Eeeee! I’m so excited to discuss this book that I could hardly wait to start. Since this is our first discussion, a reminder thatwe are reading the book 7 chapters at a time, so no spoilers please! This discussion covers the first 7 chapters so if you’ve read ahead (um, I have I couldn’t put it down), or finished the book, please jump in! But don’t give any spoilers for others. (For reference, this is about the point in the book when her room transformation is complete). Without further ado, let’s jump into this juicy read…
Let’s discuss the way the book begins by drawing us into the main character’s interiority (so much is just her intimate inner thoughts and monologue), and into a journey that actually doesn’t get very far…? The first line that really struck me was: “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.” So much of what happens in the beginning seems to be the character reacting to that. If you have a child, do you feel becoming a parent hit you in the same way? If you don’t have a child, did caregiving, political events, or something else have a similar awakening effect? What did you think about the fact that dealing with midlife as a woman leads to the choice of staying in a motel room, of all places? Do you “see parts of yourself” in the motel room; or feel like you’d like to have a Virginia Woolf “room of one’s own” even if it was just a motel room in the middle of nowhere?
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I really relate to that idea -- the sexism and bias I have experienced as a mom and a mom of a girl child has been more pointed because it has felt more existentially threatening to me and to my child than the earlier sexism (the verbal assaults, the pay gaps, the casual daily harassments). I felt I could kind of float above all that for a long while, or -- maybe wrongly -- that I could muscle through or manage it. As a mom, I have a ferocious sense of protection of my own body and that of my child.
"I have a ferocious sense of protection of my own body and that of my child." Yes!! I gave birth to my daughter *during the Kavanaugh trial and I felt that literally from day one.
Yes! My daughter is 13 and while she's developing earlier than I did she's not emotionally older than I was at 13. She's still just an older child and I have been dreading the first time something inappropriate occurs. And it makes me angry in a totally different way than I was when I was the teenager myself.
After all the poignant and hilarious turns of events in the book that took me up to the end of chapter seven, I turned back to the beginning. I had forgotten how the story began on the first page with our narrator's reaction to the note from the neighbor about a stranger who had been seen taking pictures of her house with a telephoto lens. One perspective framed inside another and then framed again inside our narrator's take on it. Instead of getting down to the business of how creepy this is, she rifts about the big picture window without curtains and how she sometimes tenderly views her husband and child in the window from the outside. She hints at the effort it takes to bridge the gap between the idyllic way things look from the outside and the reality of day to day life.
"Try to remember this feeling", she admonishes herself, "they are the same people up close as they are from here."
This line really hit a nerve for me. Some people I am close to make it incredibly difficult for me not to be angry at them most of the time. But I've become so good at talking myself down; it wouldn't solve anything and besides, how would that look?
Later on our narrator (does she have a name?) details the tedious work she puts into maintaining the image of good mother and wife ("grit, grit, grit,..) in order to have occasional moments of just being herself with her friend or with her own work("...release"). The interior of her lovely life is showing itself to be pretty grim.
I have to admit (after spending a large segment of my life in the Los Angeles area) that I was pretty disappointed when she ends her cross country drive in Monrovia! Strip mall hell! Then she buys the quilt and spends every last cent of her travel money decorating the seedy motel room??? Pure brilliance! And of course we have the opposite of her lovely home. The tacky faux pillared exterior of the motel gave no indication of the magical jewel-like interior of room 321 where she could finally live by no one's expectations but her own.
These observations are just lovely. I too had forgotten all about those first pages and the telephoto lens! "One perspective framed inside another and then framed again inside our narrator's take on it. Instead of getting down to the business of how creepy this is, she rifts about the big picture window without curtains and how she sometimes tenderly views her husband and child in the window from the outside."
Such a lovely observation, thank you for calling attention to that detail.
"Try to remember this feeling", she admonishes herself, "they are the same people up close as they are from here."
"This line really hit a nerve for me. Some people I am close to make it incredibly difficult for me not to be angry at them most of the time. But I've become so good at talking myself down; it wouldn't solve anything and besides, how would that look?"-This really got me in the feels.
I still feel like I rage against this too often. When/how do I find the zen? After menopause?!
I was really moved by what you said here, in all seriousness. "They are the same people up close as they are from here." So much is contained in this scene that I hadn't paused to notice.
Everyone else has such a memorable name that seems to fit their personality: Harris, Sam, Jordi, Davey, even Claire. But Our Narrator is unnamed? Hmmmmm
So much of the book already is dealing with interiors and exteriors also proximity and distance . Literally and figuratively.
It’s striking to me how differently individual women feel about and define middle age. This narrator is deeply feeling age. It will be very interesting for me to understand the different experiences of the discussants and the subjectivity of Miranda/ narrator. Looking forward ! Love it so far. Christina
Agree on all counts! Nice observation on interiors/exteriors and proximity and distance. Well said!
