Annotations | ALL FOURS by Miranda July

This isn't a review. I don't write about books. I write IN books.

Amid Life is a weekly newsletter about reinvention. Occasionally, I publish book notes relevant to restless, resilient, and rebellious women. This is one of those.

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Heresy to some, the way I underline and scribble in the margins. I’ll even <gasp> dog-ear a page for lack of a sticky note or highlighter. If I own the book, I’ll break its spine, ink it with opinions, and spill wine into its pages.

I long for immersion and consumption at the same time. The author and I will never be intimate, but I need them to want me. I seek refuge between the covers, and the more I feel the author sees me, the greater my need to be seen. So I circle, and stroke, and …

WHOA! That second paragraph was a bit much. However, the language of wanting is apt for this inaugural edition of Annotations. All Fours by Miranda July is very much about desire.

As I said, this is not a book review or a literary critique. You can find plenty of opinions online—OR you could listen to this fantastic interview with the author and

sam baker

of The Shift.

The book has been called daring and vulnerable. Rightly so. It’s fiction but easily mistaken for truth. July’s unnamed narrator escapes, explores, and experiments at the edge of her midlife crisis. She shares it all—in detail. The story’s narrator conjures and carries out those kinds of fleeting thoughts that one might conjure on a long solo drive in the dark but would never admit to unless there was tequila involved, and even then, would follow their confession with, “Oh, but I would never.”

Or maybe that’s just me. Am I the pearl-clutcher? The repressed Boomer? Let’s see.

My marginal notes

Following are 3 4 themes from the bits of highlighted text in my copy of ALL FOURS.

1. Reinvention

“All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five year old female artist.” (from the book flap)

45?!! So young. What could she know? Someday, I’ll have to write about my reluctance (at 62) to believe I no longer fit the current understanding of the midlife age bracket.

“You really have to know who you are and what is ending so that you can decide what to do when you come to the fork in the road.”

Humph. Maybe she does have something to say. How would I know who I am unless I spelunked into my darkest places? Without a map, what choice is there but to trust my intuition?

If you read the book, please comment! Aw, go ahead and comment even if you didn’t read it.

2. Purpose

“I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache.”

THIS. This right here is why I think the book is about desire. The intimate explorations, the borderline stalker crush on young Davey, the open marriage, the hot sex with Audra—all of it, metaphors for midlife “longing.” My unresolvable ache manifested as more PG-13 when I bought the house in Vermont and quit my job without a plan. (-13 only because of the number of times I said, “fuck.”)

3. Peri-Menopause

“We should be allowed one year during peri-menopause to be free, knowing the end is coming.”

See, this right here is why I think 45 (or the beginning of perimenopause, whatever age you’re at) is too soon to be writing about it. The “end is coming?”

No. No, it’s not. Take it from me—the best is yet to come. <ahem😊> As Dan Akchin writes in

The EndGame

, “As bona fide baby boomers, members of the generation that discovered sex, we have a reputation to uphold.”

“a women’s mental health postmenopause is usually better than it’s been at any other time in the life of that particular woman, other than maybe childhood.” – “Is that really true? Is it because our periods stop?” – “It’s more than we aren’t cycling anymore between estrogen and progesterone and FSH, And, of course, in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass reproductive age.”

YES!! FUCK THE PATRIARCHY! And also…

I’ve read or heard several reviews that say ALL FOURS is the first novel about perimenopause/menopause. But … have they not read Kate Chopin?

What other novels are about menopause (without —- shhhhh - saying the word)?

4. Freedom

“I imagined getting up …, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field …. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling and they weren’t. Not yet. We hadn’t been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed, and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn…. Start the revolution here, now, in the field? Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped?”

Well, I mean. Isn’t this a chapter in (if not the whole) story of all women everywhere? I felt this passage in my bones and deep in the fascia that holds my bones in place.

I don’t feel like this all the time, and it’s not about Felix specifically. It’s just that, well—

Has any woman ever felt truly free?

The field behind house, where I feel most free.

Thanks for reading! Let me know how you like the format of Annotations in the comments.

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine