Book Review: All Fours by Miranda July
March 19, 2025
I will warn you that this book has a lot of graphic language around sex and self discovery in that area. I would highly suggest reading any trigger warnings and spice warnings before reading. There are some strange scenes.
This is not a book I usually am drawn to, but I have seen a lot about it recently, and it was available at my library, so I figured I would give it a go. This felt very reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman in that the main character has had an unconventional childhood ( Eleanors being quite a bit more traumatic, but both not what childhood should be like ) and we find that out slowly over time. It isn’t really a plot point, but more of a describing why the person is the way they are.
We follow the story of a forty six year old mother and wife who is wildly successful at what she does, but feels like something is missing from her life. We meet her at the beginning of her breaking point, after having been at a dinner party with her husband, Harris, where the topic of if a person is a “driver” being the they are there for the ride, they are there to learn things on the way and they are excited for what is to come, or a “parker” who needs recognition and applause. In this conversation, she feels like they are saying that drivers are good and parkers are bad, and she fully believes she can make herself a driver if she wants. She can be chill, she can not get recognition and be fine. So, she decides to take a trip to New York, and she is going to drive all the way from her home in California. She packs everything up, kisses her child, Sam, goodbye and hits the road. She gets a town or two over and stops to get gas and check that the car is in tip top shape. While there she sees a young man, and has a strangely intimate moment while he is washing her windshield, staring deep into each others eyes, but there is no way he can see her through the glass, so she rights it off as all in her head. Since she is there, she might as well get herself lunch, and since she got lunch she may as well look at this antique shop, and since she is at the antique shop she may as well buy this comforter that is everything she has ever dreamed of. After purchasing the comforter, she takes it to the dry cleaners and they said they will get it to her by the afternoon of the next day so the means she has to stay in the motel near by. No biggie, that won’t set her off track too much, except that it does. She becomes increasingly more obsessed with the young man who washed her windshield, and finds out he has an interior designer wife who she hires to redecorate her motel room. Within her obsession with this man, she starts to uncover parts about her that she didn’t know where there. She discovers desires and fantasies that she didn’t know had been hiding. She becomes increasingly worried about what is to come with perimenopause lurking around the corner, and feels like she needs to branch out and have freedom. How will she explain all this to her husband? Will this ruin her child?
The thing that shocked me more than anything else in this book is how many friends this woman has. The narrator has dozens of friends who are willing to tell her anything she wants to know about their relationships, their sex lives and their fantasies. She has friends in their twenties to their sixties. I am just confused as to how she met all these women and why they feel so comfortable with her and telling her things about them. Some of them have even recorded conversations that they have had with their spouse and sent them to her. Which feels weird to me. But our narrator is so interested in how others are living their lives, and how she feels like hers is so different, that she wants to see what happens in others conversations. There were things that she said that I for sure related to, but then she would go back to talking about her strange she was and I stopped being able to relate. Which, I felt, was the perfect melding of feeling like she was a real person experiencing real things, and also that she is nothing like me and I am learning about her and learning about other people through her.
Overall, I think I would suggest this book, as long as you are aware of all of the sex and self discovery in the book. It is not a romantic book, and the sex is less about pleasing each other, and more about finding ones self.
