‘I was in a kind of ecstatic freefall’: artist Miranda July on writing the book that could change your life
Miranda July has rented a little house in LA for 20 years. Every morning she’d drive over from the home she shared with her husband and young child, work on her films and art and writing and drive home again, until one day she noticed that another little house, the little rundown house that backed on to hers, was empty, and she had a thought. Something was shifting in her, it had been shifting for some time.
The shift started when, after signing on to publish her second novel, July realised the most valuable time for her to write was early in the morning. One day she said to her husband, film director Mike Mills, “I’m going to ask something,” and she took a breath. “What if I spent one night a week in my studio?” She is talking to me from that studio, the first little house, in a hoodie and spectacles and a pink plaid jacket, leaning in wide-eyed as she remembers the fear. This is not what parents do, she’d thought, shaking a little, this is not how life works. But… what if ?
When she’d tell friends about her new Wednesday nights, alone, “Everyone would be kind of shocked, like wait a sec, how did you get that? I didn’t know that was a thing we could get.” She’d reply, “‘I mean, I just thought of it and it seems fine.’ But it was one of those things where you pull out one thread and then it’s like… why is everything the way it is?” Soon she had moved full-time into the second little house, splitting from Mills, coparenting and creating a kind of compound – a new little life built on to the back of the old one. She has rebuilt the place piece by piece, finding old rugs and sofas through tips from fans, employing a young artist to build a kitchen in butter yellow gloss. “The reason I had this studio was not just for practical reasons – I needed this psychic space, this aloneness to be free in.” Here, instead of being a mother, or a wife, she was just a person.
July grew up in California then moved to Portland, Oregon. She took the name July at 15, after a character in one of her best friend’s stories, changing it legally at 20 – she was involved in the post-punk Riot Grrrl scene by then, making music and working as a stripper in a peep show to fund her art practice. After the release of her award- winning film Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005, some critics responded (as they would about much of her work that makes the mundane seem remarkable, dealing with loneliness, love, sex, violence and death) by dismissing it with descriptions like “twee”, while her male peers were credited for their surreal genius.
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why, despite having work in major collections across the world, this year sees her first ever solo gallery show, at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, charting 30 years of her work. In conversation about the show, Cindy Sherman marvelled at how July “thrives in scary situations, in risk-taking”.
I visited on a warm afternoon a few weeks after July had left – she had stayed for too long, she said, talking to visitors, listening to their stories, “Being super nerdy.” There is a short blonde wig on the wall, which July wore in her 20s working at the peep show, and a piece created with her one-time Uber driver, and everywhere, evidence of her urgent, joyful, sometimes impossible, need to connect with other people. I lost myself for a little while, watching a film of her 2015 piece New Society, in which, inviting an audience to join her in transforming the theatre into an intentional community, she gestured to the possibility of another, better world.
Soon after beginning those Wednesday sleepovers, July started to realise something about herself. “I’ve never followed any rules as to my career…” she starts – a career which has, in her 50 years, produced three feature films (two of which she also starred in), a book of short stories, art (including an exhibition at the Venice Biennale) and now two novels. Vanity Fair describes her career as “multifaceted”, and in 2012 the satirical magazine The Onion ran a piece titled “Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is” – “But I didn’t realise that rulelessness could extend to my whole life.”
Those Wednesday nights felt full and rich, like a whole year at a time, and she started to see “that just as the structures around a career didn’t exactly fit me, the same is true with my home and romantic life”. It was around this time that she started researching her novel by interviewing scores of gynaecologists, naturopaths and older friends about menopause, eventually focusing on what this stage of life means for desire. The process sounds equal parts liberating and derailing. “I’m OK now,” she promises, “but only because I changed my life while writing – the book was my companion and confidant, but there were many points early on where I was like, this is an impossible book.”
Why? “There was the thought: should I just grow up? Get over myself, get it together, whether it’s a feeling about the body or about marriage, or getting older or sexuality, desire, all these things?” All these little things. But through those conversations she came to believe that menopause “might not just be a problem, but a really important time. And I would often think, if men had this huge change, it would be considered monumental! There would be rituals. There’d be holidays. There’d be rights and religions, and so, once I worked through the need to simply educate,” which, it so happens, she does – this is a novel that contains charts and statistics alongside “giddy, bold, mind-blowing” (according to George Saunders) prose, “I came to think it was the mythology that’s missing. The many varied and contradictory accounts that ultimately create the picture of an important time.” When we get our periods we’re told we’re becoming a woman. What do we become when we hit menopause? “No,” she lifts one finger, clarification, “when we get our periods we become a woman for men, because that’s when we can procreate. Now, we become a woman for ourselves.”
Talking to these older women, she started to consider time in a new way. As a young person she’d thought ahead to the family she might have, the fantasy, maybe, of being a star. Now at 50, “When I look ahead the same number of years, then it’s death at the end. You start setting your goals.” To my polite open mouth she says, gently, “I’m giving you the sense of the headspace that I was in when I was writing, which was, ‘Who do I want to be as a dying person?’” Here is, maybe, the hidden, spiritual element of the book. “So much of what you thought was you was maybe really other people. That starts to become more clear. And the weird part is,” she chuckles earnestly, “there can be discomfort, but I think there’s a kind of psychedelic joy to it, too.” And this is what the novel, All Fours, revealed itself to be about.
So, OK. This book.I read a proof copy early, and then I put it down and shakily messaged a series of friends, and then I read it all over again. It’s the story of a semi-famous artist navigating the second half of her life. She sets off on a road-trip to New York alone, but finds herself instead secretly checking into a motel half an hour from the home she shares with her husband and kid. Once