Miranda July
Appearances
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
It is interesting. I feel a little different since the book came out. I've now read so many emails and messages and comments on my sub stack about... And women at this point or women doing things differently are trying to figure this out that I no longer I'm like, is there a way to answer this question that isn't specific to me?
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Because I actually don't feel like I think at the time I felt very unique and very like no one's doing what I'm doing and both worried by that and sort of proud. And now I'm like, no, no. And this is incredibly widespread, at least lots of thoughts about it. And then people trying to figure out how to do it. I mean, the thing of living together... It's what you're used to.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Obviously, that's not going to work if you're incredibly embattled, you know. But if you're not, then it is kind of an opportunity to see who the other person is a bit more. Like, wow, this person who is like my longtime friend. But I never could quite see what they were like when they're dating, you know?
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Not that, like, you're necessarily getting any details or anything, but just, like, their energy, you know, because you were the person they were dating, and now you're not. And, like, yeah, there might be some sadness or strangeness about that, but... You're also like, look at you. You're a person. Like I never really gave you all of that. And meanwhile, you're also getting it too.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Like they're seeing you as a person more completely and nothing you do is threatening in the old way. You know, the way every new thing and change is like sort of threatening when you're in a couple sometimes. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And if you know it's going to be a lifelong relationship, you know, partly because of the child, but also because, you know, life isn't that long and you've already invested so much time and energy with this person, like maybe that's sort of interesting to get to see and be seen, you know, in this different way.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Yes. I mean, that's like a whole other book that I didn't write. The child in the book is non-binary. And I remember... sort of wrestling with like, should I have the child be he, and it would be he for a while, then she, none of these things are feeling right. You know, it is a fiction. I'm making up all kinds of other things.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Surely I can just, the gender of this child doesn't have to map onto the gender of my child. But I went home one day and asked my child, I just described this situation. I said, what do you What do you think? Should I just have them be they them? I mean, I don't want, you know, it's not you, you know, so I don't want that to feel invasive to you.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And they said, I think everyone in the book should be they them. Which was such a kind of 2.0 answer, like sort of like just questioning the construction of gender in general. And I said like, okay, yeah, I'm not there yet. Point taken. And then I just went with they, them. And there's maybe one point in the book where it's kind of acknowledged that
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Potentially, it's the same hormones that the narrator is taking, estrogen, you know, that a non-binary trans feminine child might one day take. But beyond that, you know, as a mother... It's not my story to tell, especially because as with any child, it's a changing story. And you don't like you.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
None of us want to put something out there that's going to haunt the child, you know, which is not to say like. They're ever not going to be trans. I don't mean that. But it's like it's a private journey. My own, you know, deep inner gender and sexuality journey is a private journey. So it's tricky. There's so much...
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
information and conversation that, uh, is missing and that I would love to give any, any, um, parents or grandparents who are listening, um, But it's just too public for just me as a mother, not an educator, not a writer. Yeah, I'm just too protective of the sanctity of their childhood.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
So, yeah, the four days, every other four days, I'm alone, you know, or wherever, whoever I choose to sleep with. Like in my 20s. Like it's really... Like, you really have to stop and think when you have that time alone where you're not responsible. Like, what actually am I doing here in this life? Like, what do I feel? And you keep...
