All Fours had me down *bad*
Longing & fatphobia in All Fours + tour updates & summer reading
At one point while reading Miranda July’s new novel All Fours I experienced a feeling I have not felt in many years: longing, longing for the bright light of pure beauty, of pure aesthetic experience, that kind of gazing on the naked flesh of someone you know will bring you only ruin. It seems there is a phrase for this exact feeling and it is “down bad.”
In practice, this looked like me in the window seat of an airplane at night on my way to Los Angeles for a Housemates book tour event as Miranda July’s voice rasped in my ears while I cried and coughed into a tissue. The straight couple next to me eyed me suspiciously as if I might require their assistance or their resistance.
July is writing about a woman who has purchased a white sun-protective shirt for a cross-country road trip but instead gets only a half an hour away from home. She’s writing about a woman with a nonbinary child that almost never lived and who has a meeting with a famous pop star (an obvious stand in for Rihanna, in my opinion) and who knows she is still many too many layers of the intimacy onion away from her husband. But in the part that made me cry/cough/cry she is describing the naked body of a man. She is describing his stomach and hips and cock and ass. She is loving him with her words, worshiping him with her eyes and the sentences drip, not just with lust but also with awe. Awe! Just pure and unadulterated wonder.
What comes back is the time in my life where I loved someone who was so beautiful and so afraid of love that I knew they could never, ever belong to me. They were only ever 75% there, but they were so intense that their 75% felt like more than other people’s 100%. I’ve written about this time in greater length elsewhere, which consisted of me being in a polyamorous long distance relationship while gut renovating my house in Philadelphia and also commuting to New York for an ill-fated masters program, and how it prompted me to ask the big questions about monogamy and poly and what kinds of uncertainty are and are not tolerable for me.
In brief, that relationship broke down my old patterns and short circuited my pleasure centers. Look up pleasure in the dictionary and you’ll find a photo of me and that person, of their naked chest and their sensitive, angular little face with its light eyes. There was a constant sense during that period of knowing that I should not be wanting as much as I was wanting. That I was robbing Peter to pay Paul or, as they say in the musical “Blood Brothers” that this person was only mine until the time came round to pay the bill, that we were living on borrowed time.
There is a moment in All Fours when the narrator needs the object of her affection to call her so badly that she spray paints the words CALL ME on a folding chair and leaves it at an intersection for the man to find but then changes her mind and brings it back to a park in her neighborhood where she discards it only for the chair to be discovered by her husband and child and found so beautiful that they insist on bringing it into the narrator’s home. Never has there been a better metaphor for the idea of something coming home to roost. This image, this feeling, these were the kinds of beauties that Miranda July’s novel gave me, a sense of being reminded how wondrous and painful and precise and flummoxing is the work of living.
I’ve been a July fan since 2008 when her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You was published. Home from college that summer, I went to an event for it in an art gallery in Chelsea and stood in line for so long in the heat that once I got inside I fainted, very slowly, to the ground. When I came to, July was saying something about her need for absolute artistic freedom. Hehe, I thought. Worth it.
I loved July’s first novel The First Bad Man so much that I recently ranted about it in this profile of Housemates’ material influences for The Cut. When I read it, I was blown away by its sheer weirdness, its incredible queerness, not in the way that the characters have sex but in the way they say the unsayable, words that open up a queer portal to the truth about who people are to each other. People like your boss’ strange daughter who ends up staying on your couch, a person with whom you are intimate but for whom you have no category in which to put her. Friend? Lover? Family? No, no, no.
When I am stuck in my writing and need a quick zap of aliveness, I have often re-read July’s (short story? essay?) “TV.” Here’s a choice quote: “The idea of playing it cool had simply not been introduced to me at this juncture.” Every fiction semester, I teach July’s short, strange story “The Man on the Stairs.” “I could smell his sourness,” she writes. “It wasn’t good, he wasn’t good, he did not have good intentions. I stood there, and he stood there, and he breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in.” I even defended her right to poop in a cast iron skillet and make it her whole personality.
But then, back on that night plane to LA, I got to this passage in All Fours:
There’s a lot going on here so let me break down why I felt so ill reading it. The “her” in this paragraph is an older woman who has also had sex with the narrator’s beloved. All Fours is arguably a book about aging and menopause, so there’s an interesting conflation going on here between aging and fatness that at first distracts from the fatphobia. But let’s look at the adjectives this aging, fat body gets: “horny,” “warm,” “close,” “big,” “soft,” “pouty,” “debased,” “silly,” “big,” “rounded,” “enormous,” “swollen,” “big,” “gross,” “incredible.” That’s “big” x 3 plus “enormous” and all the other adjectives either connote something negative or something strange, inhuman, or incomprehensible. “I’d never touched a body this big and rounded,” the narrator says, and the voice continues to express surprise that she is even able to touch this body without fleeing in disgust. “Apparently my hands couldn’t get enough of all this flesh.” It’s the apparently there that grates on me. Even the supposed rebuttal of the idea that this body is gross — “instead of being gross it felt incredible” — reads as clearly false to me, with the paragraph ending on a note of supposed shock and surprise that a fat body could have sensual appeal — “Well, knock me over with a feather…who knew.” Who knew that fat, older people could be hot? Apparently not this narrator.
The fatphobia doesn’t stop here either — this “enormous” character is a clear antagonist, the only one described in nakedly villainous terms from jump and also the only fat person in the book. The book is pointlessly littered with strange references to the narrator’s diet of whole grains and vegetable snacks and gluten free things, while milkshakes are described as “junk” and “trash” food in ways that are, surprisingly for this narrator who examines everything, left unexamined. The narrator takes to lifting weights and changing her shape as a way to “get hotter.” I could go on — but I’m just so tired.
