The New Yorker Radio Hour - Miranda July’s New Novel Takes on Marriage, Desire, and Perimenopause

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Some time in her forties, something shifted in Miranda July. She started having “this new, grim feeling about the future, which was weird, because I’m, like, a very excited, hopeful person,” she tells New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz, who recently profiled July for the magazine. July attributes some of that “feeling” to the disparity between all the information there was about her reproductive years, and how little there was about middle age and perimenopause. “If it’s stories that we need, you know, dibs. Dibs on menopause,” she tells Schwartz. July’s explorations and conversations with other women made their way into her new novel, “All Fours,” about a woman who upends her life and her marriage, and her sense of who she is and who she’ll be in the second half of her life. Miranda July is fifty now, and she is taking some pages from her own book.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Miranda July is an actor, a filmmaker, and a writer. And she's got a new novel out called All Fours. Staff writer Alexander Schwartz has been reading and watching Miranda July for nearly 20 years. I saw her first movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which came out in 2005, the same year, that I graduated from high school. So when I heard she had a new book coming out, I was very curious.

And I was blown away. It was funny. It was fast-moving. It was exciting. It was scary. Here's Miranda July reading her book. Originally, I had planned to get to New York the normal way, fly there. But then Harris and I had gotten into an odd conversation with another couple at a party.

I think this is a book that readers will read while biting their nails or covering their eyes. it is really moving. It's wild and it's adventurous, and it has to do with a woman whose life changes and who changes her own life totally when she reaches middle age. And at the start of the book,

she goes on a road trip. She's headed to New York, but surprise, she doesn't make it to New York. Basically, less than an hour, outside of L.A., she pulls into a small town called Monrovia, goes to a gas station, meets a young guy there,

and what follows this encounter upends her entire life. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far, each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A mad woman? Probably.

But my more seasoned parts just had to be. patient, hold their tongues, their many and sharp tongues, and give this new girl a chance. Alexandra Schwartz sat down with Miranda July recently to talk about her new book. Hi, Miranda. Hi. So where did this book come from for you? Well, I mean, this book is about a woman in the middle of her life, and it tries to be as honest as possible.

So it's about the body, the changing. body, perimenopause, desire, marriage, being a mother, and kind of how all those things maybe stop fitting together in a way that makes sense or has enough room in it for this narrator and maybe for a lot of women as they kind of come into themselves. I really think it probably began in my 40s having this new grim feeling about the future, which was weird because I'm like a very excited, hopeful person, but it seemed like this wasn't my decision. Like there was now kind of in the future this maplessness and even kind of basic medical facts

about my body, which was so weird because literally just a few years before, there was kind of an over-involvement in my reproductive system and so much information. July has a 12-year-old with the filmmaker Mike Mills. They got married in 2009. They're now getting a divorce. So as she approached middle age, she kept her eyes peeled and her ears open for anything that she could learn from other women about what might come next. So a woman would say something or I'd read something.

I'd write it down, and I was like, maybe it's worth it to not age gracefully. Maybe it's worth it to not be cool about this because there's so much here. And what a gold mind. You know, it's not that we haven't read women writing at this age, you know, but to specifically name everything. And that seemed to be the project to me and then to keep living as I wrote it. I think it may be fair to say that some of the things that the narrator in your novel was going through, you were also going through as you were writing the book. And some of the things that started happening to her started happening to you too. Can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. Eventually, you know, as I kept living while writing this and as I kept kind of creating room for myself through the writing of the book, interesting things were happening in my life. You know, I was having. conversations with all the women I knew and my husband about the structure of marriage and why do

we do it the way we do it. There was another kind of work I was doing talking to other women, gynecologists and naturopaths and older women who had already been through this time that I was writing about this perimenopausal time. So there was a version of the book, that existed for quite a long time that was almost more of a manual because I was so filled with information. So at that point, I began to realize, like, oh, like, yes, there can be information there, but it should be entirely warped by this narrator's desires, which are thick. I mean, one thing, there was this kind of tension, like, oh, I'm not used to writing at the speed of life. And how do you do that? Because the whole thing about fiction is it kind of, you need

