Miranda July Turns the Lights On (2024)

Miranda July is good at plot. Stories will come to her fully formed, like a gift from the gods; all she has to do is unwrap them. In her Los Angeles office, a little house where she keeps more than three decades’ worth of papers, photographs, awards, cassette tapes, and costumes, is a notebook that she filled in a single feverish train ride with the bones of her first feature film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005). Something similar happened with her first novel, “The First Bad Man” (2015), and with her latest movie, “Kajillionaire” (2020): a sudden vision, a pause to ponder, then a rush to get it all down. July is a director, a performer, and an artist who likes to work in media that do not seem to be media at all until she shows up to exploit their latent possibilities. She has opened an interfaith charity shop in a fancy London department store and created an app that allows strangers to deliver intimate messages and narrated the inner monologues of models during an Hermès fashion show. But she thinks of herself, first and foremost, as a writer. Sometimes, on a film set, an actor will improvise a line and she will have to tell him, No, please stick to the script. She knows what she means to say.

In the fall of 2017, July started to feel a second novel coming on. This time, though, she wanted to do things differently, to embrace the mystery of not knowing—what the writer Grace Paley called “the open destiny of life”—for as long as she could. “I felt like there was a way in which one’s anxiety is very calmed by having a plot,” she told me recently. “You feel safe. And there’s a way in which working like that can limit things if you have what you think of as a good idea too early.”

She began recording notes on her laptop. “A mom dealing with trauma. Sexism and marriage. All the women struggling with all the good men,” the first one read. A few months later: “A sort of Lord of the Rings story of marriage and motherhood and middle age.” The notes accumulated, until, eventually, there were nearly two thousand of them. The novel that resulted, “All Fours,” will be published this month, by Riverhead.

In the past, July’s protagonists have been outsiders, tenderhearted weirdos who flaunt their glittering fictionality like a piece of costume jewelry. Old Dolio, the heroine of “Kajillionaire,” played by Evan Rachel Wood, is a small-time scammer who lives in an office building with her emotionally repressive parents. Cheryl Glickman, the narrator of “The First Bad Man,” is a reclusive employee of a women’s self-defense nonprofit who ends up in an erotically explosive relationship with her bosses’ daughter. “All Fours” breaks with this tradition. The novel’s narrator is an unnamed forty-five-year-old in L.A. with a mellow music-producer husband, Harris, and a sweet, precocious seven-year-old, Sam. She is a “semi-famous” artist and writer, a status that she is at once proud of and defensive about. She is a recognizable member of Miranda July’s world. She is, in fact, a lot like Miranda July.

The novel starts with a road trip. The narrator has come into some unexpected cash: a whiskey company has licensed a sentence she once wrote, paying her twenty thousand dollars to use it in an advertisem*nt. (“It was a sentence about hand jobs but out of context it could also apply to whiskey,” she explains.) Her best friend, a sculptor named Jordi, advises her to spend the money on beauty, so she decides to drive to New York and luxuriate at the Carlyle Hotel. Less than an hour after setting off, she stops for gas in a nondescript town called Monrovia. A man in his early thirties cleans her windshield. He’s handsome, friendly. They chat. His name is Davey. He’s a Hertz employee; his wife, Claire, works at an interior-decorating company. They’re saving up a nest egg, Davey tells her—twenty thousand dollars.

The narrator checks into the Excelsior, a depressing motel nearby. She tells Harris that she’s still driving. What is she doing? “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” she asks, reasonably. “Who made the stars? Why is there life on Earth?”

The next day, she cancels her stay at the Carlyle. Then she calls Claire and hires her to renovate the room at the Excelsior. She wants to make it sumptuous, sublime, inspired by a Parisian hotel whose opulence once made her weep. She is willing to pay for the best of everything: wallpaper, carpet, tile, drapes. They agree on a fee. You can guess what it is. Within days, she and Davey have succumbed to the kind of magnetic, earth-shattering attraction that makes men compromise their gubernatorial careers and women join cults. The room at the Excelsior becomes their love nest, of a kind—Davey, an honorable soul, will not break his wedding vows by consummating their passion—but a terrible deadline looms. The narrator’s putative road trip must come to an end. What will happen when she returns home to face her life?

“If a book is really working, you’re in a narrow channel, and the water is going really fast,” the writer George Saunders, a friend of July’s, told me. That is what reading “All Fours” is like: being swept, paddleless, down a coursing river, submitting to the thrill of the rapids. July’s narrator is ecstatically trapped by a plot that she has no choice but to set in motion, even as it upends her life. July knows how this feels. When a character serves as an alter ego for her author, it is natural to wonder if the things that befall her are taken from reality. But what of the reverse? When you mold an avatar in your own image, then send her on bold and outrageous adventures, you may find that you have opened a portal from the invented world into the real one—that what you have dared to imagine on the page may enlarge your imagination for what can happen beyond it.

In early December, I knocked on the front door of July’s little house. No one answered. I went in. The main room, furnished with a long white table and a pair of fraying armchairs upholstered in a lemon-tree print, was lined with bookshelves. A long, dark braid that looked like it might have been scalped from Marina Abramović hung in a hairnet by a doorway. The doorway was familiar to me. While July was working on “All Fours,” she relieved the tedium of writing by dancing there, sensuously writhing in various costumes or states of undress. Sometimes she filmed herself and put the videos on Instagram, surfacing from her private labors to flirt with the world.

