It is perhaps a bit uncouth, as much of the world writhes in unseasonable heat, to say that we as a species are “cooked.” We’re “toast.” But that’s the phrasing I keep seeing on social media this month and it does feel apt, if also all too literal. We have our own heat advisory going into effect this week in Northern California. It’s not supposed to start for a couple days, but at my soccer game this morning everyone clustered in the shade during our water break, all of us complaining, scarlet-faced, panting like dogs.
Sometimes, looking at the news, I wonder whether any of the people who thought climate change wasn’t real are starting to change their minds. Of course, soon enough it won’t matter. Heat is coming for all of us, or some other natural disaster, or nonstop war. It wouldn’t be the introduction to this newsletter if I didn’t open with some version of this sentiment: we are deeply, incontrovertibly, kaleidoscopically fucked.
And with that out of the way, now on to books. In May and June I started a great many and finished fewer than usual. (I almost never abandon a partially read book, but it seems some of these might take a long time to get through.) A few of those I have finished had a real impact on me.
One is All Fours by Miranda July, a novel about a perimenopausal artist and mother navigating a changing relationship to her body, her husband, her work, and the wider world. She departs for a solo cross-country road trip (LA to NY), but decamps instead to a nearby motel where she experiences an awakening — sexual, physical, psychic, spiritual, creative. It’s not a coincidence that it happens away from her husband and child, but that fact gives the narrative its engine. Eventually, she’ll have to return and, unless she keeps up a lie, face a reckoning.
This book has gotten much mainstream press and has fueled a lot of group-chat obsession, so I hesitate to write a review here. There has even been mainstream press about the group-chat obsession with it. A piece in the New York Times called “The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Because of Miranda July” tells about women sending their friends screenshots of its pages and scheduling Zoom calls to discuss it and ask one another questions about how to live.
I loved this book for many reasons. The writing is powerful, the register of its observations is at once minute and claustrophobic, and those observations themselves are true to life (if, like me, you’re a compulsive noticer of minutiae). It’s brazenly embarrassing and painfully funny, and the terrain it surveys — the zillions of changes in the lead-up to “The Change” — is under-explored (even if one can’t spit without hitting five middling novels about how motherhood is tiring or whatever). This book is, I believe, a truly feminist work of art that grapples not only with liberation but with narcissism, vanity, low-key fame, and the one-two punch of an uncomfortably heightened sex drive and diminishing sexual power. It does, though, feel very white and I long to read a smart class analysis of the narrator’s relationship to certain other characters. July’s sensibility can also be a bit precious and twee here and there, but she’s arguably brilliant and the novel gathers an undeniable potency (a revealing word choice in this context).
The nameless narrator of All Fours joins a squad of horny first-person heroines, including Greta from Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss and Kit from Kimberly King Parsons’s We Were the Universe, which I’m about halfway through. (I really hate that we’re using the word horny like this all the time now, but it’s the best descriptor for these three characters.) But July’s gal is sadder than all of them. In spite of an insistence on sadness — a hallmark, perhaps, of female narrators? — Greta and Kit are less believable in their proclaimed misery, whereas July’s narrator is kind of living in a quiet scream. It’s very affecting.
I admit I resent the implication — in dozens of Instagram posts and in that Times piece — that white, upper-middle-class married women might actually leave their husbands and entirely transform their lives as a result of reading All Fours. It is, of course, possible. And it may just be my bad attitude, the bitterness of a long-divorced mother who’s weathered great stress in order to (afford to) live outside the bounds of traditional matrimony, but I think part of the popularity of a story like this comes from the way it offers up separation or divorce as a juicy thought experiment. The book chronicles the pain and wonder of solitude in motherhood, and of contemplating a radical life choice, offering a brief fantasy of autonomy without any risk. I can hear the voiceover in the commercial: “We do the work of a feminist reclamation of agency so you don’t have to!”
Of course, presenting other lives is what so many stories do and I often love them for just that. Also, is divorce still a radical life choice? I’m probably just being brittle. Anyway, count me among those who were deeply moved by this weird, heavy, very entertaining book.
I read two books on the recommendation of other books-focused newsletter writers this month. One was Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, which Jim Ruland wrote about in his wonderful newsletter Message from the Underworld.
It’s a taut novel about the passion, obsession, intimacy, and violence of women’s boxing and it’s written through a series of fights. It’s unusual and fast-paced. Worth reading, which I did in an afternoon.
I also read Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by Jószef Debreczeni, recommended by Dorian Stuber in his newsletter Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau. (Our reading tastes are very similar, so I’ve gotten many recs here and you should too.) This is a Holocaust memoir written by a Hungarian journalist and originally published in 1950, but only recently published in English translation. It’s an unremitting catalogue of horrors, a testament to the savagery and arbitrariness of the concentration camps (Debreczeni was in many, including some I’d never heard of, like Fürstenstein and Dörnhau — there were more than a thousand camps) but written with literary flair and devoted not just to chronicling details but also to analyzing the way power works in an environment of scarcity and degradation. It’s gripping and very upsetting, definitely one of the best books I’ve read about the Holocaust.
It must also be said that reading it now only ratchets up the devastating sense that this history of dehumanization and slaughter is repeating itself, only this time with Jews at the helm. I know that in many ways the analogy does not hold, but there are profoundly disturbing echoes. This passage, which struck me, could very easily be written about Jews and Palestinians.
Other books:
My Work by Olga Ravn — an interesting and engrossing, but occasionally tedious project by a Danish writer, a very big book I read quickly, about the repetitive nature of motherhood and the vicissitudes of postpartum depression.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara — the product of obsessive focus and a staggering amount of research into the Golden State Killer. Fascinating, but only read it if you’re prepared to never again feel safe in your own home.
Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke — a very good character-driven debut about a difficult homecoming for a queer Jamaican woman who is mourning her younger brother.
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley — a memoir about the loss of a friend that I found deeply moving and engaging. A testament to the outsized impact friendships can have on us. Crosley is an incredibly good writer.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny O’Dell — an attempt at an antidote to climate (and other) despair that kind of worked? An imaginative guide to thinking outside of capitalist time. I'm likely to just remain inspired by it without actually changing my habits (like married women readers with All Fours), but nonetheless I really enjoy how O’Dell’s mind works. I was lucky to get to talk to her about her last great book, How to Do Nothing.
More: A Memoir of Open Marriage by Molly Roden — I simply could not stand this. With regard to questions of love, fidelity, loyalty, sexuality, partnership, if All Fours is a work of philosophy then this is a board book.
In so-called real life in May and June I also celebrated my friend Carvell Wallace’s beautiful new memoir Another Word for Love at Pegasus Books in Berkeley and celebrated the arrival of Womb House Books, the brick-and-mortar feminist bookstore of my dreams, which the incredible Jessica Ferri has opened in Oakland.
There’s much I plan to read and do in July, so… stay tuned? And happy reading 📚🩵
Very excited to pick up All Fours! As I’m entering peri menopause the prospect of this novel is comforting. I read “The Morning Star” on your recommendation and was a million percent blown away with the low key constant tension that went almost nowhere. Never thought I would like such a novel and now I’m obsessed with reading reviews of it for better insight about what the hell actually happened. Lastly, I’ve been just devouring “All This Could Be Different” by Sarah Thankam Mathews. Have you read it? I’m preparing my MFA application for fiction to Iowa and would appreciate any recommendations for novels that came from their graduates or professors. Just finished “A Doubter’s Almanac” by Ethan Canin which is about generational inheritance of both addiction and mathematical genius.
Thanks for the shout out! I have Ravn's book and need to get to it. I loved The Employees but that seems different in almost every way.