Why can't we stop talking about All Fours, one year later? (thread)

Women are still loving/hating Miranda July's iconic midlife novel, and its female main character

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Ah, Summer 2024. The summer of All Fours.

The summer of Kamala Harris for president. The summer of brat and Beyoncé. The summer of the the Eras Tour.

Oh, where have ye gone, golden days of last summer? Beyoncé wore a cape and an American flag as a leotard and introduced Team USA, and Simone Biles was absolutely everything.

I paid for Peacock streaming just so that my daughter and I could sit in from of the TV with the AC running, and watch the women’s gymnastics team blow our minds each day. By night, I devoured All Fours every spare minute that I had.

All Fours was part of the before time, when everything was Charli XCX, and Taylor Swift, and Kamala everywhere you looked. It was before the election and all that came with it…a time when angry men didn’t dominate the media landscape, and successful, outspoken women did.

Ah, it was a different time. Not long ago, and yet so far away.

And maybe that’s part of why we can’t stop talking about All Fours.

For many women, All Fours was all they wanted to talk about last summer. And I’ve noticed that any time it comes up, women still want to talk about All Fours.

Any mention of Miranda July’s hit midlife novel—at a party, a brunch, in the comments and chats of this Substack—sends women into spilling all their feelings about it all over again.

Maybe this is nostalgia for last summer when hopes were high, and women dominated the media and the zeitgeist—every headline, every screen, every playlist. And there was Miranda July on the bestseller list—nominated for the National Book Award—and, it seemed, on the cover of every women’s or lit magazine.

It seems hard to imagine how All Fours—a novel about middle-age sex, female desire, motherhood, freedom, and one woman’s rebellious reinvention—would land right now. It’s hard to imagine that a hit story about a successful, bisexual perimenopausal woman who has an affair that leads to a sexual awakening—wouldn’t merit its own White House press conference, somehow.

Maybe we can’t stop talking about All Fours because now we are surrounded by “tradwives” and tradwife discourse, and All Fours feels like the antidote to that.

Maybe it’s because there’s no big Female Main Character novel that’s unseated it in quite the same way since.

Maybe it’s because All Fours (and the All Fours group chat—a whisper network where of women fantasizing about desire and freedom) represented a time when midlife women were rising into their power and having a moment—only to have it all snatched away.

Maybe it’s because Miranda July, like me, belongs to the only generation of American women to be born with full rights that have been lost in the same lifetime.

Or maybe—and this comes up a lot—it’s because we can’t decide if the FMC (Female Main Character)—who feels like a veritable doppelganger for the author herself—is a hero, or a narcissist. We can’t decide if it’s okay for a woman to leave her marriage and take whatever she wants. We can’t decide if a woman who writes herself into the high echelons of literary autofiction as a flawed main character—like a lady Philip Roth or Jonathan Franzen— is a genius, or a post-feminist nightmare.

Maybe Miranda July’s FMC is an emblem of our collective feminist exhaustion jn this moment.

Or maybe we can’t stop talking about All Fours because “all fours” as a metaphor feels painfully close to home right now for women everywhere. The novel’s title reflects the idea of being at a crucial turning point—being in a position of both great vulnerability, and (maybe?) profound grounding and transformation. And the ending to that story is still unfolding for all of us.

What I do know is that whenever All Fours comes up, women pounce on it and want to spill about their reactions to it all over again.

• What do you think about All Fours?

• What is it about All Fours, do you think, that had a hold on us such that we can’t seem to stop talking about it?