July has rented the house since 2003, when she moved from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles before making “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” Shortly after the film’s première, she and the writer-director Mike Mills began dating; she spent every night at his place in Silver Lake but kept all of her things at hers. Every few days, she would go back for a change of clothes and stumble into what felt like a time capsule. The kitchen was still stocked with beans and rice. The condoms from a previous boyfriend were still in the bathroom drawer. Nothing had changed, except her.

July kept the beans, threw out the condoms, and moved in with Mills. They married in 2009, and had a child, Hopper. She commuted daily to the little house to work, a fifteen-minute walk. But after she sold “All Fours,” in 2019, on the strength of a freewheeling seven-page proposal, she began to worry. How would she access the unencumbered focus that novel-writing demands? A book is like a child; it wants your full attention all the time. July’s solution was to spend one night a week—Wednesdays—back at her house. Released from the disruption of domestic obligations, she could write as soon as she woke.

July’s voice entered the room, followed by the rest of her. In the flesh, she does not seem like a person inclined to break into sensuous dance. She is reflective, deliberate, serious to the point of grave, though emotion can bring her, in a flash, to tears. “She’s very precise in the way she speaks and in the way she thinks and the way she dresses,” the writer Sheila Heti, who is close with July, told me. Today, she was wearing gray Wranglers with a navy-blue Nike windbreaker debonairly draped over a ribbed white turtleneck: haute greaser.

“This is a bit in transition,” July said, gesturing at the room. She had been reorganizing. On the floor was a collage of photographs that she was tinkering with in preparation for an upcoming exhibition of her work, which would be presented by Fondazione Prada in Milan. As we went to sit down, she calmly let me know that I had stepped on it.

July opened her laptop to show me more of the notes for “All Fours.” Many had to do with aging. In two months, she would turn fifty; the fact of passing fully and finally out of youth had been one of the novel’s instigating themes. July had felt herself beginning to cross that frontier when she was shooting “Kajillionaire.” “I was around these women younger than me, and then Debra Winger,” she said. “There were all kinds of things that I was watching her go through that I could relate to, more than I could to the younger women.” Winger played Old Dolio’s severe, aggressively unmaternal mother, and July asked that she wear no makeup: not an easy request for any actress, let alone one in her sixties who had once been celebrated for her looks. “I had never been around someone who was a sex symbol in her youth, like a literal, mainstream sex symbol,” July told me. “I was kind of, like, ‘I think maybe I wasn’t hot enough to have the loss be something that I have to work so hard to process.’”

Still, the idea of aging as a loss—of beauty, of femininity, of the known self itself—had stuck. In “All Fours,” the narrator has never given serious thought to getting older until she has a routine gynecology appointment and is prescribed estradiol, an estrogen cream. This is ironic: preoccupied with her longing for Davey, she had explained her moodiness to Harris by telling him that she was menopausal. But that had been inconceivable, a bluff. Now her doctor tells her that she is indeed in perimenopause. The symptoms listed by WebMD include “reduced libido, or sex drive.” She finds a chart of sex hormones that shows men’s testosterone comfortably cruising near the same levels over a lifetime; women’s estrogen looks like a camel’s hump, crashing at fifty. “We’re about to fall off a cliff,” she tells Jordi, in a panic. Davey has reawakened her dormant carnal desire, her ecstatic connection to her own body, just in time for her to lose it forever.

July read a note from 2018: “Thinking about what aging means for the trans child, the need for hormones and blockers.” (Hopper is nonbinary, as is Sam, the narrator’s kid.) “And how the physical changes of middle age/old age out anyone who is living as more feminine than they were born, which most women do. We find that makeup and cute clothes don’t work anymore.” The note went on:

It’s not that one wants to be masculine, but the femininity we were instructed in was actually youth. It peters out. For any kind of woman, especially a trans woman, but all of us. So you find yourself having to invent a new kind of femininity. From thin air. Not based on anything you’ve seen—or if you’ve seen it it’s so rare as to be part of an exquisite and obscure collection.

I told July that this reminded me of the recent hoopla when Pamela Anderson chose to go makeup-free at Paris Fashion Week. People acted as if they had never seen an older woman’s naked face before.

“Yeah,” July said. “And I did just watch all of ‘The Golden Bachelor.’” Not usually a viewer of reality TV, she had been fascinated by the self-presentation of the contestants, older women who were competing for a shot at love. “How many times do we have to hear ‘It’s not over! You get a second chance at life!’? I was, like, Yeah, it’s also not over when you’re eighty! There’s the miracle of the second chance—or eighth! Or ninth!”