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And just because you've unburdened yourself practically, you know, with from this construction or these these real responsibilities doesn't mean they just automatically lift off your shoulders. Like most of my issues come from within. Right. So suddenly you're like, oh, it wasn't all the construction of marriage or that. the patriarchy or those, it was those things, but they're inside me.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And I'm still running for dear life or replacing those constructions with new ones, you know, anything that'll fill up my time, take my time, please, you know, Instagram, whatever, like, and so to actually be willing to take on that freedom, it's a real practice. And I don't mean to make it sound hard or scary. It's only hard in the way that a new habit is hard.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I mean, I think I wasn't ever like, I'm not like a music head. So the thing that drew me to punk, especially as a teenager, was first of all, it was an all ages scene. Like the clubs, like I could go to them. They weren't, they didn't have alcohol. And not only that, but the whole premise was you don't have to be taught. Like you can figure it out yourself.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I mean, I think fear in general was also why I wrote the book. Like, I... Upon turning 40, which was a few years before I started writing it, it seemed like this grim time was suddenly approaching that was very vague, like this time of a woman who's no longer young.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And that was great for me, who did not want to be taught by anyone anyways, and wanted access to a space, a world, a literal... I mean, I put my first plays on in a punk club in 924 Gilman, a sort of seminal all-ages punk club in Berkeley. And that was... So great. Honestly, I would wish that on any teenager to have the freedom to do something outside of school.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
That's while punk seems sort of lawless, it actually was a structure. You know, it did formalize what I was doing.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Well, I moved to Portland to be with my girlfriend at the time, and Riot Grrrl kind of had just happened. I'd say I sort of missed it slightly. But certainly the feminist underpinning was all there.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Initially, let's see, my girlfriend and I broke up. She moved out. We had to cover her rent. And I remember my friend at the time, like, how are we going to get this money really quickly, you know, that we were missing? And she said... well, one of us is going to have to strip and it can't be me because I have glasses. And I was like, okay.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And so initially it was this club that I think is still there called Mary's. And In Portland. But then I've had these kind of lifelong problems with my eyes, and there was smoking in the bars back then. So I couldn't really handle the smoke. So that's why I moved to the peep shows, which is just like a box. You're not really sharing air with anyone.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Yeah, I mean, my main goal was to make as, you know, much money. It still wasn't that much, but to make this amount of money in a short time so I could work on my, you know, what ended up being like my first book of short stories, my first feature film. You know, I needed the time was how I was thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't. recommend that job to my child or anyone else's child.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
But on the other hand, like most jobs at that age are not so great.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
No. No. I don't think – I thought of it as my job, my not great job that was – I think when I quit that job, I started working unlocking car doors for a company called Pop-A-Lock. Right. You know, when you lock your key in your car and that doesn't happen so much anymore.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And that job really, I really hated because I had a beeper and like I could be beeped in the middle of the night to like have to go. Unlock someone's car, which I was, you know, I'd been trained, but I always managed to get it open. But sometimes it took like a while.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I mean, at the time, like for some context, like I was a lesbian. I had like very, I think like bleached out short hair and I would wear a wig that was like my normal pretty girl wig that was like longer brown hair. And so the whole thing was, was sort of like, I am so far from this, you have no idea. Like, I'm... Yeah, so it just kind of felt like... Like, I'm not even me.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And I wanted to not write about that because so many women I admired, so many writers had written about more important things, right? Like they had not focused on the people trying to shame them or the shame they felt themselves. They focused on important subjects. But the more that I... I got older and I started writing this book at 45.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
That kind of thing? Yeah, just like... Yeah, and I could see exactly how... Like, I remember at the... At Mary's, knowing that there was, like...
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
that there was a kind of guy like if I put on what's the song like in your eyes the light the heat like what is that Genesis or something I don't know in your eyes I think it's called that that would really just be like oh my god like this song which is so great and this girl you know like that that would sort of generate this like man feeling. And that there was another song, Brown Eyed Girl.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Even though I don't have brown eyes, that it like cultivated a feeling of like, just a brown eyed girl up here, you know, like girl next door kind of feeling. And that that was another thing that the customers liked to feel, you know, it was kind of like a homey feeling. Yeah. So I think...
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
But, you know, these things aren't so different than life itself, like noticing qualities in the rest of life, which I was doing all the time anyways. I mean, like in my first collection of short stories, I think there's only one story that has a peep show in it. So the amount of noticing I was doing at that in my 20s was across the board. And...
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Most of what I was noticing was not in that club or in Mr. Peeps.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I mean, the things that make me most happy to read are like women who, while they were reading the book, felt kind of exposed. Like, oh no, this is like my whole inner life exposed here in this book. And, you know, I've had people tell me that like they were reading it on the plane and they felt like they...