I'm also thinking about how my experience in my 40's aligns and also contrasts with the authors' too. This is a great idea for further discussion, thank you. I'm also really loving it, it's so well written!
I related to so much of what the narrator is experiencing in All Fours. But I think as someone who has identified as a lesbian feminist since the mid 90s, I was already acutely in touch with the sexism of our times. Surely, I avoided certain chunks of that sexism by being in romantic partnerships with & raising children with women - specifically with women who were also feminists and not into bringing heteronormative gender roles into our relationship (some lesbians ARE into that). AND STILL, despite being in egalitarian homo relationships, I have ALWAYS longed for (and rarely had) a room of my own! And yes, having a child, and then (step) children, living in NYC, being a WRITER (or wanting to be), and being kinda perpetually broke, has made the need and the desire for a room of my own so much more intense.
I finished the book months ago and I don’t want to give any spoilers - it’s also hard for me to remember exactly what we know and don’t know by the end of chapter 7. I am skimming it over to try and remember. What I want to bring up, I guess, is that as I read the first half of the book, I wondered if it was ultimately perpetuating too much negativity around women aging. I think there is important conversation to be had about women aging and ageism that is not necessarily only connected to (peri)menopause.
I made an escape from the monotony of a passion-less, long-term relationship (17 years & and one that was filled with many issues) right around the time I turned 40. I fell in love with a younger woman. It wrecked me for a while. The way that the narrator talks about aging throughout the whole book is fascinating and complicated, I think. But something she says in chapter 7 about her desire being uncouth and inappropriate because she was too old, especially resonated with me and how I was feeling around that time in my life (my early 40s). Now it’s a different story though.
Thank you for sharing this and for your perspective, Erin. What you mention here is something that I think about A LOT. Is it different from same-sex couples/lesbians? How is it for non-hetero relationships?? Surely it's so much better?!
What you say here about how even with an egalitarian relationship with a woman, it's all still too much (esp with a child/children piled on top) is something that I think about too, though. I feel like my hetero relationship is about as egalitarian as a woman can hope for, and still childrearing plus everything else is too much for both of us. It's just too much for two people, esp the way we do it in the U.S.!
As a mother of two, I can completely relate to the need for a place or time of aloneness where no one can contact you and no one is needing something from you. I often joke that formerly long, boring flights are fun for me now - all this time to myself to work, or read, or just zone off. Where do I even begin with these 5 hours of freedom??
I know not all households are like this, but for most, when we become mothers, we’re immediately thrust into the primary caregiver role, whether or not we have a career of our own. Biologically and often economically it makes the most sense. And with that, we lose freedom in a way that men don’t. Our bodies, our time, and our minds (the zillion things to now worry about that most men don’t - sleep schedules, feeding, what car seat to buy?!) are not our own. Even a shabby motel room offers liberation and escape when juxtaposed with the *wonderful* but smothering aspects of motherhood.
Yes! A flight alone! The best part about it is that you're not in your house so you can't even do any work or be stressed about the housework you're not doing! I v much relate to this.
"We lose freedom in a way that men don’t. Our bodies, our time, and our minds (the zillion things to now worry about that most men don’t - sleep schedules, feeding, what car seat to buy?!) are not our own." Well said and v relatable.
I distinctly remember, when discussing getting pregnant with my male partner, explicitly saying that I didn’t want to live a life of domestic drudgery, which is what I associated marriage and child rearing with. We agreed we would do it differently and for a time we did but for lots of reasons it wasn’t sustainable and we are now firmly in depressingly heteronormative roles. Her line about being able to ignore sexism before children is so relatable. I honestly don’t know what the answer is while it’s biological women who give birth because, like you say, it makes the most sense for us to be the caregivers, especially whilst our bodies are healing.
Thanks to patriarchy this can be v hard to escape. One hopeful thing to note is that other wealthy countries to suchhh a better job helping women get back on their feet, while the U.S. remains in the dark ages. But that does mean that things can change!
Btw I think you might like Amanda Montei's book "Touched Out," which has a similar experience to yours in many ways, it sounds like!
Yes, I often look to other countries, particularly Scandinavia, feel hopeful, while also wondering what went wrong here. But at least we’re not the US, that’s an insane system.
Thank you for the book recommendation, my TBR list is getting very long thanks to Substack but I shall add it nonetheless!
I recently half read Woman on the Edge of Time which posed the question of a future where women & people generally had been taken out of the gestation and birth equation and that was the only way to utopian vision of equality. The present day character really railed against that but it was an interesting proposal and one I was totally torn about.
I think so many women (and some men too) blame themselves for failing to escape certain gender roles/domestic arrangements that we don’t wish to have and don’t benefit us. But it’s the system, not us! Systems are set up to enforce this and profit from it. It makes me feel better sometimes to remember it’s not a personal failing.
That’s helpful, thank you because of course I do blame myself for not being stronger, less tired, more determined.
