Get up off ‘All Fours’?

Some complex thoughts on the “Miranda July effect”, These Times and my longing for a communitarian feminism.

Note: I am writing here in quite broad brush strokes about gender, particularly about female midlife experience. I know several of you would question or even see yourself as sitting outside of binary categories - thank you for being here. Please do feel free to complicate, question or critique (ideally constructively) in the comments. I’d be very interested to hear how this lands with people from different perspectives.

"P9210759 Palm Trees Sunset crop - CS" by Art4TheGlryOfGod by Sharon is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Yesterday the new series of The Sacred podcast kicked off with an interview with

Freya India

. Freya is a writer in her mid twenties focusing on her generation of girls. She also works with Jonathan Haidt in the Free the Anxious Generation team. One of the things we discussed was her raw and challenging substack piece The Age of Abandonment about the impact of family breakdown. We had a really helpful and careful conversation about how hard it is for the children of divorce to talk about the effects of it. How painful it can be to talk about it at all, given so many people go through it and how quick we are to judge or feel judged.

I always wanted to talk about family breakdown, and it was just too close to home, literally, for me and but then I thought, well, you know, there's so many children growing up this way. There's probably so many children who feel that loyalty and sense of betrayal to their parents if they talk about it, so no one's talking about it because, you know, either their parents are divorced or they're older and they played a part in a divorce, it's… an issue that's so deep….So I think I can talk about it from a perspective of no one's to blame, but it's still a tragedy, and it's still something that I don't want to play out in my own life.

That conversation was one impetus to finally publish today’s risky feeling piece. The others were the L.A. fires and the inauguration. Here is the thing I have been avoiding saying: I am worried that the Miranda July effect might not be good for women.

This may or may not make any sense to you. If you a novel lover or pay attention to the literary world, you will have heard of All Fours by Miranda July. You may even have got a copy for Christmas. For everyone else, it has been a smash hit, featuring in books of the year lists and carried by every literary or literary-aspiring celebrity.

The novel is, essentially, auto-fiction, voiced by a narrator who shares many biographical facts with July. She is married with a child, and in midlife embarks upon an affair with a younger man, who she pursues by spending $20,000 lavishly decorating a motel room (and getting his wife to design it). Various sexual adventures ensue, she breaks up with her husband and experiments with polyamory. It’s a book about many things, including dance and unprocessed trauma, but it’s preeminent theme is the perimenopause and the restless wildness of midlife women.

I hadn't know much about Miranda July before this New Yorker profile. Reading it, I fell for her. I liked her vividness, her weird seriousness. She’s also clearly brave, an increasingly important value to me.

I also enjoyed the book. It’s promised sexy content was a bit too dark in places, but July’s prose is electric. She’s raw, hilarious and completely unsparing of herself (or at least the narrator is).

Take this:

I stood…. with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip

Or this on a mismatched libido:

Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.

Or this on receiving a note from a neighbour about seeing someone taking pictures of their house:

I put the neighbor’s note on my desk. I was busy, too, but I always have time to worry. In fact, I think I had already been worrying about someone using a telephoto lens to take pictures through our windows when the note arrived. Worrying is the wrong word—more like hoping. I hoped this was happening and had been happening since my birth, or something along these lines. If not this man through the windows, then God, or my parents, or my real parents, who are actually just my parents, or the real me, who has been waiting for the right moment to take over, tap me out. Just please let there be someone who cares enough to watch over me. It took me two days to call Brian the neighbor because I was busy savoring my position, like when a crush finally texts back and you want to enjoy having the ball in your court for a while.

My disquiet is not about her, or All Fours itself, which does not set out to be anything except a good novel. I’m wrestling instead with the book’s effect. This New York Times piece pointed to how many women were seeing it as some kind of rallying call. Hard on its heels came a Guardian piece ‘This book is my bible!’ The women who read Miranda July’s All Fours, then blew up their lives. They showed that my low lying unease about the impact on our cultural narratives had some basis.

The New York Times called it….“the talk of every group text”, having started “a whisper network of women fantasising about desire and freedom”…every book group had a friend of a friend whose life had been shaken to its foundations.

