I finally read All Fours, by Miranda July this week. It came out in May, three weeks before my book, to enormous fanfare, and has been hovering over my summer ever since. Launching a book turns you into a marketing monster in ways that are deeply unpleasant, and I’m loathe to say that some of the coverage July received, made me feel like it was overlapping with my book in ways that might be sucking oxygen from my launch.
To be sure, what July was quoted saying in interviews — “not much is mapped out past midlife for a woman, so it can feel like you’re nearing the edge of a terrifying drop” — is very similar to what I’d said during the launch of No One Tells You This, and actually in No One Tells You This. There’s also the fact that initially the main character sets out to drive to New York to stay in the Carlyle Hotel. Which, is also, roughly speaking, the beginning of NOTYT. The Carlyle must exist as some solo lady mirage fantasy.
But in complaining about this, even just to myself, I reminded myself of all the people who wrote to me when NOTYT came out to ask me if I thought I was the first person to contemplate these themes. Which, obviously not. And also, I do not want to be that person. More to the point, the whole thesis of the chapter in I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself where Ellie and I are touring Paris and contemplating plaques (which Town & Country excerpted) is essentially that we need more stories and more community between the women telling these stories.
Anyway, I loved All Fours. It’s strange and messy and unique and full of life. And probably not for everyone (plenty of friends have had the opposite reaction, but god bless a divisive book). But the fact it’s selling so well, I think, is evidence that middle age for women is all of these things. And lord, the relief of seeing even one version of it on the page is enormous.
And we are getting so many versions this year! It’s incredible. It’s even more incredible to me no one has done a feature on this. In the book world, Middle Age for women is currently being feasted on from all sides, in fiction and in non-fiction. Divorce, menopause, long-term marriage, sex, rage, enjoyment. It feels like a banquet.
To wit: February brought us Lyz Lenz’s incredible This American Ex-Wife, a manifesto on her own divorce and the joys of divorce in general (and the ways the institution of marriage punishes women). Along with Splinters, Leslie Jamison’s memoir about her own divorce. In May came All Fours. In June came my book as well as the novel Sandwich (which Jo and I discussed here), about being in the middle of menopause in the middle of a long-term marriage. And last month Sarah Manguso’s incinerating novel Liars, about the dissolution of a marriage. And then there’s Jenn Romolini’s Ambition Monster and Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s The Myth of Making It, both mid-life reckonings with the trappings of ambition. I mean, jeeezus. It’s a bonanza.
There’s a line in All Fours I keep thinking about (the tampon scene gets a lot of attention, though my reaction was mostly along the lines of, why don’t men know more about how we deal with our periods).
“Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age. Then you have to have lived experiences or you’ll go batty. Which is the normal thing: dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s — all more common in women. Fantasies consume them until they can’t tell what from….You think these cotton-candy dreams aren’t hurting anyone…but they are. You and everyone around you.”
In some ways all of these books, mine included, feel like a reckoning with all the fantasies about women we’ve been taught to adhere to since childhood that proved to be just that. Fantasies (male ones, for the most part). Instead of going batty, however, we all took to the page to testify to our own lived experiences. We got powerful. There’s nothing more powerful than having ownership of your own story. That this is all happening against the backdrop of a Republican Party intent on making their hatred of women their primary platform does not, as I wrote in the New York Times in May, seem unrelated. In some ways it feels like that most American of tropes: a wild west showdown. It also makes for some incredible reading.
Good Decisions
I’m on Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books podcast talking with Zibby Owens.
She Runs the City is running an excerpt from Enjoy.
Next week: Everything I read this summer.
I am enjoying myself so much at the midlife banquet, your dish included! I’d add Lioness by Emily Perkins, Hagitude by Dr Sharon Blackie and Deborah Levy’s trilogy to the feasting table.
I just started your latest book and have to say one little detail jumped out: the mention that at 46, women 10-20 years your senior appeared not to like you. Your explanation of why that may have been was interesting, but my first thought after doing the math was: ohhh....56-66, that is exactly when postmenopausal women stop feeling like they have to be "nice" and "liked". While it may have felt personal to you, it could have been a very global "no F*%$#s left to give" (a common statement in the menopause blogs, ha).