Full disclaimer re book. I didn’t actually finish it as it was just too kind bending for me at the time. However the blurb claims it’s a ‘classic feminist novel’ so hopefully it lives up to that. Iron I that my father in law bought it for me when his son, who although a good feminist man, has some work to do!
"Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly. These “free spirits” who thought they could just invent the value of things..."
And then:
"...And now I felt the opposite of hatred. Who better to decide the worth of things? She was maybe fifteen years older than me. Been there, done that, nobody’s fool. She wasn’t even ugly, just not young, a little chubby. Until recently she had been a better-looking woman than me and she knew this at a glance."
I loved this set of realizations from Our Narrator.
The first one rings so true about how women are set against each other by so many societal cues but especially agism. And then, after a bitter exchange where she can't bargain down the price of the quilt, O.N. surprises the reader by reversing her perception of the stereotypical old bitch with a generous assessment of her as a seen person, an individual of worth and substance.
I would LOVE a room of my own! When she spent the money to redecorate the motel room I was so confused but as it came together and she used it aa a “womb” I totally got it and envied it!
The almost casual mention of her aunt and cousin's suicide in middle age is a really important thread, and ties in with the narrator's own struggles with depression, or the blues as she refers to it. Her father's explanation that her aunt jumped to her death because she couldn't accept aging out of being an object of desire, and the narrator's own realization that she was next in this matriarchal line, adds even more weight to her relationship with Davey and the fear she has that she is too old for him: "Just a few years earlier, at forty or forty-two, I would ahve been a contender, but now it was too late. And he was just the first one. from now on this would be the norm. And not just with men younger than me, but with all men. I would never get what I wanted anymore, man-wise" (71).
She feels like this is the end of hetero desire towards her, but interestingly contrasts it with queer desire on the following page. The contrasts between her anxiety about hetero desire for her (or her own desiring of men) and the way she thinks of queer desire and bodies, especially in conversation with her friend Jordi, who sculpts bodies, also brought me back to her description of herself as multiple with Harris. Her bisexuality unfolds over the narrative but I think might be an important piece here, especially connected to her realizations of her perimenopausal state.
Interesting...esp bc by the time she's obsessed with Davey I forget about her bisexuality! Her anxiety about being desired by men seems to overshadow everything!
I'm so intrigued by this and would love to hear more: "Her bisexuality unfolds over the narrative but I think might be an important piece here, especially connected to her realizations of her perimenopausal state." Maybe in a guest prompt!
I read ahead and I have to say that right now I'm just not recovered. Hopefully I'll be recovered by the time we get there but she's exceeded my expectations here. Omg lol
That sentence abt motherhood and sexism is absolutely perfect. The perfect summation of it all! Personally, I felt more sexism from outside my home (in academia specifically) then inside but maybe bc i found myself loving motherhood. I like how she carefully balances the narrator's need for space, work etc with the really beautiful descriptions of connection with her child. Eating apples in the tub for one. I loved the dialogue between the narrator and her kid throughout the novel. I wish I had read this when my kids were little bc the narrator models a real respect for her child's inner world. I hope I did that for my children!
As for the motel room, omg, yes. It's been a complete fantasy for me to have some sort of space like this. Like, to state the obvious, but a room of one's own really is a feminine fantasy in a patriarchy. I wonder if living with men, even the good ones, compromises this need for space? It's moving to me how later in the novel her friends come over and they are able to exist differently in the room as well, taking baths etc.
I went to her reading of this book in Seattle with Laurie Frankel (who I’m desperate to become BFF’s with) and so many people think this is essentially Miranda July’s memoir. She does deny it but it was tough for me to separate them, especially after meeting her.
Interesting! Did you it changes the way that you receive it, knowing that it might be autobiographical?
It's also interesting that she denies it and that it might matter to people--esp bc the way that we think about who is "allowed" to make certain choices and openly discuss them is very gendered. Would people respond the same way to a memoir by a male? Would they insist that it must be memoir even if he says it's not?
Didn't I read some interview somewhere with MJ where she admits that it is somewhat autobiographical? I'm almost certain I did. And well, even if I didn't, come on! Just the basic facts of the narrator's existence undeniably overlap with the basic facts of the author's existence. So there's at least that.
I have read a ton of interviews with July and have been a fan of her work since Me, You, and Everyone We Know (highly recommend). I love No one Belongs Here More than You. I did NOT like The First Bad Man, really at all. And All Fours, which I absolutely loved, definitely seems more autobiographical than anything else she's done, I think. But I always read her work with a sense that there's some pieces of her in there. I always read EVERYONE's work this way though.
Having spent over a decade writing and finally just finishing a dissertation on writers who all blur the lines between fiction and autobiography (Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles), I have a lot of strong feelings and ideas about the ways that this matters and doesn't matter at the same time. But that's too much to get into here. And I'm already worried that I'm coming off as pretentious. Blah!