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
at a certain point had to put it away not because of the sexual content but because like they were sitting next to their husband and it was all their all their true feelings that they weren't saying um and that's always kind of astonishing to me like oh writing can do that like i i um I get a lot of messages from older women who say like, oh, this all happened to me.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
My all fours time was 20 years ago. But I'm stunned to realize that I wasn't alone. I thought I was uniquely crazy or irresponsible or something. And so they're just, it's like a reframing of their life to have the community from the book.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And the more that I talked to other women and gynecologists and naturopaths, the more I felt that this subject actually wasn't separate from those more important things.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Right. I mean, we shouldn't have to reinforce it for sure. But it does, like, I think people, I don't totally want to blame women when there's real repercussions, you know, economically, just in their sense of what's possible in the world, you know, so it's a tricky thing.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
line like I yes I sort of obviously I'm on the side of declaring it but I am kind of often I'm just being honest here because so much of the book is about like not trying to be less ashamed than I actually am Not trying to seem less ashamed. Because I feel like then you can't evolve. Like if you're hiding the place where you're actually at, then it's hard to get to the next place.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I mean, like, why was I thinking about this at 45? But I was.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
We're going to have to decide, are we saying you – Oh, I'm sorry. The character. The character. The character. I mean, we can get into that. But, you know, the narrator's saying.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Right. Yeah. So she leaves the sort of more androgynous styles in the suitcase. Right. Every old thing had a modern counterbalance. Past age 40 you had to be careful with vintage. I didn't want to be mistaken for an elderly woman wearing the clothes from the 1960s of her youth. Young people especially had trouble making distinctions between ages over 40.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
When I got my first Patti Smith tape, Horses, at 22, Smith was only 49. But I didn't think of her as a contemporary person. I wasn't even sure she was still alive because the cover of Horses was a black-and-white photograph. Instead of knowing this was a stylistic choice, like vintage clothes, I unconsciously associated the record with the deep past of black-and-white movies.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
If anyone asked, I would have probably managed to assign the album to the right decade, but most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations never brought to light. A good way to check your outfit is by running past the mirror, or better yet, make a video of yourself running past your phone. How old was that blur of a woman? Was she from the past or was she modern?
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And where was she going in such a hurry? I walked around Monrovia in a red shirtwaist dress and white wedge heels. The commercial areas weren't really built for walking, but there were some nice residential neighborhoods. Several times I passed teenage girls wearing backpacks, their breasts inflated by the hormones in cow's milk and barely covered by tank tops.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Whenever I saw them coming, I pretended I was from another country, projecting the air of someone so foreign she could not understand or be hurt by anything American.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I think I was catching myself around this time. I kept sort of noticing what I was thinking about older women and noticing the way that I might dismiss someone or not give them sort of the full benefit of an interior relationship. life or an erotic life or think of them as like a sad character kind of for no reason, right? Like this is just like someone I'm seeing in passing. And
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
By the time I was writing the book, I was aware, like, oh, that fear or hatred of older women is, of course, self-hatred, you know, because I will become that. And to some degree, I already am that to people younger than me. You know, so it's like a kind of slippery zone.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Well, I had a different experience from the narrator. I actually had this amazing doctor, Dr. Maggie Ney, who started talking with me about it in my early 40s. I may have been just 40. And she's like, look, we're going to take your blood and see where your hormone levels are at. And that's just to get a baseline so that
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
As you get older and your hormone levels drop, we'll kind of understand the speed at which that's happening and when you might want to do bioidentical hormones if you want that. And I always remember at the end of describing all this, which was a longer conversation, she said, I'm so excited for you. And she didn't mean that, like, as a joke.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And I, not knowing anything else about this, never having had a conversation about it in any other time in my life, not having had a conversation about it ever before with anyone, I just smiled. I just dumbly smiled and was like, huh, yeah. You never know what's coming next, you know? Like, this is exciting. Like, go from ballet slippers to pointe shoes, you know? Like, it's always something.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
I don't know. It didn't seem inherently bad. But then, as I would talk to my friends, I was like the only one who knew anything.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Yeah, I mean, my changing life moment, it wasn't like I alone in my head was coming up with that I had to do this. It was like an ongoing conversation with my husband at the time. And very slow, and we both... I think as much as we didn't want to traumatize our kid, we also didn't want to traumatize ourselves. And we were very attached to ourself and the triangle of our family.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
So what exactly had to change and what could stay the same changed. I feel like it's still changing. I mean, kind of as long as we're a family, which will hopefully be forever, you know, you've got three changing people in it whose needs are changing and who are trying to be honest. And I guess that was the big shift was like, oh, we're not going to pretend we're not changing anymore.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
And that a lot of those changes have nothing to do with each other anymore. You know, or this thing that we've built. But, you know, as much as you worry about the kid, my biggest worry was that they wouldn't get to see me as I really was. And I say they because they're non-binary. There's just one kid there.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
because I started to realize, oh, there's a whole lot of myself that happens outside the home with my best friend or in my studio alone being creative or just me alone in the world. Like, I feel like I'm starting to feel like this part that used to just be like,
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
me on a break or you know at work this may be the lion's share of me this might be kind of what I have to offer them as far as um one way to live one way to be but actually when I go home I'm being like a smaller version and not kind of like I um just less interesting to even to myself, like, cause I was biting my tongue a lot. Um, and no one was asking me to do this by the way.
Fresh Air
Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
Like it's, um, it's very personal. I know a lot of people who the freest they feel is, is in their home and you know, the world is terrifying, but, um, And so I began to feel like something I had to do for my child, like I need to change these circumstances so they can see who I really am.