Review of All Fours by Miranda July

The unnamed main protagonist in All Fours frequently made me feel uncomfortable because of her unorthodox decision-making and near-constant navel-gazing, but she ultimately uses her unorthodox detour from her everyday life to shape a fulfilling path forward.

In All Fours, Miranda July offers the story of an unexpected midlife journey, in which a semi-famous creative type (her medium and work is unspecified) sets out on a road trip from LA to New York to meet with friends and find inspiration--but impulsively exits the freeway thirty minutes from home and checks into a motel instead.

The unnamed narrator leads her (steady, unthrilling) husband and her child Sam to believe that she is following her carefully planned route and then that at the end of her cross-country adventure, she is immersing herself in the wonders of New York. But she is actually redecorating her nearby motel room (using the $20,000 windfall she was to spend on her NYC trip), wandering the nondescript town, making up stories about her New York experience, and developing an all-consuming obsession with a younger man who works at Hertz.

I generally feel extreme personal discomfort at witnessing others' questionable decision-making, and at times I felt as though All Fours was sent to test my limits. I had visceral reactions to some of the protagonist's choices, and, early on and often I was exhausted by her relentless, intense navel-gazing and the picking-apart of each minute detail within each of her experiences. Her revved-up sex drive was so heavily featured, it felt like its own character.

But I settled into the constant unease of traveling alongside a character whose author seemed hell bent on making the reader uncomfortable. (Beyond the main protagonist's overreaching intention to burn it all down in her life, there are extended scenes that involve bonding through cutting matted poop hair away from a dog's butt; one character's removal of a tampon from another in a bid for unorthodox intimacy; and putting hands into a stream of another person's pee for the same purpose.)

The shape of the character's primary relationship after these weeks in the hotel room is unusual (she polls her friends to determine that it is so within her circle as well) and for me was a relief, as it was an actively chosen path rather than a reactive, motel-based, lie-founded, drawn-out floundering that heavily featured and often relied upon various bodily fluids.

I appreciated the exploration aspect of the story, and ultimately I could appreciate its existence within a claustrophobia-inducing and self-imposed set of impulsively imposed and drawn-out circumstances. I laughed out loud once and did enjoy the dark humor that emerges at times.

The title references a scene in which the main character's sculptor friend is working on a headless piece of a woman on all fours, and her note that it is not the most vulnerable pose as we might think, but the most stable position for the human body.

I listened to All Fours as an audiobook.

More about Miranda July

A performance artist, actress, and director, July is also the author of the books The First Bad Man and It Chooses You and the stories No One Belongs Here More than You.