Nope, as soon as I got to this part, I was like, SAY MORE! "Having spent over a decade writing and finally just finishing a dissertation on writers who all blur the lines between fiction and autobiography (Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles), I have a lot of strong feelings and ideas about the ways that this matters and doesn't matter at the same time."
See I HATED "The Future" and I really couldn't forgive her for it until "The Last Bad Man" which somehow allowed me to get over the just completely self-absorbed characters in "The Future". But now I can understand that the events and characters including the cat in "The Future" were just things she created. She wrote the lines the cat said, she VOICED the lines the cat said. I knew that when I saw it initially but I still felt really manipulated. That's what I think is so interesting because I asked myself if I would be so upset about an imaginary cat if a man had written the script. And it felt like I wouldn't be, probably. I watched a clip of her voicing Paw Paw earlier to show my daughter (I had her watching "Me, You.." earlier while I was reading ahead. She was just as horrified by what I told her about "The Future" as well after watching it. I think most people would be. It had to be the point. But most women don't create characters that are so hard to continue to like, because I don't think I can watch the entire film again. I understand it's not really her but I'm pretty sure I'd just get mad again. And that's what she was going for, because she could have written a different ending. But she went with that one. I don't think I could have done that, not after writing the cat's letters. Lol
It's weird. I know I saw The Future. But I completely forgot it. I just watched the trailer and it jogged my memory a bit. But I should watch it again. I definitely did not hate it. And I'm pretty sure that big parts of that movie or that character are also autobiographical.
See that's what I think she wants us to have to think about but I only reached that point by reminding myself of it for a long time. After "Me, You, and Everyone We Know" and "No One Belongs Here More Than You" I had what was essentially a huge crush/want to be BFF situation with "her". And I think memoir writers who write like David Sedaris for example are inviting that in a non-ambiguous way. She's never described her work as anything other than fiction though. It's never creative non-fiction, it's just fiction. I have to take her word on that, if she wanted to write memoir she certainly could but she chooses not to for a reason. The reason might be as simple as these conversations we're having here. I think it's deeper than that though.
I loved that line, too. What I resonate with is the suffocation we feel as mothers as wives. How she often delays going up to the main house as long as she can because she can be a different self while she is in her studio. I think that is some of what is going on with the motel room. What if I were to make something that was just to MY liking, without checking in with anyone else or being sensible in any way? There is a wildness to her insanity that I love.
"What if I were to make something that was just to MY liking, without checking in with anyone else?" This reminds me of something that a friend said to me after we both got divorced in our thirties. Post-divorce, She had turned her home into the coziest spot full of her own art and photos and knick-knacks it was intimately just HERS. She advised me to do the same and take advantage of it when I got divorced, as a kind of silver lining, and I did. (Neither of us had kids at that point, so it was truly just our space.)
When she got remarried she lamented the loss of her own space that she created "without checking in with anyone else." I never thought of the motel room that way, but I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of power in that.
Your great piece on this book and women being "unhinged" is part of what convinced me to choose this book. Thank you!
I'm so glad you chose that exact sentence! It really spoke to me too. I have a bit of a love/ hate or at least like/dislike situation going on with the narrator. This hasn't happened to me before in her short stories. I felt a lot of conflicting feelings about The Future though which made me nervous about this novel. It's off-topic but it's interesting to me that The Future was sort of about auditioning for adulthood or parenthood in some ways and those parts held the conflict.
That sentence had me like...yes, this exactly! Put something into words succinctly that I had thought to myself 1000 times. My relationship w my partner felt pretty equal and easy when we both just had our own work. But then when all the sudden when there was a baby and there was this big extra job that required 24-hour attendance it was like, who is going to do all this extra work now? And only one of us was conditioned to take it on...
I don't know her other work! But now I'm looking up The Future. What is it that makes you feel love-hate for this narrator, do you think? I like that she's complex the way that male characters are allowed to be when mothers are not. But it's def. complicated. She also has *a lot* of privilege that's harder to relate to.
Like my relationship with my husband is identified more with when she talks about “her” spoons. I'm pretty sure I've actually thought THAT sentence and it's sad and hilarious. It's a lot more stuff now but I so get it when it's always feeling like less.
Lol, yes I think you're probably describing the things that cause my conflict when you say *a lot* of privilege. In her other work she's also made characters that can be difficult to like, because of their lack of situational awareness? It says more about the reader probably* which ones you feel sympathy for versus the ones you don't. She's almost always in first person and that has its own way of making it difficult for me to keep reminding myself she's not her characters. I think this has to be an intentional choice. Which is pretty brave considering.
Not sure if it came up in the comments yet, but one thing I loved was the non-gendering of her child (it felt this way to me at least, but, yes, perhaps her child is nonbinary?).
The interior experience of the transition into motherhood is so relatable and captured so beautifully and the choice to not add the extra layer of "girl mom" or "boy mom" feels like a perfect way to suggest that that layer doesn't matter at all in the context of this experience.