After her gynecology appointment, the “All Fours” narrator begins to spiral. She feels that she is on the verge of a kind of death. Davey has long ago returned to Claire and limited contact, but she decides that she must have him at any cost. She commits to a rigorous weight-training program. Her triceps start to tighten, her butt to lift. Since leaving Monrovia, she has booked her room at the Excelsior one night a week—Wednesdays—under the pretext of working on an art project. Now she attempts to summon her would-be lover by performing a lewd, longing mating dance in front of the motel and posting it to Instagram. Davey doesn’t see the video, but Harris does. The previous issues in their marriage were one-sided, the narrator’s secret, but the dance plunges them into a shared crisis that they have no choice but to confront together.

July’s own Wednesday nights led to a comparable rupture. “It was one of those things that seemed to break a cardinal rule of being a mom and a family,” she told me. “You release your death grip on the structure as it was described to you, and suddenly each part of it you can look at.” The more she looked, the less sense the structure made.

By the time her novel was finished, so was July’s romantic relationship with Mills. Now they both had girlfriends, and were “nesting” at Mills’s house, alternating four-night stretches there with Hopper. But July needed a place of her own—and, as if by magic, one had appeared only a couple of weeks before my visit. Behind her house was another of the same size, owned by the same landlord. Its longtime tenant had just departed, leaving it in rough shape. “I haven’t made a home, really, since I was in my twenties, but I’ve made three feature films since then,” July told me. She had deliberated, then signed the lease.

We went through what had just become July’s unshared yard and up a set of stairs to the other house. The kitchen was a mess of peeling linoleum and dour, dark cabinetry. A porch off the living room had been closed in, its walls covered with seedy wood panelling that seemed to have been untouched since the seventies.

But the light was beautiful, particularly in Hopper’s future room. July was excited about the peach-tiled bathroom, which had an ancient, hazardous-looking heater coiled in the ceiling. Her own bedroom had barely enough room for a queen-size bed. July told me that she planned to treat the renovation as an art project. She wouldn’t ask her landlord for permission; she would be her own neighbor, her artistic and domestic lives arranged side by side. “Now every day will be Wednesday,” she said.

On one of July’s shelves is a collection of books by Richard Grossinger, with titles such as “Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings,” “Dark Pool of Light Volume II: Consciousness in Psychospiritual and Psychic Ranges,” and “2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration.” Grossinger is July’s father. He and her mother, Lindy Hough, met as undergraduates, and when July was born, in 1974, so was North Atlantic Books, their publishing company. When July was three and her brother, Robin, was eight, they moved from Vermont to Berkeley.

July’s parents were joined in graphomania. “Writing was not a voluntary activity for them,” Robin told me. “It wasn’t even a calling. It was a compulsion.” Hough wrote poetry and fiction. Grossinger wrote nonfiction on every topic under the sun, and many beyond it; his interests ranged from baseball to Tai Chi, ecology, bodywork, and astronomy. North Atlantic was run out of their house, and the life of the family was indistinguishable from that of the business. July and her brother served as unpaid interns of a kind, sorting through stock in the basem*nt, trekking to the post office to mail orders in a wacky assortment of boxes. July’s parents didn’t have a permit to operate out of a residential property, so when a delivery truck would arrive, Robin told me, the whole family would rush to get the books inside before the neighbors noticed. “It definitely was idiosyncratic—even for Berkeley,” he added.

July finds much to admire in her upbringing. “The fact that my parents are both writers, but not famous or successful, made me understand that this was something worth doing day in, day out,” she told me. “They had their audience, and it was enough.” Pride, however, was not unmixed with embarrassment. One of the press’s best-sellers was “The Monuments of Mars,” a treatise on alien civilization by the conspiracy theorist RichardC. Hoagland. At the grocery store, July saw an issue of the National Enquirer devoted to the same subject. “I knew we were in that territory somehow,” she said. “It was a fine line, and we just went over it.”

July has drawn on this dynamic throughout her work, most notably in “Kajillionaire.” In the early days of the press, the Grossinger-Hough family was awash in financial anxiety, and so, in the film, is Old Dolio’s. Yet it doesn’t occur to her to challenge her parents’ judgment, or their suspicion of the outside world, even when it is obvious that their scamming techniques leave much to be desired. They divide their paltry loot three ways, like business partners. “I always thought it was insulting to treat you like a child,” Old Dolio’s father, played by Richard Jenkins, tells her. “It just always seemed so insincere.” Both of July’s parents appear, in fictionalized form, in “All Fours.” The narrator’s father, who believes that his soul has been replaced by that of an impostor, meditates for hours a day and is in the grips of something he calls “the deathfield,” a state that seems to correspond to depression.

As a kid, July liked to record one-sided conversations on cassette tapes, leaving pauses so that she could play them back and chat with herself. In high school, she found her voice on the page with Snarla, a feminist zine that she made with her best friend, Johanna Fateman, who went on to become a writer and a founding member of the band Le Tigre. July created a recurring series of interviews with different parts of herself—her confidence, her insecurity. Fateman depicted the pair as fictional characters, Ida and July, the name that Miranda eventually took as her own.

Snarla turned out to be July’s ticket out into the world. She and Fateman distributed copies at 924 Gilman Street, an all-ages punk club in Berkeley, where the zine got the attention of riot-grrrl bands from the Pacific Northwest who saw in July a kindred spirit. “Her hair was bleached white, like the top of a Q-tip, and she used to wear her tights over her shoes, so she just had this otherworldly quality to her,” Carrie Brownstein, of the band Sleater-Kinney, who met July when they were both nineteen, told me. After graduating, July enrolled at U.C. Santa Cruz, but school was never her thing. She dropped out after two years and moved to Portland, the heart of the scene.

By then, July knew that she wanted to make films. She had already written and directed a play, “The Lifers,” based on a correspondence that she had initiated with a thirty-eight-year-old inmate in Arizona whose name she had found on a list of prison pen pals in the back of a magazine. July had been fascinated by incarceration since she was small—at bedtime, her father read her Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”—and the inmate, serving a life sentence for murder, had no contact with anyone else on the outside. “I would write about my daily life, like, ‘I’m taking driving lessons,’” July recalled. “And he would write about his: ‘There was a riot.’” She sent him audio letters and blank cassettes, which he would return filled with his voice.

July staged “The Lifers” at Gilman Street with a pair of actors recruited through ads in the East Bay Express; rehearsals were held in her parents’ attic. July is a perfectionist, prone to both meticulous planning and insomniac anxiety. The night before the play’s début, she panicked and walked across town to a friend’s house, then, too shy to wake his family, went home and lay down under a parked car. “I used to worry much more about madness,” she said. Her father’s mother, brother, and sister all died by suicide, a legacy that she confronts in “All Fours.” The deathfield didn’t emerge from nowhere.

“All Fours” is not the first time that July has described the cliff—that precipice over which another era of life unfathomably looms. It’s there, too, in “The Future,” her 2011 film, in which she plays Sophie, a woman in her thirties who is stuck, along with her boyfriend, in a state of perma-immaturity, afraid to commit to anything—a career, a cat, each other—that would signal the end of youth and all its possibilities. “I’ve always taken each stage really hard, like, no cool whatsoever,” July told me. As a newly minted teen-ager, she was astonished to return from summer break and discover that a friend had sprouted boobs, and even more astonished when she asked to touch them and was angrily rebuffed. “I don’t know why we’re all acting like professionals at this,” she remembers thinking. “We’re amateurs. We know nothing.”

Amateurism—ignorance of convention as a kind of fruitful innocence—is an important creative conceit for July. When she got to Portland, she created an underground distribution network, eventually called Joanie 4 Jackie, for short films made by women. For five dollars, any woman could send her movie to a P.O. box that July had rented and receive a tape of ten “lady-made” films in return. July spread the word by giving pamphlets to bands on tour, and by contacting teen-girl magazines. “She’s already getting a steady inflow of films about everything from dreams to breasts, but says, ‘It doesn’t have to be arty or punk, just real,’” Sassy reported. By the time July ended the project, ten years later, she had distributed two hundred different shorts.

Part of what July was looking for was a community. At Santa Cruz, she had taken a filmmaking class and been turned off by the machismo that clung to the craft. “It was mostly guys, and every short they made would have a gun in it,” she said. Joanie 4 Jackie was a way of translating the democratic ethos of the riot-grrrl movement to the hierarchical male movie world. July hadn’t yet made a movie herself, but everything was training. Her first romantic experience, in high school, had been with a twenty-seven-year-old male graduate student. “I grew my feminist consciousness over the course of that relationship,” she told me. “I drove us up into the hills to a cliff and made him go down on me. And when he came up, I broke up with him. Not that I even enjoyed that. It just seemed like a good visual.”

In Portland, she found real love with a woman who worked at RadioShack; July nicknamed her Radio. “I’d never seen a butch girl,” she told me. “And then I was, like, ‘Oh. This is the complete package.’ In that case, complete with no ability to communicate.” The couple formed a band with July’s roommate; July was devastated when Radio dumped her for their bandmate. She had already booked a West Coast tour, so she called each venue to announce that another act would be opening: “It’s called Miranda July.”

July had been experimenting with writing short scripts for herself, playing around with voices, imagining the kinds of characters they might belong to. Those were the pieces—abstract, ominous, wantonly freaky—that she began performing, in front of audiences who expected to hear music. “I was in awe of it, but I think there was some skepticism,” Brownstein told me. To support herself, July worked odd jobs—at a Goodwill, a café, then a peepshow—and made a brief, brutal foray into sex work. Her narratives grew more complex, her stagecraft more ambitious: catwalks, screens, projected backdrops that she controlled with a clicker in her hand.

Finally, she felt ready to pick up a camera. In her first film, “Atlanta,” a ten-minute short from 1996, July played both a twelve-year-old swimmer competing in the Olympics and her domineering mother. In her second, “The Amateurist,” she again played two roles: an “amateur” and the stolid, ingratiating “professional” who monitors her via video surveillance. The amateur wraps herself in a fur coat, strips down to her underwear, dances, gives the professional the finger; the professional interprets this behavior according to a baffling numerical system that seems as sinister as it is inscrutable.