to process things. They need to go into your unconscious and then kind of come out in surprising ways so you can be surprised. And so you can just have the whole thing sort of crystallize in a way that it doesn't in real life. The novel focuses a lot on something you call the cliff. It's both a literal thing in the book. It's a graph. And it's a metaphor for the narrator's fear. of life after 50. Can you explain what this idea the cliff is for you? I mean, in a literal sense in the book, this is the first book I've written that has a graph in it. I was very excited about the graph. And the graph is a hormone graph and it shows, you know, if you picture like a hat or something, like women's hormones go up really steeply in puberty. And then there's the top of the hat

and that's sort of your whole adult life until, oops, then you're going down the other side of the hat. The hat is good I didn't use the hat instead of the cliff in the book because I think the cliff packs more punch, don't you? Yeah, the hat doesn't quite have, doesn't convey the terror of the bottom in the same way that the cliff does. No one's ever walked on a hat, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, scale is actually a big issue.

This looks like an actual thing you would. would feel in your life, that steep slope. And in fact, the whole book takes place in that slope, that transition from the top of the cliff to the bottom. She's not at the bottom by the end, but it is a book that takes seriously that just transitions and transformations of all kind. Yeah, I mean, you know, on the one hand, the cliff is this idea about middle age, and especially for women, that, as you say, literally, hormones will drop what came before will be different than what comes next. But it does strike me that this is an idea you've dealt with before and not just about midlife. You know, I'm thinking about your film The Future from 2011, which is a movie I really love.

You play a character who's in her 30s, who's terrified of whatever the next stage in life might hold. Let's listen to a clip from that film. It could just be six months. That's if we do a bad job. We're not going to do a bad job. Well, I have to be able to go to New York. No, one of us always has to be here now. So I always have to be home? What if I don't want to be doing tech support for five more years?

We'll be 40 in five years. Oh, 40 is basically 50, and then after 50, the rest is just... Loose change. Loose change? Like, not quite enough to get anything you're really? to get anything you really want. Oh, God. So for all practical purposes in a month, that's it for us.

She doesn't really want to commit to a career or anything else that might tie her down and kind of close off the possibilities that you have when you're a young person, that life can go in any direction. Choosing a direction means choosing against a bunch of other directions. So do you think the cliff is... is an idea that's been with you for a long time. Is an idea that's changed for you over time? Yeah.

Yeah, you're right. I take each stage, you know, pretty hard. Each new part of life, I'm always, I remember when everyone started getting married. And I'd really just be like, I'd have to train myself to be like, oh, wonderful. When really I was like, isn't this weird? Why are we all doing this? What's next? Children? Like, what? You know, like, and these things that really don't bear, I mean, literally you could not think about them and the culture does the work for you. You know, so, yes, I've been thinking more than necessary about each stage for a long time. some of that comes from wanting freedom and seeing each stage as a kind of external shaping of my life, you know, and what it's allowed to mean.

And there were such built-in meanings to each stage until this one. The reason the cliff is so surprising is because you weren't connecting the dots because no one was presenting the story. I mean, you don't present the story if it's. It's not aspirational, you know, it's just sort of nothing. And I think that's the startling feeling. And one that seems repairable to me, because if it's stories, what we need, you know, dibs on menopause, something that literally no one wants dibs on. But I felt like I was the man for the job.

New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz. Speaking with Miranda July, more to come. So we're talking a lot about live stages. And right now, I kind of think we may be at a moment where separation is starting to become its own life stage. Polyamory is in the air. People are talking about opening marriages. Certainly this was not the case just a few years ago. Separation is something that you write about in all fours. It's something you've gone through.