I really relate to that idea -- the sexism and bias I have experienced as a mom and a mom of a girl child has been more pointed because it has felt more existentially threatening to me and to my child than the earlier sexism (the verbal assaults, the pay gaps, the casual daily harassments). I felt I could kind of float above all that for a long while, or -- maybe wrongly -- that I could muscle through or manage it. As a mom, I have a ferocious sense of protection of my own body and that of my child.
"I have a ferocious sense of protection of my own body and that of my child." Yes!! I gave birth to my daughter *during the Kavanaugh trial and I felt that literally from day one.
Yes! My daughter is 13 and while she's developing earlier than I did she's not emotionally older than I was at 13. She's still just an older child and I have been dreading the first time something inappropriate occurs. And it makes me angry in a totally different way than I was when I was the teenager myself.
After all the poignant and hilarious turns of events in the book that took me up to the end of chapter seven, I turned back to the beginning. I had forgotten how the story began on the first page with our narrator's reaction to the note from the neighbor about a stranger who had been seen taking pictures of her house with a telephoto lens. One perspective framed inside another and then framed again inside our narrator's take on it. Instead of getting down to the business of how creepy this is, she rifts about the big picture window without curtains and how she sometimes tenderly views her husband and child in the window from the outside. She hints at the effort it takes to bridge the gap between the idyllic way things look from the outside and the reality of day to day life.
"Try to remember this feeling", she admonishes herself, "they are the same people up close as they are from here."
This line really hit a nerve for me. Some people I am close to make it incredibly difficult for me not to be angry at them most of the time. But I've become so good at talking myself down; it wouldn't solve anything and besides, how would that look?
Later on our narrator (does she have a name?) details the tedious work she puts into maintaining the image of good mother and wife ("grit, grit, grit,..) in order to have occasional moments of just being herself with her friend or with her own work("...release"). The interior of her lovely life is showing itself to be pretty grim.
I have to admit (after spending a large segment of my life in the Los Angeles area) that I was pretty disappointed when she ends her cross country drive in Monrovia! Strip mall hell! Then she buys the quilt and spends every last cent of her travel money decorating the seedy motel room??? Pure brilliance! And of course we have the opposite of her lovely home. The tacky faux pillared exterior of the motel gave no indication of the magical jewel-like interior of room 321 where she could finally live by no one's expectations but her own.
These observations are just lovely. I too had forgotten all about those first pages and the telephoto lens! "One perspective framed inside another and then framed again inside our narrator's take on it. Instead of getting down to the business of how creepy this is, she rifts about the big picture window without curtains and how she sometimes tenderly views her husband and child in the window from the outside."
Such a lovely observation, thank you for calling attention to that detail.
"Try to remember this feeling", she admonishes herself, "they are the same people up close as they are from here."
"This line really hit a nerve for me. Some people I am close to make it incredibly difficult for me not to be angry at them most of the time. But I've become so good at talking myself down; it wouldn't solve anything and besides, how would that look?"-This really got me in the feels.
I still feel like I rage against this too often. When/how do I find the zen? After menopause?!
Ha! Don't pin your hopes for zen on menopause!
So I have heard haha!
I was really moved by what you said here, in all seriousness. "They are the same people up close as they are from here." So much is contained in this scene that I hadn't paused to notice.
Does she name the narrator? I don't think she has? You get so carried into her personality you don't even notice.
Everyone else has such a memorable name that seems to fit their personality: Harris, Sam, Jordi, Davey, even Claire. But Our Narrator is unnamed? Hmmmmm
Y CB
So much of the book already is dealing with interiors and exteriors also proximity and distance . Literally and figuratively.
It’s striking to me how differently individual women feel about and define middle age. This narrator is deeply feeling age. It will be very interesting for me to understand the different experiences of the discussants and the subjectivity of Miranda/ narrator. Looking forward ! Love it so far. Christina
Agree on all counts! Nice observation on interiors/exteriors and proximity and distance. Well said!
I'm also thinking about how my experience in my 40's aligns and also contrasts with the authors' too. This is a great idea for further discussion, thank you. I'm also really loving it, it's so well written!
I related to so much of what the narrator is experiencing in All Fours. But I think as someone who has identified as a lesbian feminist since the mid 90s, I was already acutely in touch with the sexism of our times. Surely, I avoided certain chunks of that sexism by being in romantic partnerships with & raising children with women - specifically with women who were also feminists and not into bringing heteronormative gender roles into our relationship (some lesbians ARE into that). AND STILL, despite being in egalitarian homo relationships, I have ALWAYS longed for (and rarely had) a room of my own! And yes, having a child, and then (step) children, living in NYC, being a WRITER (or wanting to be), and being kinda perpetually broke, has made the need and the desire for a room of my own so much more intense.