After July had made six shorts, she was accepted, on her third try, into Sundance’s incubator for first-time feature filmmakers. “I at that time was very punk,” July told me. “I had never gotten feedback or teaching on anything. So I applied, but with a real chip on my shoulder.” The film that she was developing—“Me and You and Everyone We Know”—is both a tender and a surprisingly steely treatise on human connection. Richard, a divorced shoe salesman, craves love but shrinks from it. His elder son is bullied and, in a sublime twist, adopted as a sexual guinea pig by two classmates who also flirt with a pervy middle-aged man who happens to be Richard’s colleague; his younger son finds affection with an adult stranger in an online chat room. Meanwhile, Richard is pursued by Christine, an openhearted performance artist whose earnestness excites and frightens him.

At Sundance, July learned how to kill her darlings and emerge the stronger for it. (A lesbian story line got axed; too many subplots.) But there were certain compromises that she wasn’t willing to make. “It was there that the pressure to cast stars began,” she told me. “People were, like, ‘Who are you thinking of casting for that lead? Maggie Gyllenhaal?’ And I would say, ‘Well, I’m thinking I’m going to play it myself.’”

The narrator of “All Fours” is beloved by many, unknown to most. She feels that the world underestimates the scope of her achievement, her ambition, her power. Her admirers are “not the kind famous men had, not a young woman eager to suck the wisdom out of my dick,” she thinks. “My fame neutered me.”

When “Me and You and Everyone We Know” débuted at Sundance, in 2005, July was shot overnight into the kind of celebrity that most indie auteurs can only dream of. One minute, she had been making experimental works that played to niche audiences. The next, she was collecting a Special Jury prize at Sundance, and, a few months later, the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Around the world, people were tattooing themselves with the ))<>(( symbol, which the younger son in the film invents to signify the greatest act of love and eros he can imagine: pooping back and forth forever with the object of his affection.

As July became a recognizable figure—that pouf of curls, those ethereal blue eyes—she began to realize that the persona the public had assigned her didn’t match the person she knew herself to be. She had cast herself as Christine, but the performance had worked too well; actor and role were now conflated. “To me, it couldn’t be more obvious,” she told me. “Like, Wow, I made this whole movie! I wrote it. I star in it. I directed it. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But, she went on, “the culture itself seemed like a sieve that kept that out, and all that came through were the clothes and the character I played, who was quite vulnerable, and would not have been able to make a movie.” When people recognized July, they would ask to give her a hug, “like I was a lost forlorn little girl or something.” “Me and You” looked head on at prickly and taboo topics—Agnès Varda’s film “Kung-Fu Master!,” about a middle-aged woman’s affair with a fourteen-year-old boy, had served as a major inspiration—yet July felt “declawed” by popular perception. “I don’t relate to this woman,” she remembers thinking. “And now I’m stuck as her, and everything I do is cute.”

The charge was hard to shake, and not just because of “Me and You.” July’s first book, the short-story collection “No One Belongs Here More Than You” (2007), featured a cast of cheerful eccentrics who confess their outré foibles and kinky yearnings with guileless sincerity. “The Future” was narrated by a talking cat, voiced by July; in one climactic scene, the boyfriend, played by Hamish Linklater, stops time and converses with the moon. Meanwhile, July was becoming known for digital experiments like “Learning to Love You More,” a Web site that she ran for seven years with the artist Harrell Fletcher which issued weekly prompts—“describe what to do with your body when you die,” “write the phone call you wish you could have”—that blurred the line between art and life. The Onion ran an article, “Miranda July Called Before Congress to Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is,” that encapsulated the prevailing attitude.

Back at July’s table, as we went through her notes for “All Fours,” the question of the book’s style kept coming up. “Giving myself permission to write straight,” one note said. “I’m so tired of the ways I’ve been clever and funny and strange,” another began.

I asked July what she meant by writing “straight.”

“I got so used to making a character that is weird enough and unreliable enough that she can say things that are really not O.K., and do things that are really not O.K., and everyone will laugh, but part of them will resonate with it, like, ‘Oh, God, I’m kind of like that,’” she said.

It wasn’t until the end of “The First Bad Man” that July felt able to write in a more direct way, to shrug off the cloak of the flagrantly fictional. The writing of that book had been interrupted by Hopper’s birth; July and Mills had spent a frightening stretch in the NICU.

“I was in a very tripped-out place, very close to death and mortality,” she told me. She ended up putting that experience directly into the novel, by giving it to Cheryl, the fastidious oddball whose peace is shattered by her bosses’ unruly daughter. Touched by July’s grief and love, the book matured, deepened; Cheryl, who began her fictional life as a singular, bizarre presence, ended it as an Everywoman. “Oh, that’s a new thing,” July thought. “Maybe you can just say it.”

That effect—aliveness—is what July was after in “All Fours.” “This won’t ever be autofiction,” she wrote in her book proposal, “because, for me, nothing takes flight without the alchemy of invention.” But the invention would be pared back, tied to the real, in order to let in something else: risk. July had first tried this with “The Metal Bowl” (2017), a story that she published in this magazine, whose narrator is a prototype for the one in “All Fours.” It’s risky to let people see who you think you are, to expose your prejudices, your ego, your wild, embarrassing hopes and absurd failures. But that is what the book is about: giving up the cover of convenient fictions in order to own life’s facts.

