Her new novel is a fierce coming-of-middle-age story, five years in the making. Here, the artist explains why she wrote the book for all women
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH WEINBERG
I’M ONLY ON THE SECOND PAGE OF Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, when I start highlighting: ‘...that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting’, she writes. Like a fan-girl, I read it aloud to her when we meet over Zoom, July speaking from the book-lined office in her new LA home. ‘It’s funny, you’re not the first person to read that line to me,’ she says, laughing. ‘That’s one of those things I wrote being like, I guess I’ll just write that as if everyone knows what I mean, when, in fact, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one’.
July is far from being the only one. The multi-hyphenate creative has the extraordinary ability to distil near-universal female experiences into a single sentence, invariably underpinned with her trademark fearless vulnerability and searing wit. Unsurprisingly, she has a devoted following. Her artistic output is remarkably diverse: she’s written bestselling shortstory collections, directed and starred in a Cannes-award-winning feature and numerous other films, and her first solo art exhibition, ‘Miranda July: New Society’, is currently showing at Milan’s Osservatorio.
If that wasn’t enough, at 50, she has now written the definitive, albeit fictional, guide to the burn-it-all-down, radicalising and yet incomprehensibly ignored chapter of a woman’s life that is the menopause. The book, her second novel, follows the journey of an unnamed forty-something semi-famous artist in a coming-of-middleage story. Sound familiar? ‘My best friend can read it and be like, wow, it’s so weird how none of this happened and yet it’s all the truth. Some people will just be like, oh, well, it’s her. I have this problem worse than any other writer because of the career that I’ve made, and maybe that’s a tool to be used. I know it’s fiction, but the fact that a lot of my audience has grown up alongside me, that’s a useful thing to loan to the character.’
FORCE OF JULY
She wrote the novel over five years, as ‘a companion to this important stretch of life that is super-mapless. There is the narrowest, most shadowy understanding of what my future –physically, sexually and intimately – as a mother, artist and woman, might look like. So I was like, oh! This is wide open, in ways that are depressing and exciting, because anything yo
