is often the only release one can find. But this idea is poorly explored in this book, which demonstrates no natural consequences, which is why I call it a fantasy novel.
In sum, All Fours is about a mom in her 40s foolishly imagining she is losing her sex appeal (just as I did in my 30s, though this seems absurd to me now that I’m 58 and still feeling sexy) who feels compelled to act out her every sexual impulse while she still can, which leads her to more art and a happier, more fulfilled life. She is lonely and desperate to be fully seen and loved, yet the man she has at home seeing and loving her is dismissed as inadequate with little explanation. The book misses the opportunity to explore how the character’s childhood trauma and family history of suicides (another connection point I had) may have led her to blow up her stable home life in adulthood so she could recreate the chaos and drama that felt more familiar to her. I am also not sure if the author was saying that she is a freak in her ravenous desires (which means so was I) or if she is saying that many women feel this way, which seems to be the larger takeaway readers are having. In this, I suppose, I can take some comfort, as I definitely thought I was an anomaly in how I thought and behaved back then, and this book suggests otherwise.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lanettes/p/all-fours-brought-me-to-my-knees?r=1n2u6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Here's my review of the book. I had a very strong reaction to this novel, different from what many of you wrote, and I'd love to talk about it with all of you. Thanks for reading and letting me know your thoughts.