How, as a writer and as a person, did you confront that stage of life? Well, it's hard to answer that. Like, my best answer is the book, you know, in a way, because it's like it's too personal, really, to talk about. But I'll say that I did have to have a space where I really felt free to say all the things with no, no repercussions, no judgment. And that that, that, that, that, that, That was my friend Isabel's studio, Isabel Albuquerque, the sculptor during the time I was writing the book, and during the time that I was thinking about marriage and questioning its structure. And so the conversations, I mean, we would often leave with a sort of task for ourselves over the next week before we met again. You know, I remember one task was trying to live according to our cycles, you know, our menstrual cycles, which meant sort of like rest when you're tired. If you feel unhinged kind of like this, like take that as sort of gold and questions about desire too.

Like, you know, is it possible that perimenopause, a time when your hormones are fluctuating, is meant to make you alive to sides of yourself that were previously less important for this second half of your life. And so this is an important moment not to miss that if you were to lock down during this moment, you might have a very bitter second half of your life. I mean, I think of you, hopefully not going to embarrass you by saying this, but I think of you as one of the great sex writers, in part because you really get at how freaky and unreal and real at the same time sex can be. So how do you sit down to write a great sex scene? Hmm. Well, I mean, for one thing, you feel it in your body, you know, and so much. of it is longing and not having, especially in this book, I became especially interested in sort of how much is the body, like what is sex? Is it the fantasy? Like in the book, there's

sort of a distinction between body-rooted people and mind-rooted people sex-wise. I mean, I wrote so much stuff that just flowed out that was so fun to write so exciting and then I would go back and I'd think that's not really true which is so easy to do because so much of sex is about kind of a story right like in real life sex is a fiction so how do you how do you get at the truth of something that's already fictional and you know one way is to also talk about when you're not aroused, you know, like the narrator sometimes is like inconveniently not feeling it. You know, we're in this space, we're talking about the body.

Of course, we've talked about sex fine, but dance is huge in this book as well. The object of the narrator's obsession aspires to be dancer. and I know dance has increasingly been a part of your life. You know, what place does dancing have for you in life and in your writing? Yeah, it's dance is kind of crept up on me. I'm surprised these days when I look at old work and I'm like, well, that's dance too. You know, like that it's kind of always been there, but maybe only as I've gotten older.

and it's like more interesting to be a dancing body when you're not a young body. Also, you know, as I was like a stripper, you know, I worked in peep shows at a time. So like that got very, like the meaning of a young dancing woman's body was so tied up in this certain kind of show. And then, you know, I outlived that. And sometimes when I'd be writing and just my brain is, you know, my head is literally hot and my eyes are working so hard. And maybe I'd feel I'd either done something good or I'd just had to give up and put on music, which is not intellectual in the same way. And the freedom and the kind of intelligence and even humor that comes in the body. And I think in this book, I wanted to write, like, maybe one thing about being this age besides all the questioning was the feeling that I maybe knew some things by now, having devoted my whole life to art, to making things in all different forms.

So there's a great scene in your book where the narrator is with Davy, the object of her obsession, this hurts employee, who also happens to be a great. They're in a motel room that she's rented in this podunk town, and they dance together. Let's hear some of that from your book. We started dancing. By now it didn't bother me that I wasn't at his skill level. I understood that total commitment was the only thing that mattered. The room appeared in shattered pieces. We saw each other and then we didn't.

In the brief instant when the strobe caught us, we were just souls, meeting each other's eyes. dead serious. This wasn't possible with language. Words always took things down a notch with their supposed knowing, their elaborate trying. Words kept you in two separate brains. Dance was the way to close the gap.

What gap? How could there be a gap between any two living things when every living thing was so obviously one thing? So dance was a good holder for me because of the body, because of the desire, because of this specific man's body, it gave me, you know, a way to also write about him, you know. But there's, I remember just being telling people, like, he's a dancer,

he's a hip-hop dance, like, being, like, so horrified at my own creation. Like, can you believe I'm doing this? And there was even something about, like, the embarrassment of that. You know, it's that kind of embarrassment that lets you know, like, you're on to something. Thank you so much, Miranda. Thank you, Alex. Miranda July, speaking with New Yorker staff writer, Alexandra Schwartz, about her new novel, All Fours. You can read Alex's profile of Miranda July at New Yorker.com.

That's the show for this week. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Callalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman.

With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. We had additional help this week from Ramele Wood. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.