I’m about to turn forty and I just read All Fours by Miranda July: hormonal cliffs and storytelling in the age of instagram

All Fours has been sitting on my ‘to read’ list for a few years. I just finished it. The novel was recommended by multiple friends whom I trust to have good taste, but who are also the kind of people who wouldn’t be comfortable admitting they read genre fiction in public. It took me so long because I’m in an era of life where I find it difficult to pick up contemporary fiction. Crime? No problem. Romance? Yes pls. Romantasy? Truly the perfect form for my current headspace.  

I get annoyed when contemporary fiction puts style ahead of story, which is remarkably common. I have less interest in cleverness than I did when I was a lit major at university. With the very limited brain capacity that child bearing and rearing have afforded me, I’ve come to understand that for me, the best kind of prose is the kind I don’t notice at all because the story is so compelling. See: Phillip Pullman. Naomi Alderman. Ann Patchett.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate a unique and clever style, I just want to read novels that try to share something entertaining or profound before they try to prove the skill and specialness of the author. You know? It’s not like I didn’t enjoy Intermezzo, it’s just that I had to push through Sally Rooney’s voice for the first 50 pages before the story grabbed me and I was able to turn her volume down. She’s very brilliant, no doubt, just loud.

I fully expected, having not actually read a Miranda July novel before, that she would be this kind of author—a little bit ‘look at me’. I was both wrong and right. There’s no doubt her work is performative, even theatrical, but that plays out in concept more than style.

I was both moved and disturbed by All Fours. Probably because I’m turning 40 in a few months and I’m terrified of what perimenopause is going to do to my body and brain. Some passages felt like a gut punch. Others made me cringe and snap the book shut, muttering angrily. It was like being seen and attacked simultaneously. The whole thing made me insecure and righteous and confused and repulsed and then insecure again. Unease on loop.

The story itself is unhinged to the point of being unbelievable, but the lead character was drawn with such commitment and humanity that she reeled me in regardless. I limped reluctantly through Part 1 over a few months and then consumed Parts 2-4 in as many days. In essence, it’s a story about perimenopause and a woman facing the perceived end of her ‘public’ life—when she’s no longer desirable nor desiring.

It drew out a belief I didn’t realise I held: that for our first 40 years we are ‘falling in life’, and our last we are ‘falling in death’. The story left me with the sense that although ‘falling in death’ is as terrifying as it sounds, it’s also more intoxicating, wild and hopeful than most stories would lead us to believe. So that’s a nice epiphany to have had as I hover at the edge of my fourth decade.  

Now that I’ve recovered from the existential shock of the story and its relevance to my own moment in time, the other thing that’s staying with me is the auto/meta-fictional nature of this book. I’ve always been a fan of the kind of fiction where you can’t tell what’s true and what isn’t. In All Fours, the lead character is not Miranda July, but it’s also not not her. There are many parallels, and a clear blending of her lived reality with her fictional ideas. It’s an insanely vulnerable and brave piece of work in that sense.

The novel reminded me that I ‘discovered’ Miranda July originally not because of her books but because of her Instagram, which I stumbled across while down some internet rabbit hole in 2019. She’d uploaded a facetime recording of herself talking to actress Margaret Qualley. They were both playing themselves and seemed to be speaking after a period of no contact following a romantic relationship. It was clearly fiction, I thought, but also was it? It was so believable it felt perilous to watch. The story played out on her Instagram over 5 weeks and included a cameo from Jaden Smith. It ended with Margaret and Miranda carrying out a ritual with a ribbon and a saucepan within a circle of coins in her studio.  

I thought it was thrilling. The concept, the format, and the execution.

A long time ago, I took a paper at university called Writing Technologies which I still think about all the time. It focused on the ways in which language and meaning have evolved with new mediums for writing and publishing, e.g. from stone tablets to parchment to the printing press to Microsoft Word to blogging. There is no doubt that as our technology has changed, so has the way we consume stories. The internet creates more fragmented narratives, but they are also deeper, ‘stickier’, and arguably more emotionally impactful due to their multi-modal nature (this is exactly why/how I fell so hard for BTS). We can follow threads of narrative from hyperlink to hyperlink all over the internet. We can traverse them in prose, images, video and audio. The potential is vast. It still doesn’t feel like many storytellers have taken full advantage of the possibilities this offers.

Recalling that Instagram series from 2019 made the completeness of All Fours even more interesting to me. The novel doesn’t directly reference the Margaret Qualley story but elements of it are strongly reminiscent of it: the dancing, the attempt to process emotion in the form of ritual or performative communication. I can’t help but feel the Instagram narrative was an experiment that began the journey to the novel. The key difference being that All Fours is a narrative bound within one medium, a book, which is commercially viable. A transmedia autofiction narrative would not be so lucrative. Art and commerce collide again.

Anyway, better get back to lifting weights and eating protein before my brain and body melt.