Miranda July on Middle Age and Menopause

I remember turning the big 4-0, and I was like, This is no big deal. My birthday came and went with little fanfare or disruption. 

Turning 50, though, has been a whole other story!

Now, at age 50, I can’t help looking ahead to FOUR YEARS FROM NOW, when my son will graduate from high school and go on to college, and feel an oppressive sense of dread. It’s like I’m looking down the barrel of a shotgun.

What will happen to me when he goes away to college and I’m no longer mom? Will I simply disappear? Cease to exist? Float up into the sky like a helium balloon whose tether has been cut? What will I do with all of that personal time?

Luckily for me, as often happens, the right book landed in my hands at just the right moment: All Fours, by Miranda July. 

This is a wild, weird ride of a novel that deals with issues of middle age, marriage, motherhood, aging, and desire. The main character is an unnamed woman very similar to July herself: She’s a “semi-famous” artist who lives in L.A., is married, and has a child who is nonbinary. While things are o-kay at home, the woman can’t help feeling that something isn’t quite right–or that something is missing. So, with her husband’s encouragement, she embarks on a solo road trip cross-country from L.A. to New York City. The thing is, though, that she never makes it farther than 20 minutes from home. On impulse and without telling her husband and child, she holes up in a crappy little motel room in the small town of Monrovia, where she starts a love affair with a much younger, married man named Davey, who works at the local Hertz car rental but is an aspiring hip-hop dancer. It's almost like an adolescent crush on steroids.

And that is only the beginning of this funny, complicated, surprising, meditative, sad, and often boundaries-pushing novel.

I just finished reading it yesterday, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it–and whether  I even like it or not. Does it work as a novel, in my opinion? No, it goes off on way too many different tangents; however, it’s a novel about a woman who is on a “journey” so maybe that justifies the sometimes disjointed, jumpy narrative. July is a wonderfully funny and talented writer, but there were definitely some scenes that I found depressing AF and descriptions of older women that felt quite cruel. There are also A LOT of sex scenes in this book and they are all quite graphic in nature, which is sometimes titillating but oftentimes not. Without a doubt, July is a provocateur who likes to push the limits, and she definitely does this in this novel.

Despite these criticisms, though, I have to give Miranda July MAJOR PROPS for her courageousness and honesty in talking about female desire, menopause, and middle age–things that our culture wrongly labels as “taboo” or not to be talked about. We all know that men go through midlife crises. Hell, we even know what it looks like--the guy who buys the new, red sports car, starts hitting the gym, and is on the lookout for a younger wife or girlfriend. It's become a laughable stereotype.

Women experience midlife crises, too, but we don't see them in our culture, do we? We don't see their true lived experiences represented in literature or film (until this novel). As women, we don’t talk about how unsettling, anxiety-provoking, and uncomfortable the experience of middle age can be, and we should. In the book, the narrator’s Ob-gyn says to her: 

“Everyone–all my patients–think they’re supposed to play it cool about these changes . . . but ‘freaking out’ actually plays an important role in transitions. Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs–it’s the shock of this squeezing and the sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their first breath! . . . The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase, life on Earth.”

Yes, July drags us with her, through the anxiety, fear, and shame that comes with aging as a woman, but thankfully, there’s a turning point in the book (if you’ve read it, you’ll probably already know what I’m talking about) where the narrator finally realizes that menopause is not a death sentence. It can be a time of transformation or reinvention, in which a woman can finally pursue her desires and passions with total abandon. 

What did you think of All Fours? Please leave a comment.