In February, I returned to Los Angeles to see how the home renovation was progressing. July has never owned much in the way of furnishings—her only contribution to the house with Mills was a set of linen curtains—and she had decided to procure everything secondhand. On my first visit, I had tagged along as she hunted through a vast salvage store in Filipinotown, where she hoped to discover a coral-colored toilet. A pair of bright-orange doors were labelled as the former property of J.Robert Oppenheimer; a hideous chandelier hailed from Rupert Murdoch’s estate. Immune to the proprietor’s friendly patter, July scanned the offerings and came away with a pair of flush-mount light fixtures from the thirties. The commode remained at large.

Now July stood in her kitchen with an artist friend, Chadwick Rantanen, who had come over to help with painting, and NicoB. Young, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old, also an artist, whom July was employing as her contractor. (They had been introduced by Young’s girlfriend, a former nanny of Hopper’s.) Young had totally reconfigured the room, lining it in custom cabinetry that he was in the process of covering with a glossy yellow resin that evoked Laffy Taffy.

An important decision regarding fridge placement had to be made. July directed Rantanen and Young to shift the appliance to the left, then back to the right. Every angle had to be considered: the approach from the sink, the clearance from the table, the view from the entryway. On the one hand, more functional space—Young’s vote. On the other, the perfect symmetry that July craved.

“I am very drawn to having this sense of roominess,” she conceded, as the men again nudged the fridge away from the countertop. “It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, look how luxurious!’”

“Whereas that shows a bit of restraint,” Young said. “Look at all the space that you could have used.” The difference could be measured in inches—no more than three.

“Yeah, I have money to burn,” July joked.

Later, I asked July about the budget for her renovation. Twenty thousand dollars, she said—just like in “All Fours.” It also came from the same source. A few years ago, Johnnie Walker had licensed a sentence from her story “The Moves,” in which a daughter recalls her father teaching her how to get a woman off. Somewhere in the world is a whiskey ad emblazoned with the words “Don’t wait to be sure. Move, move, move.”

We were back in July’s office, near a pile of books that she had consulted while writing “All Fours.” There were classics such as “The Second Sex,” plus “The Agony of Eros,” by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, and “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Bioidentical Hormones.” At the top of the stack was a book called “A History of the Wife.” I had noticed a photo from July’s wedding day propped by her writing table: July, in a knee-length white dress and a short veil that had been designed for her by Rodarte, standing next to Mills in the woods, both of them beautiful and unsmiling.

In “The Metal Bowl,” the narrator describes her marriage like this:

We’d been tunnelling toward each other for years. It was hard work, but the assumption was that eventually our two tunnels would connect. We’d break through—Hallelujah! Clay-encrusted hands finally seizing each other!—and we would be together, really together, for the remaining time that we were alive. So long as we both dug as hard and as fast as we could, everything would work out. But, of course, neither of us knew for sure how the other person’s digging was going. One of us might have been doggedly tunnelling toward the other person, while the other person was curling away in another direction.

The marriage in “All Fours” is marked by a similar sense of distance, for which the narrator feels responsible; next to the easygoing Harris, she is the complicated, cagey one. Like July, she underwent a traumatic delivery, and during the time that she and Harris shuttled back and forth to the hospital, visiting their fragile newborn, they operated as a single, soldered unit. Someday, she assumes, another crisis will shock them back together.

Instead, she is ambushed by desire. July is one of the great sex writers, even when what she is describing could not properly be called sex. To remain faithful to his wife, Davey is maddeningly chaste: no kissing, no genitals. He and the narrator dance and lie on the floor, their feet touching, but this is not enough. On one occasion, the narrator follows him into the bathroom: “I stuck my hand in the stream of his hot pee, catching an overflowing handful.” Davey wants to return the intimacy, so she lets him push in her tampon. “I felt close to tears, some combination of shame, excitement, and an unexpected kind of sadness, as if this were coming after a lifetime of neglect,” she tells us. This is icky, moving, and very funny: all the qualities of sex, save the pleasure.

When sex does enter the book, it comes like a sudden desert rain, unexpected and unstoppable. At one point, the narrator ends up in bed with Audra, the woman who initiated Davey into the arts of physical love. “Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like a banana’s, but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water,” the narrator marvels. July, so free on the page, is positively prim when asked about such scenes. “I’m still a little in the phase where it’s fine if you read the book, but I’ll have to kill you afterward,” she said. She went on, “I get that it’s my own shame. I feel fairly at peace with my shame. It’s what I have to work with.” The part of her sitting with me, as the bright California light gently filtered into the room through white sheers, was separated by some interior screen from the private part of her that had described the narrator tussling with Audra’s “big, soft tit*” and “enormous ass,” and the mystery had to be respected. July did own that she had been especially pleased with a line in which the narrator wonders if Audra was “vibrator-tuned, if this was a fool’s errand.” She giggled.

One function of sex in “All Fours” is to create a kind of inversion. The shock of eros forges intimacy between the narrator and a stranger, and, as a result, her former intimate becomes a stranger in turn. What reconnects her to Harris is, paradoxically, the process of breaking apart their union. July describes her separation from Mills, too, as a “transformation.” To avoid feelings of competition and toe-stepping, they had always steered clear of each other’s careers. But separating, July said, had been a high-stakes collaboration—like “carefully clipping the wires on a bomb.”