Lots of my married or partnered female friends in midlife were reading it last summer and passing it around. The meme “if you know, you know" began to crop up along side it. Whenever a story really captures the zeitgeist I start paying attention because cultural stories like these are formative. These ambient narratives construct invisible choice architecture. As we navigate our lives, the dominant stories are there, making some paths seem attractive and others not, some socially permissible and others taboo. We are hyper social creatures, constructing our selves from fragments of stories and the example of people we admire, as this quote from the Guardian piece (focused on the polyamory theme in the book) makes clear:

“Especially living in LA, I feel it’s in every topic of conversation,” she says. “I know so many people experimenting with it. But Miranda July, older and cool, makes it way more legitimate….”

The cultural scripts for midlife women are changing, and I think we may look back and see ‘All Fours year’ as a turning point.

For a long time we were invisible. Neither maiden nor crone. Some of us embodied the mother archtype, literally or otherwise, which is the ultimate de-centrering of the self. Mothering is beautiful, powerful and complex, but not open to or desired by everyone. Also, it isn’t all we are. Father has never been an all-encompassing identity, and neither need Mother be.

Alongside that script, the archetypes have been frump, grump or desperate, clinging onto youth with the help of surgeons and/or serums.

Then came all the non-fiction menopause books. We’ve lived through a necessary public educational moment. Most people know now that female midlife is as biologically disruptive as adolescence with profound knock-on effects. Another cultural story was added: “trying to stay afloat in a hormonal hurricane". All Fours takes that story from non-fiction to fiction. It also turns up the volume on a story that that has always been in the mix: Midlife women are fewer-Fs-given but more-Fs-had, bossing their sexual (re-)awakening whilst throwing off the shackles of convention and commitments, often with a younger man. It isn’t just All Fours. Variations on the theme drive Baby Girl, The Idea of You and Lonely Planet, all films released in the last year. Good Girl Grows Up. Beware, here comes WOMAN.

My goodness, I feel the pull of this. It sounds fun, right? (well, I guess that depends who you are reading this. It might also sound terrifying. Especially if you are the male husband or partner of a midlife woman).

It is a powerful narrative frame because it has truth in it. For many women there is a restless, itchy, empowering energy about these years. I have felt it. I am currently trying to surf those waves, think they are where a lot of my newfound creative energy and confidence is coming from. I see it in those of my friends, already pretty badass, who are coming out of the trenches of having young children, sleeves rolled up, eyes burning. I love them, and would ideally have them running the world. I also want more freedom for them, less duty, more joy. Yes, more pleasure.

The U- bend of happiness (the fact that most people are least satisfied in the middle of their lives) can extinguish the twinkle in all of our eyes. Responsibility, disillusionment, a sense of diminishing possibilities; they all undermine our aliveness. I want to keep mine. All Fours has put a twinkle back in a lot of women's eyes. It centres female desire and agency, to both of which I want to say yes, yes, yes¹. I just can't seem to switch off the pastoral part of me which asks: what happens after you have blown up your life and had some great orgasms? What happens when the hormonal storm settles?

The New York Times and Guardian articles (and their echoes in real lives) leave me feeling not judgey, but worried. The semi-conscious story about what a good life looks like (and in this case, what an “authentic” life is for a midlife woman) can’t help but influence us.

The implicit argument of the book is that “extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex”, as one review put it, can be transformative, and is worth pursuing at almost any cost. That pleasure defines an authentic life, and if it propels you right out of your broadly happy marriage and home life, so be it.

I don’t buy it.

I am pro-pleasure. I experience a lot of it, in general, and in marital terms. Orgasms are great. I just don’t think pleasure transforms us. It is inherently a momentary thing. Heroin addicts experience a lot of pleasure but are not the recipe for Fully Aliveness. The lives of nuns look pleasureless, yet many of them glow.

My deepest prior is that connection is the source of fully aliveness, and that ongoing, intimate, committed relationships are the most reliable source of this. We are made for each other and made by each other. Knowing and being known, over time, even when it's hard, is a huge ingredient in our flourishing. I want both pleasure and deep connection but if I had to choose? I’d go for connection. My hunch is that it is what sustains us both emotionally, and as I will come onto, in very practical ways.

Therefore, I am also pro marriage. I am pro humans committing to each other in covenant bonds of mutual care. This is for all the same reasons I am pro community. I believe it is most often how we flourish. Not always, and not under all conditions, but generally. In my book (also called Fully Alive), I said this:

I’d even go so far as to cheerlead ‘traditional marriage’, by which I mean two equal people committing to care and support each other, to share and struggle together over time. A set of serious, socially witnessed, legally binding and economically impactful promises are the strongest protection we have come up with against extractive sex…. I think marriage is still a good container for this kind of sexual humanism because like every virtue, every habit that makes me feel fully alive, it takes structure and repetition.

