Miranda July Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Miranda July in conversation with Lexie Smyth about her novel, All Fours

You work in multiple forms of media—why did you decide to tell this story as a novel?

It's somehow never a matter of having an idea and then deciding the medium—the medium is part of the idea. I was putting notes into a file called "Novel 2" for about a year, while working on another project, before I finally sat down to write. The file, and eventually the novel, was the right container for such an intimate story. I tried so hard to get into dark interior corners, parts of myself and the culture where light rarely shines—narrow conceptions of women, desire, aging—that we carry around without even knowing it. It's an exciting territory because radical change can come so easily after awareness dawns.

All Fours does not shy away from the visceral, intense, and often challenging pieces of womanhood and motherhood. How does it feel to be able to reflect on these aspects of life that are not often represented in literature?

It felt both scary and kind of exhilarating to purposely hang out in territory that has long been described as icky or sad or embarrassing. You've been told so much about how to be a young woman, you're marketed to, you're represented on film and TV, there's so much over-involvement in your ...