I wondered what it would be like for July to give up the comfortable home she had shared with Mills. “It was a wonderful season in that house,” July told me. But, lately, she had found herself longing to cross her yard at the end of the workday and lie down in her own small room. She wanted solitude, but not just that. Hopper would be there half the time, and she was focussed on making her house livable for a kid. July asked me if I had heard of “the repair,” a concept that she had been taught when Hopper was small. “You f*ck up, right?” she said. “You lose your temper. Or you do something even worse—something subtle, that you know wasn’t quite right.” She put on a musing-aloud kind of voice. “‘Gosh, what I did there, I felt a little scared! Did you see what I did? I lashed out at you. I’m so sorry I did that. I wonder what I could do next time.’” Messing up is inevitable. The lesson is what comes next.

The next month, July flew to Milan, where Fondazione Prada was hosting her exhibition in the heart of the city. Titled “New Society,” the show functioned as a kind of retrospective, the first of July’s career. When I arrived, the day before the opening, July and the show’s curator, Mia Locks, were bustling around, meeting with docents, posing for promotional photos. A crisis had just erupted involving “I’m the President, Baby” (2018), a work that July had made in concert with Oumarou Idrissa, an Uber driver she met when he transported her to an interview she conducted with Rihanna. The piece consists of four sets of jewel-toned velvet curtains that were originally linked to Idrissa’s phone and bed, opening and closing according to when he slept, used the Uber app, went on Instagram, or contacted his family in Niger on WhatsApp. July had discovered that the curtains didn’t hang quite right, and a fleet of Prada seamstresses had bundled them off to be hemmed.

This was July’s second time making art with the Prada Group. In 2010, she was asked to make a film for “Women’s Tales,” an anthology of shorts commissioned by Miu Miu. July replied that she wanted to make a movie about an app that didn’t exist—and that she wanted funding to create the app, too. The result was Somebody, a messaging service that went live in August, 2014, and lasted through October of the next year. Messages sent through Somebody were intercepted by a stranger nearby, who then used the app’s geolocation tool to find the intended recipient and deliver the text verbally. The sender could select from a menu of actions to guide the performance: cry, laugh, shout, kiss. July is fascinated by collaboration; what is it like to be invited into contact with someone else, to change and be changed by another? By removing the artist from the equation and turning normal people, briefly, into actors playing the part of a stranger, Somebody was among her fullest realizations of this theme.

July in prep mode was alert, nervous, tired. By the following morning’s press conference, though, she had fully assumed her role. Dressed in an A-line gray wool skirt, a red eyelet cardigan, and black pumps, she stood statue-still, hands clasped, while Locks gave introductory remarks that a translator rendered into Italian. When it was her turn to speak, she came alive.

“In these performances, it’s a funny thing, because I have the power, and I’m onstage, and everyone’s looking at me, but simultaneously I’m vulnerable,” July told the scrum of journalists. She motioned toward the back of the room, where a video of “New Society,” the performance that gave the show its name, was playing. In that piece, July asks her audience to create a new society together, complete with flag, currency, and national anthem. At one point, she leaves the theatre entirely. “Involving other people is scary,” she said. “It’s dangerous. It makes my heart skip a beat.... Probably that rush is a bit like the material I’m working with. It’s like its own paint.”

As July was peppered with more questions, I wandered up to the second floor of the show. There was the collage that I had stepped on, safely behind glass. A few months earlier, July had recirculated a prompt from “Learning to Love You More”: “make an exhibition of the art in your parents’ house.” One end of the floor was devoted to the result, in which a young Milanese woman, Miriam Goi, displayed various knickknacks from her mother’s home alongside museum-style wall text. The effect was charming, at once playfully nose-thumbing about “official” notions of art and ennobling of personal taste in all its peculiarity.

Growing up, July was made to feel that “some people are smart and special. And then there are regular people, and they’re less interesting than us.” July came to disagree, and her work is her proof. The writer Maggie Nelson told me that one of the things that make July so effective on the page is how simple and accessible her prose is. “The weirdest things happen—these kinds of very weird, glittery cloud spaces are conjured, so it’s very avant-garde in that way. But I’m always impressed by the mystery of how you can do it with pretty plain language,” Nelson said. “It feels like a stealth operation.”

For all her populism, though, July has no interest in fully ceding control. Later that evening, clad in a pale diaphanous dress and Balenciaga heels, she greeted well-wishers near a new digital work that she had begun making while she was still finishing “All Fours.” On Instagram, she had asked seven strangers to upload videos in response to prompts; then, using editing tools on her iPhone, July spliced the videos together with ones that she had made in the dancing spot in her office. She called the piece “F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You).”

I slowly circled the six big screens showing the work. On one, a man danced with a wheelchair as July crouched near him, encased in a pair of nude stockings. On another, a person veiled in a garbage bag was suspended upside down from the ceiling, like an insect hanging from a sac, while July wiggled around and then began to heave herself toward her partner: a disembodied tush hopping, frog-like, up the wall. The contact between July and her partners could seem loving. Kisses were exchanged; one body melted into another. But there was also a sense of detachment, rupture. Trying for connection is no guarantee of finding it. Here was a man washing himself in a shower, joined suddenly by July, but even as she pressed herself against him he carried on as if she wasn’t there.