Connected sex, in which the other person’s particular pleasures and their emotional state are as front of mind as our own, takes practice. It doesn’t come naturally to me, or, I’d guess, to any of us. Luke Bretherton puts it more eloquently: ‘covenantal faithfulness [like marriage] is the context for cultivating intimacy over time with others . . . Rather than a territory to be defended or a narrowly prescribed set of actions to be performed, such covenantal relations are a way of talking about a set of virtues and practices through which we learn to relate fruitfully and truthfully.’ He describes marriage beautifully as ‘an expansive social practice and vocation . . . [not] marriage understood as a bounded territory. When being married or not becomes a cosh to beat people with, a form of social currency, it is a disgrace. But when we can see it as ‘an expansive social practice and vocation’ that trains us to connect in a disconnection culture, it is a jewel.

My case for marriage is...[that it is] one way we can learn to attend to the full humanity of another person, over time, even when it’s hard. And I believe that this pursuit, whether in marriage or committed friendship or close community, is what helps us be fully human ourselves.

I... want to argue that marriage is still a good thing to aim for, a good thing to protect, some-thing revolutionary despite its normcore clothes. It can teach us to care. Like Thoreau going to the woods to pursue a deep life in one place, committing to one person need be no less of an adventure.

I can believe this, and not think all marriages are good or healthy. All Fours might give some women permission for a decision they needed to make, which turns out to be right for them and their family. This might be the case for you. Only you know your relationship, your life. I have, and claim, no right to cast judgement on your decisions, and if we were in the room I would just want to hear your story.

What seems risky about the “Miranda July effect” and the wider story playing out in films like Baby Girl is that neither in the book or in many of the stories are women leaving terrible relationships. They are not miserable or in danger, just a bit…bored. In the case of the protagonist the trigger is a graph that shows female sexual desire falling off a cliff after menopause. The narrator wants to make the most of the window before that point.²

My fear is that the part of the story that links leaving your partner to find more and better sex becomes the dominant story of what a courageous, authentic, empowered midlife looks like, it could be formative in unhelpful ways.

I was admitting these complex and (what felt like) unsisterly qualms to a dear friend and philosopher, Erin Plunkett. She is smart, feminist and another Miranda July fan. She sent me this from her book, drawing on the work of philosopher Stanley Cavell on the Hollywood ‘comedies of remarriage’ from the 1930s and 1940s which deal with couples who marry and separate and marry again

Cavell’s examples of this process often involve banal scenes from married life or intimate relationships, when boredom or issues of fairness or trust arise that change the scope or meaning of how one partner sees the other, or herself…this pattern, for Cavell, becomes indicative of a commitment to seeing another person (and so seeing oneself), a process that involves continually reviving the ‘spirit’ in which things are seen and refusing to look away or to become complacent. In the Tracy and Hepburn film Woman of the Year (1942),:

“The happiness of marriage is dissociated from any a priori concept of what constitutes domesticity…. Marriage here is being presented as […...] the scene in which the chance for happiness is shown as the mutual acknowledgement of separateness, in which the prospect is not for the passing of years (until death parts us) but for the willing repetition of days, willingness for the everyday (until our true minds become unreadable to one another).”

The shift from an a priori concept of domesticity, to which a married couple succeeds or fails to conform, to the improvisational arrangement that Cavell describes offers a sense of what successful repetition might look like. It is a shift into becoming, an acknowledgement of the on-going nature of relationship and a willingness to….renew the aspect under which one sees another and oneself. It is also an acknowledgement of inevitable difference or separateness, which is not allowed to become an excuse for withdrawal or disinterest

My vision of marriage that can be a healthy adventurous habitat for even a fewer-fs-to-give midlife women is closer to this “improvisational arrangement”. An ongoing co-creation between two intimate people who know they are also, always, strangers. It is ultimately, like almost everything I am coming to value, a practice of attention.

I’ve also been reading Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lembke. Her argument is that our dopamine saturated environment is making it increasingly difficult to find real pleasure. Our frantic, addictive screen-based lives are creating the same effect we are used to seeing in drugs and alcohol abuse - a need for higher and higher doses of dopamine to achieve the same effect.

