Miranda July: The Essential Works

Miranda July: The Essential Works

This article relates to All Fours

Miranda July is an artist who works successfully in multiple mediums, perhaps equally well-known for her films and her fiction. Born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, and raised in Berkeley, California, July dropped out of college in her early twenties and moved to Portland, Oregon, where she began exploring performance art before becoming a filmmaker.

July's first full-length movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know, for which she both starred and directed, was released in 2004 and racked up some of the most significant independent film awards, including the Caméra d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize at Sundance. The movie is a romantic dramedy about a recently separated shoe salesman living with his two children and developing a relationship with a video artist (played by July). Subplots revolve around the salesman's young sons catfishing an adult woman and the sexual awakening of two teenage girls who live next door.

In 2007, July released a book of short stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You that further cemented her status as an indie darling. The stories explore modern loneliness and longing for connection, both romantic and platonic. The details, events, and characters depicted are often bizarre — the New York Times review attests, "July specializes in awkward encounters, cringe-inducing moments that play out between co-workers, lovers, or strangers on the street." The settings include a peep show booth, roach-infested apartment, and senior swim class, demonstrating connections can be made anywhere.

July's debut novel, The First Bad Man, was released in 2015 and revolves around a middle-aged woman who invites her boss's 20-year-old daughter to move in with her and the intense relationship they develop centered around fantasy. Though perhaps less explicitly sexual, the novel is similar to All Fours in that it involves an older woman's borderline obsession with a younger person. Reviewing it for the New York Times, Lauren Groff called The First Bad Man "a wry, smart companion" and "painfully alive."

July's film Kajillionaire debuted in 2020 and scored a 78/100 from the notoriously stingy review aggregation site Metacritic, plus a 90% approval rating from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. A very different film from Me and You and Everyone We Know, it's a darkly comical crime caper involving a family of con artists attempting to get away with insurance fraud. Evan Rachel Wood, Debra Winger, Gina Rodriguez, and Richard Jenkins star.

In addition to the above, Miranda July has created a variety of visual and written works (including "We Think We're Alone," for which she collected and published random emails from famous friends demonstrating, among other things, that actor Lena Dunham was considering the purchase of a $24,000 couch). A full list can be explored on her website.

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to All Fours. It first ran in the May 15, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.