I finished the book months ago and I don’t want to give any spoilers - it’s also hard for me to remember exactly what we know and don’t know by the end of chapter 7. I am skimming it over to try and remember. What I want to bring up, I guess, is that as I read the first half of the book, I wondered if it was ultimately perpetuating too much negativity around women aging. I think there is important conversation to be had about women aging and ageism that is not necessarily only connected to (peri)menopause.
I made an escape from the monotony of a passion-less, long-term relationship (17 years & and one that was filled with many issues) right around the time I turned 40. I fell in love with a younger woman. It wrecked me for a while. The way that the narrator talks about aging throughout the whole book is fascinating and complicated, I think. But something she says in chapter 7 about her desire being uncouth and inappropriate because she was too old, especially resonated with me and how I was feeling around that time in my life (my early 40s). Now it’s a different story though.
Thank you for sharing this and for your perspective, Erin. What you mention here is something that I think about A LOT. Is it different from same-sex couples/lesbians? How is it for non-hetero relationships?? Surely it's so much better?!
What you say here about how even with an egalitarian relationship with a woman, it's all still too much (esp with a child/children piled on top) is something that I think about too, though. I feel like my hetero relationship is about as egalitarian as a woman can hope for, and still childrearing plus everything else is too much for both of us. It's just too much for two people, esp the way we do it in the U.S.!
As a mother of two, I can completely relate to the need for a place or time of aloneness where no one can contact you and no one is needing something from you. I often joke that formerly long, boring flights are fun for me now - all this time to myself to work, or read, or just zone off. Where do I even begin with these 5 hours of freedom??
I know not all households are like this, but for most, when we become mothers, we’re immediately thrust into the primary caregiver role, whether or not we have a career of our own. Biologically and often economically it makes the most sense. And with that, we lose freedom in a way that men don’t. Our bodies, our time, and our minds (the zillion things to now worry about that most men don’t - sleep schedules, feeding, what car seat to buy?!) are not our own. Even a shabby motel room offers liberation and escape when juxtaposed with the *wonderful* but smothering aspects of motherhood.
Yes! A flight alone! The best part about it is that you're not in your house so you can't even do any work or be stressed about the housework you're not doing! I v much relate to this.
"We lose freedom in a way that men don’t. Our bodies, our time, and our minds (the zillion things to now worry about that most men don’t - sleep schedules, feeding, what car seat to buy?!) are not our own." Well said and v relatable.
I distinctly remember, when discussing getting pregnant with my male partner, explicitly saying that I didn’t want to live a life of domestic drudgery, which is what I associated marriage and child rearing with. We agreed we would do it differently and for a time we did but for lots of reasons it wasn’t sustainable and we are now firmly in depressingly heteronormative roles. Her line about being able to ignore sexism before children is so relatable. I honestly don’t know what the answer is while it’s biological women who give birth because, like you say, it makes the most sense for us to be the caregivers, especially whilst our bodies are healing.
Thanks to patriarchy this can be v hard to escape. One hopeful thing to note is that other wealthy countries to suchhh a better job helping women get back on their feet, while the U.S. remains in the dark ages. But that does mean that things can change!
Btw I think you might like Amanda Montei's book "Touched Out," which has a similar experience to yours in many ways, it sounds like!
Yes, I often look to other countries, particularly Scandinavia, feel hopeful, while also wondering what went wrong here. But at least we’re not the US, that’s an insane system.
Thank you for the book recommendation, my TBR list is getting very long thanks to Substack but I shall add it nonetheless!
I recently half read Woman on the Edge of Time which posed the question of a future where women & people generally had been taken out of the gestation and birth equation and that was the only way to utopian vision of equality. The present day character really railed against that but it was an interesting proposal and one I was totally torn about.
This sounds FASCINATING. Thx for the rec!
I think so many women (and some men too) blame themselves for failing to escape certain gender roles/domestic arrangements that we don’t wish to have and don’t benefit us. But it’s the system, not us! Systems are set up to enforce this and profit from it. It makes me feel better sometimes to remember it’s not a personal failing.
That’s helpful, thank you because of course I do blame myself for not being stronger, less tired, more determined.
Full disclaimer re book. I didn’t actually finish it as it was just too kind bending for me at the time. However the blurb claims it’s a ‘classic feminist novel’ so hopefully it lives up to that. Iron I that my father in law bought it for me when his son, who although a good feminist man, has some work to do!
This sentence in Chapter 6:
"Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly. These “free spirits” who thought they could just invent the value of things..."
And then:
"...And now I felt the opposite of hatred. Who better to decide the worth of things? She was maybe fifteen years older than me. Been there, done that, nobody’s fool. She wasn’t even ugly, just not young, a little chubby. Until recently she had been a better-looking woman than me and she knew this at a glance."
So many feelings about this exchange.
I loved this set of realizations from Our Narrator.
The first one rings so true about how women are set against each other by so many societal cues but especially agism. And then, after a bitter exchange where she can't bargain down the price of the quilt, O.N. surprises the reader by reversing her perception of the stereotypical old bitch with a generous assessment of her as a seen person, an individual of worth and substance.