July celebrated her fiftieth birthday with her girlfriend, plus her friends Isabelle Albuquerque and Sheila Heti. After dinner, they decamped to her new house, sitting on a rust-red sectional that July was still trying to configure on a red Turkish rug. “You see how, if you squint your eyes, it’s like baloney?” July said, of her emerging color scheme.

A few weeks earlier, I had spent an afternoon with July and Albuquerque. Tall and angular, her dark hair slicked into a Bowie back sweep, Albuquerque had burst into July’s office, a bubbling hot spring next to July’s still lake. “Oh, my God!” she screamed, when she saw the advance copy of “All Fours” that July had been saving for her. Like Jordi, Albuquerque is a sculptor; July modelled the character on her, and she is the book’s dedicatee.

“I’m still kind of processing it,” Albuquerque said, when I asked her how she felt about the depiction. “But I don’t see it as just my alter ego. I feel part of a lineage.” Many people define the eras of their lives by romantic relationships. July’s are better understood as a sequence of all-consuming friendships that stretch back to grade school. Some have ended with bad breakups; most carry on, if at a lower heat. Heti told me that after she and July first spoke, twelve or thirteen years ago, for a magazine interview that Heti was conducting, she pursued July by e-mail. “We decided to talk for an hour a week to start our friendship,” Heti said. “That was our ritual. We sent long, long e-mails with pictures: this is my life, this is my first boyfriend, this is my pet. Just everything to fill in the gaps.”

Before “All Fours,” friendship never played a real role in July’s work. It was as if there was no room for it; the poles of romance and loneliness loomed too large. But it is at the core of the new book, the thing that grounds it in the real. Jordi serves as the narrator’s confidante and sounding board, just as, during the writing of the novel, Albuquerque did for July. On Wednesday nights, they would meet at Albuquerque’s studio, or take long walks to their favorite vegetarian restaurant and discuss the big questions of their lives, July pausing along the way to write down scenes.

“There was so much pain and heaviness, and sharing it with you, not being alone, partly made it possible to write about it,” July said to Albuquerque. She tipped back her head and mimed shouting to the heavens: “‘What are we supposed to do? Tell us! In this life! How do you be free and safe?’”

The first third of the novel—the erotic obsession with Davey, the extravagance of the Excelsior remodel—had come easily to July. But what would happen after? She had no idea. She started to see herself as a kind of perimenopause evangelist, transmitting to other women all the information that she had been collecting about their changing bodies. Drafts devolved into manuals and manifestos. She was yanked from this path by the publication of an actual work of nonfiction on the subject, Heather Corinna’s “What Fresh Hell Is This?,” and by the writer Rick Moody, an old friend and early encourager. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, he reminded her. “I just started bawling,” July said. “It was like he’d quoted the Bible passage that was going to save me.”

One element from that heady period that survives in the final book, if in a rather altered form, is a series of interviews that July conducted with middle-aged friends about the state of their marriages and desires. “You remind me of me before I transitioned,” one interviewee, a trans woman, tells the novel’s narrator. “That sense that time is running out but you’re too chickensh*t to explode your life.” When the narrator does explode her life, though, some of these same friends find her smug; she can’t stop bragging, as if she, and she alone, has discovered the key to happiness.

“I think one of Miranda’s most brilliant features is her real respect for and kind of amazing capacity to summon peak-experience feelings,” Maggie Nelson told me. “I’m more of an after-the-ecstasy-the-laundry kind of person. But I learn from Miranda the power of these moments that might cause someone to change their life.” After reading an early draft of the novel, Heti had carefully delivered feedback. “I thought she wasn’t seeing the character clearly,” she said. “There was a way in which she was a stand-in for universal experience.”

For July, the book had turned out to be a kind of prompt, and she thought that reading it would prompt other people to change their lives, too. Still, she had to be prepared to acknowledge that no woman is a true Everywoman. “What’s that word when whales send out sound waves?” Nelson asked. “Echolocation. I think there’s a kind of echolocation principle operating. Sometimes she finds an echo, the character. And sometimes the creature at hand says, No, that’s not how it is for me.”

Thinking about the novel entering the world, July felt vulnerable. “And the truth is, I feel vulnerable before every project comes out, but this one... ” She paused. “It’s like there’s an invisible war, and I turned the lights on. Or I pointed at it, at least.”

What was the war? I asked.

“The idea that, as a woman, as you get older, you’ll not expand and get more and more powerful,” she said. “I mean ‘powerful’ in all different senses, not just worldly power. I’m more useful, in a way, in the world. I need less, and I’m able to give more as I get older, you know? I don’t have a feeling of dependency on anyone.” The war wasn’t just with the external world, with other people’s impressions and expectations; its fiercest front was internal. “The only real threat is of outdated thinking, of calcifying in the mind,” July had written in her notes, long before she knew the end of the novel—before she knew the beginning, even. “That scares me. But, again, who has the time? I really just keep going.”♦