Books › All Fours
All Fours
400 pages
A wildly original, fiercely funny fever dream about blowing up your domestic life just to see what the pieces look like.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like being trapped in a delightfully unhinged, erotic fever dream that somehow speaks the exact truth about being a woman in midlife. The narrative moves at a brisk, almost manic clip, propelled by the protagonist's sudden, absurd detour from her own life. It is a deeply intimate experience, wrapping you in an atmosphere that is simultaneously claustrophobic and radically expansive. The prose is deadpan, weird, and startlingly vulnerable, delivering laugh-out-loud observations right alongside gut-punching truths about marriage, perimenopause, and the terrifying hunger for freedom. It will absolutely thrill readers who love their literary fiction fearless, messy, and unabashedly horny, offering a bizarre but profoundly tender reinvention of what it means to age and desire.
- Mood
- feverish
- intimate
- surreal
- erotic
- tender
- Tone
- wry
- absurd
- vulnerable
- darkly comic
- unabashed
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- midlife reinvention · female desire · the absurdity of domesticity · bodily aging · artistic freedom
- The writing
- Sharp, idiosyncratic, and disarmingly frank, blending deadpan humor with startlingly profound observations.
- The arc
- Moves from a state of suffocating domestic paralysis into a wild, boundary-pushing exploration of desire, ultimately landing in a place of radical self-acceptance.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave fearless, weird, and deeply honest explorations of female sexuality, aging, and the messy realities of long-term partnership.
Content notes
- explicit sexual content
- infidelity
- medical anxiety
About the book
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
Description from Open Library.
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