Yes! This is another great scene that I had forgotten about. So much contained in this exchange!
It's so hard to stop reading ahead!
I would LOVE a room of my own! When she spent the money to redecorate the motel room I was so confused but as it came together and she used it aa a “womb” I totally got it and envied it!
I was also totally perplexed by this until I remembered that I say, "All I want in the world is a hotel room all to myself" alllll the time!! Haha!
The almost casual mention of her aunt and cousin's suicide in middle age is a really important thread, and ties in with the narrator's own struggles with depression, or the blues as she refers to it. Her father's explanation that her aunt jumped to her death because she couldn't accept aging out of being an object of desire, and the narrator's own realization that she was next in this matriarchal line, adds even more weight to her relationship with Davey and the fear she has that she is too old for him: "Just a few years earlier, at forty or forty-two, I would ahve been a contender, but now it was too late. And he was just the first one. from now on this would be the norm. And not just with men younger than me, but with all men. I would never get what I wanted anymore, man-wise" (71).
She feels like this is the end of hetero desire towards her, but interestingly contrasts it with queer desire on the following page. The contrasts between her anxiety about hetero desire for her (or her own desiring of men) and the way she thinks of queer desire and bodies, especially in conversation with her friend Jordi, who sculpts bodies, also brought me back to her description of herself as multiple with Harris. Her bisexuality unfolds over the narrative but I think might be an important piece here, especially connected to her realizations of her perimenopausal state.
Interesting...esp bc by the time she's obsessed with Davey I forget about her bisexuality! Her anxiety about being desired by men seems to overshadow everything!
I'm so intrigued by this and would love to hear more: "Her bisexuality unfolds over the narrative but I think might be an important piece here, especially connected to her realizations of her perimenopausal state." Maybe in a guest prompt!
I read ahead and I have to say that right now I'm just not recovered. Hopefully I'll be recovered by the time we get there but she's exceeded my expectations here. Omg lol
That sentence abt motherhood and sexism is absolutely perfect. The perfect summation of it all! Personally, I felt more sexism from outside my home (in academia specifically) then inside but maybe bc i found myself loving motherhood. I like how she carefully balances the narrator's need for space, work etc with the really beautiful descriptions of connection with her child. Eating apples in the tub for one. I loved the dialogue between the narrator and her kid throughout the novel. I wish I had read this when my kids were little bc the narrator models a real respect for her child's inner world. I hope I did that for my children!
As for the motel room, omg, yes. It's been a complete fantasy for me to have some sort of space like this. Like, to state the obvious, but a room of one's own really is a feminine fantasy in a patriarchy. I wonder if living with men, even the good ones, compromises this need for space? It's moving to me how later in the novel her friends come over and they are able to exist differently in the room as well, taking baths etc.
I went to her reading of this book in Seattle with Laurie Frankel (who I’m desperate to become BFF’s with) and so many people think this is essentially Miranda July’s memoir. She does deny it but it was tough for me to separate them, especially after meeting her.
Interesting! Did you it changes the way that you receive it, knowing that it might be autobiographical?
It's also interesting that she denies it and that it might matter to people--esp bc the way that we think about who is "allowed" to make certain choices and openly discuss them is very gendered. Would people respond the same way to a memoir by a male? Would they insist that it must be memoir even if he says it's not?
Interesting to think about!
Didn't I read some interview somewhere with MJ where she admits that it is somewhat autobiographical? I'm almost certain I did. And well, even if I didn't, come on! Just the basic facts of the narrator's existence undeniably overlap with the basic facts of the author's existence. So there's at least that.
I have read a ton of interviews with July and have been a fan of her work since Me, You, and Everyone We Know (highly recommend). I love No one Belongs Here More than You. I did NOT like The First Bad Man, really at all. And All Fours, which I absolutely loved, definitely seems more autobiographical than anything else she's done, I think. But I always read her work with a sense that there's some pieces of her in there. I always read EVERYONE's work this way though.
Having spent over a decade writing and finally just finishing a dissertation on writers who all blur the lines between fiction and autobiography (Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles), I have a lot of strong feelings and ideas about the ways that this matters and doesn't matter at the same time. But that's too much to get into here. And I'm already worried that I'm coming off as pretentious. Blah!
Nope, as soon as I got to this part, I was like, SAY MORE! "Having spent over a decade writing and finally just finishing a dissertation on writers who all blur the lines between fiction and autobiography (Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles), I have a lot of strong feelings and ideas about the ways that this matters and doesn't matter at the same time."
Seriously I would love to know what you think!