This is making taking pleasure in anything, especially anything familiar, more and more difficult. It is also corroding connection. It made me wonder whether some of the long term relationships which are boring women are related to this context - everything but the most extreme experiences seem boring when you’ve had your pleasure sensors dulled by an excess of dopamine.

I also have a longer term concern for the women treating All Fours like a self-help book. Wind the tape forward. If, as the book implies, female sexual desire goes down after menopause ends, will these choices still seem good ones? Also, (and this is where I pivot to apocalyptic) as the world gets more turbulent is this story going to serve us?

Watching the L.A. fires sweep through both the real city where Miranda July lives and the fictional one of her narrator, something began to crystallise. The inauguration with all its sinister foreshadowing landed it. The cultural story of midlife women emerging here is a fundamentally individualised one. It’s focus is on expression of an authentic self, pursuing autonomy, freedom and pleasure. None of which are bad things. I just don’t think they are ultimate. They are also the key psychological levers which consumer capitalism pulls on, a system which needs us always restless, always thinking the good life is somewhere, anywhere else. Under this kind of capitalism, the more our relational needs can be met through the market rather than each other, the better.

Freya India

also speaks about what she sees as a predatory mental health industry advertising remote and AI driven therapy to young girls who might actually just need some real friends.

Individualism is coming to the end of its road. We are going to need each other. We are going to need (already need) local, loyal, long term relationships. It seems inevitable that emergencies are going to become more regular as the climate crisis unfolds and democracy disintegrates in the hands of a few power-drunk computer nerds and their over-grown frat boy friends. In situations like these, good sex will not save you. When the world is upside down, the people who come through relatively whole, emotionally and physically, are those embedded in relationships of mutual care and support. People who are living in interdependence, not individualism. Who can share skills, assets and capacity, who can have each other’s back and sacrifice for the common good.

We can find this in a committed network of friends and in local community. Sadly, many of us struggle to. We might also find it outside the boundaries of “heteronormative” marriage. I have friends in at least one polycule which I would bet on supporting each other through hard times. It doesn’t seem impossible that the looser web of relationships left at the end All Fours could too. However, for the majority of us, if we are able to, the primary place we find it is the family, whatever that looks like. There is a reason people still make vows. They can hold us together, hold us into the care of children, even when we are bored. For these strangely pragmatic seeming reasons, I worry about women leaving decent marriages in search of some elusive authentic self, some dream of total sexual becoming. I’m not sure it’s worth the cost.

Part of the knottyness for me in this is related to my ongoing desire for a truly communitarian, care-embracing feminism. Men have long left their spouses for younger women in midlife, too often strewing the kind of havoc Freya India speaks of in their wake. We have been able to have compassion, understand some of the drivers and still not find it something to celebrate. I want women to be able to find liberation and joy and yes, really good sex, without having to do the same. Surely, surely, we can have both the flourishing of women and the flourishing of the wider family at the heart of things. Maybe I’m just naive and this really is all zero sum. Maybe a truly communitarian feminism is impossible because women always end up shouldering too much of the relational burden. Maybe we’ve spent too long sacrificing pleasure on the altar of care and this is all a healthy corrective. I’ve not managed to write myself clear on this one. I’d love to hear what you think.

I’ll just leave you with this final quote from the Guardian article.

Besides, the question the book poses isn’t really about whether to be polyamorous; rather, whether a woman who walks out on a partner who is “perfect in all these ways” is just too radical to stomach. Like Imogen, Lilly tried to get her partner to read it. He listened to the audiobook, “on double speed, probably. And he said: ‘I loved this book, but a lot of this is concerning to me.’ And then we ended it pretty much that week.” She moved into a new place a few weeks ago and the first thing she bought, just like All Fours’ protagonist, “was a pink coverlet for my bed”.

The quest for truth, Imogen says, “is hard. I don’t know whether Miranda July would want to be responsible for a lot of people blowing up their lives. Right now I’m really in the scary, anxious part, but you have to hold your head up and know that in the end, looking back, everybody needs to live their most authentic life.”

I don’t know if I agree. What I do know is I am cheering for Imogen and Lilly. I hope they are ok.

1. Narf

2. In one of the many ways the novel is clever and complex, the narrator can’t later find this graph again, and it appears it’s stark prediction is not as straightforward as she’d thought.