Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’

With each passing year, a woman becomes more attuned to what matters, more fluent in her boundaries, more rooted in her contradictions. The body may soften, sag, or ache, but it also speaks with a new kind of honesty

What does it mean to be both a working artist and an aging mother? What is it like to navigate the often painful shifts in identity required by each role? How does it feel to slip between selves—artist, mother, aging woman—and encounter the subtle glitches, the moments of disorientation, that emerge in the spaces between? Miranda July addresses these posers in ‘All Fours’, one of the finalists for this year’s Women Prize for Fiction.

The author shows us how desire in aging women shifts and ambition reshapes itself. We see that the mirror may show unfamiliar contours, but the soul behind the eyes becomes clearer.

From the novel, we are left in no doubt that aging in women is a profoundly transformative experience—physical, emotional. For the working artist and mother, aging adds another layer to the shifting terrain of identity. It brings both clarity and contradiction: a deepening of self-knowledge alongside a society’s diminishing gaze. As the body changes, as children grow and creative urgencies shift, the woman finds herself moving through multiple selves—each bearing its own joys, griefs, and quiet revolutions.

At the beginning of the novel, the unnamed forty-five-year-old narrator is about to set off on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this isn’t just an ordinary journey; there’s much more beneath the surface than meets the eye. We sense the weight of someone trapped in a marriage and yearning for freedom. It’s only later that we come to understand her longing for escape. It is also later that we understand the link between her quest for escape and the fact that aging is an unpeeling of falsehoods and a reckoning with truth.

The narrator, who regularly finds herself wondering if her life is real, is the mother of a child, Sam, born prematurely, a situation which subjects her and her husband Harris to eight anguished weeks.

The circumstances surrounding the child’s birth leave her feeling estranged from both her husband and reality. In search of an escape from the confining space motherhood has placed her in, she turns to art—keeping her struggles hidden from her husband. At times, she resorts to lies to conceal the truth, and she relies on elaborate fantasies to sustain her sexual connection.

On her way to New York, just a few miles outside Los Angeles—in a quiet town called Monrovia—she meets Davey, a young Hertz employee. She runs into him two more times that same day. Choosing to rest in the small town, she books a room at a modest motel, its facilities well below her usual standard. For reasons known only to her, she decides to renovate the room and hires Davey’s wife, Claire, as the interior decorator. Both the motel’s management and Claire are baffled by her decision to pour thousands of dollars into the redesign.

After the room’s redesign is complete, she ends up staying in the town for three weeks, well beyond what she had first planned. Each afternoon, Davey visits her. A mutual, unspoken passion begins to surface—tender yet unresolved. She learns that Davey is a dancer, and through dance, they begin to explore new forms of intimacy, ones that slowly draw her closer to reality. Within its faded walls, the room offers her a blueprint for life. “I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.”

When she returns to Los Angeles, she is met with the daunting task of making sense of her life. Should she come clean with Harris? What is clear is that she must confront the quiet weight of menopause, the haunting memory of her Grandma Esther and Aunt Ruth who both took their lives in their fifties, and her own brush with death during the birth of her now-seven-year-old non-binary child.

The narrator finds herself comparing the lives of men and women in their late forties, noticing the stark contrast in the ease with which men seem to glide through this phase. Her husband’s experience, she muses, is like “ambling along a gently sloping country road with a piece of straw in the corner of his mouth, whistling” with effortless contentment. Meanwhile, her situation makes her imagine “getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn’t discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped.”

The book also delves into the theme of female friendship. We see this through the narrator’s bond with Jordi, her fellow artist. In their open conversations, the narrator confides in Jordi about her anxieties, fears, and the bizarre predicaments she often finds herself in. Jordi serves as a guiding figure, offering advice and always taking her calls, no matter the time of night. Through these exchanges, the narrator reveals that speaking with Jordi is “my one chance a week to be myself.”

July delivers a humane and sympathetic exploration of the journey to menopause, a subject often shrouded in silence and misunderstanding, as if it were something to conceal rather than acknowledge with empathy and honesty. The author confronts this phase of life that our society urges women to endure quietly. She addresses it in a way that calls out our society for its failure to support women through a delicate moment the narrator’s friend, Mary, sees as the time women must “decide what to do when you come to the fork in the road”.

My final take: July clearly shows that aging, especially in women, is not a fading, but a complex becoming. It is not the slow erasure our culture often suggests, but a deep unfolding—a gathering of layers, wisdom, scars, and softness. With each passing year, a woman becomes more attuned to what matters, more fluent in her boundaries, more rooted in her contradictions. The body may soften, sag, or ache, but it also speaks with a new kind of honesty.

This is a novel with brutal honesty about sexual exploration!