See I HATED "The Future" and I really couldn't forgive her for it until "The Last Bad Man" which somehow allowed me to get over the just completely self-absorbed characters in "The Future". But now I can understand that the events and characters including the cat in "The Future" were just things she created. She wrote the lines the cat said, she VOICED the lines the cat said. I knew that when I saw it initially but I still felt really manipulated. That's what I think is so interesting because I asked myself if I would be so upset about an imaginary cat if a man had written the script. And it felt like I wouldn't be, probably. I watched a clip of her voicing Paw Paw earlier to show my daughter (I had her watching "Me, You.." earlier while I was reading ahead. She was just as horrified by what I told her about "The Future" as well after watching it. I think most people would be. It had to be the point. But most women don't create characters that are so hard to continue to like, because I don't think I can watch the entire film again. I understand it's not really her but I'm pretty sure I'd just get mad again. And that's what she was going for, because she could have written a different ending. But she went with that one. I don't think I could have done that, not after writing the cat's letters. Lol
It's weird. I know I saw The Future. But I completely forgot it. I just watched the trailer and it jogged my memory a bit. But I should watch it again. I definitely did not hate it. And I'm pretty sure that big parts of that movie or that character are also autobiographical.
See that's what I think she wants us to have to think about but I only reached that point by reminding myself of it for a long time. After "Me, You, and Everyone We Know" and "No One Belongs Here More Than You" I had what was essentially a huge crush/want to be BFF situation with "her". And I think memoir writers who write like David Sedaris for example are inviting that in a non-ambiguous way. She's never described her work as anything other than fiction though. It's never creative non-fiction, it's just fiction. I have to take her word on that, if she wanted to write memoir she certainly could but she chooses not to for a reason. The reason might be as simple as these conversations we're having here. I think it's deeper than that though.
I loved that line, too. What I resonate with is the suffocation we feel as mothers as wives. How she often delays going up to the main house as long as she can because she can be a different self while she is in her studio. I think that is some of what is going on with the motel room. What if I were to make something that was just to MY liking, without checking in with anyone else or being sensible in any way? There is a wildness to her insanity that I love.
"What if I were to make something that was just to MY liking, without checking in with anyone else?" This reminds me of something that a friend said to me after we both got divorced in our thirties. Post-divorce, She had turned her home into the coziest spot full of her own art and photos and knick-knacks it was intimately just HERS. She advised me to do the same and take advantage of it when I got divorced, as a kind of silver lining, and I did. (Neither of us had kids at that point, so it was truly just our space.)
When she got remarried she lamented the loss of her own space that she created "without checking in with anyone else." I never thought of the motel room that way, but I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of power in that.
Your great piece on this book and women being "unhinged" is part of what convinced me to choose this book. Thank you!
This is her with Carrie Brownstein on Portlandia.
https://m.imdb.com/video/embed/vi3953376537/?vPage=1
Ha!! This is pretty much how I picture the narrator...(waifish, pale, cool severe angular haircut) right down to the weird dancing.
I'm so glad you chose that exact sentence! It really spoke to me too. I have a bit of a love/ hate or at least like/dislike situation going on with the narrator. This hasn't happened to me before in her short stories. I felt a lot of conflicting feelings about The Future though which made me nervous about this novel. It's off-topic but it's interesting to me that The Future was sort of about auditioning for adulthood or parenthood in some ways and those parts held the conflict.
That sentence had me like...yes, this exactly! Put something into words succinctly that I had thought to myself 1000 times. My relationship w my partner felt pretty equal and easy when we both just had our own work. But then when all the sudden when there was a baby and there was this big extra job that required 24-hour attendance it was like, who is going to do all this extra work now? And only one of us was conditioned to take it on...
I don't know her other work! But now I'm looking up The Future. What is it that makes you feel love-hate for this narrator, do you think? I like that she's complex the way that male characters are allowed to be when mothers are not. But it's def. complicated. She also has *a lot* of privilege that's harder to relate to.
Like my relationship with my husband is identified more with when she talks about “her” spoons. I'm pretty sure I've actually thought THAT sentence and it's sad and hilarious. It's a lot more stuff now but I so get it when it's always feeling like less.
Lol, yes I think you're probably describing the things that cause my conflict when you say *a lot* of privilege. In her other work she's also made characters that can be difficult to like, because of their lack of situational awareness? It says more about the reader probably* which ones you feel sympathy for versus the ones you don't. She's almost always in first person and that has its own way of making it difficult for me to keep reminding myself she's not her characters. I think this has to be an intentional choice. Which is pretty brave considering.
Agree! I think @jesstwardzik on this thread also has feelings about the first person/potential autobiography aspect of it.
It can def make the character less likeable but also that's the bravery of it...?
Wow, all of this.
Not sure if it came up in the comments yet, but one thing I loved was the non-gendering of her child (it felt this way to me at least, but, yes, perhaps her child is nonbinary?).
The interior experience of the transition into motherhood is so relatable and captured so beautifully and the choice to not add the extra layer of "girl mom" or "boy mom" feels like a perfect way to suggest that that layer doesn't matter at all in the context of this experience.
This is such a good point, and one I hadn’t thought of at all!
That line about planning the WAFFLES!