If All Fours had been two parts instead of four and ended around the “call me” chair, with the knowledge that this ill-fated affair was both the thing and not the thing at all, that the thing is actually the narrator’s body and her life and her desire, it would have been, to me, a perfect book, in perfect keeping with July’s earlier works — short and strange and vicious and tender and unexplainable. But it doesn’t. The rest of the book felt baggy and over-explained to me. Except for the “menopause is woefully misunderstood” thread (which, true), it’s an easily reducible “the dangers of heterosexuality to women” story. Women need a room of one’s own. It’s tough to be a mother and an artist. OK????
When I got to the above passage in All Fours and the full sex scene and then the action that follows, I felt more than I usually do when I come across fatphobia in fiction, possibly because of my years-long love affair with July’s work and possibly because she had just made me feel so MUCH with this novel, so included, so loved, and now she was pushing me out, making it clear how disgusted her narrator would be by my body. I felt physically nauseous. Upset. Confused. Betrayed even?? No, more than that. I felt done. Released from the power of Miranda July. She had stumbled, and I felt the shaking of the earth from that stumble. It turns out she does not worship her artistic integrity above everything else. Right there on the same level, she worships the God of Being Thin. She was just another author to me now. Brilliant and flawed and capable of great mistakes.
I had a thought then, on that flight that’s been knocking around in my head ever since. What if I was my own Miranda July now? Could I be more July than July had been in this novel? Could I take the model the July gave me and do with it something newer, more expansive, less marred by the food dysfunction and body dysmorphia of being raised a Gen X secular Jew?
I could, I’m thinking, and I will.
Toppings
Blue Stoop has tons of amazing online writing & publishing offerings coming up this summer that might be of interest to you or someone you know, and they’re VERY reasonably priced. Where else can you study with or ask questions of Madeline Miller, Jennifer Wilson, Liz Moore, Carmen Maria Machado, me, Sara Novic, Kristen Arnett, Crystal Hana Kim, Julia Phillips and more for just $50? All sessions are digital and recorded if folks can't make the date itself, and all the revenue is a fundraiser for rigorous writing education and accessible literary community in Philly with most instructors donating their time.
I had the pleasure of getting to do a joint event with Santiago Jose Sanchez for their debut novel Hombrecito and Housemates. I was so very impressed by the episodic structure of the book and the ways POV shifts are the plot of the book. If you liked Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, I think you’ll love Hombrecito.
I gasped during the plump sex scenes between Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin in this season of Bridgerton (I just got home from part 2 of book tour, let me live) and cherished this
article about why the world is still not ready for a “mixed-weight” couple.It happened. If you’re just joining me here on Substack, I’ve written previously about how I became obsessed with Alanis Morrisette’s journey to Jagged Little Pill. This week, I saw Alanis in concert in Camden, NJ for JLP’s 30 year anniversary. Joan Jett opened (??) and my stomach felt powerfully expanded from so much screaming. Alanis still has lots more tour dates this summer in NY, CT, the midwest, and west coast.
For any Philly folk or expats, it was a lot of fun to write this “Ultimate Guide to Queer Literature in Philadelphia” for Philly Mag, in which I rounded up the queerest bookstores, reading series’, book clubs, resources, iconic Philly queer books, recently and upcoming queer lit with a Philly connect, and more.
As a little treat, I’m planning a visit to the Alice Austen House Museum in Staten Island later this summer. Austen (1866 – 1952) was “one of America’s earliest and most prolific female photographers, and over the course of her life she captured about 8,000 images.” She was also a lesbian and her home is now a nationally designated queer historical site.
Book Scoop
I have part 3 of 3 of the Housemates Book Tour left and I’m going to Portland, OR (with Kimberly King Parsons, 7/10) as well as Moorestown, NJ (with Liz Moore, 7/24), Philly (with Sarah Gerard, 7/26), and Boston (All She Wrote Books, 7/28), as well as the Jersey Shore and Vermont just for fun. I haven’t been eating nearly enough ice cream, give me your recs for any of these places??
Housemates is a national bestseller, hitting both the American Bookseller Association and USA Today Bestseller lists! This response has exceeded my wildest dreams. I cannot believe how many readers have connected with Bernie and Leah and with my elder queer narrator and with this fictional West Philly group house. Here’s a pic from the day I found out, in Chicago.
A few particularly fun moments: Housemates and I were on the Slate “Working” Podcast, coded “highbrow/brilliant” by the NYMag Approval Matrix, selected as a Best Book of the Week/Briefly Noted by The New Yorker, and interviewed by Vogue.
In all the kerfuffle, I also wrote for Time Magazine about how doctors are telling people like me that we are too fat to freeze our eggs. Spoiler alert: we are not!
That’s all! I will be taking a vacation in August so Frump Feelings may be delayed until the second half of the month. Until then I remain, yours,
Emma
I am so glad you wrote about this! I have been aching to discuss this book but, like you, the second half fizzled for me.
The first part of All Fours had me feeling giddy. It had me searching online to figure out if she had ever talked about being neurodivergent (as far as I can tell, no) because this was the first work of hers I consumed after realizing that I was autistic — her other work had always seemed to resonate with me and I wondered if this might be why.
To me the entire book read as though it was a heavily masking woman slowly realizing that not only is not everyone else merely pretending to be who they think they need to be, but realizing that her capacity to keep the mask on is getting lower as she ages. Highly relatable for me even as a childless, fat queer woman!
I didn’t feel my normal disappointment about the passage you quoted, in fact I kind of liked how the narrator described Audra as humoring her as she gets up to leave, and it makes the narrator realize that she had been viewing her all wrong. Audra was having plenty of sex, didn’t need a thin younger woman to find her sexy, and was a far less pathetic woman than the narrator. I guess I read that passage to be July’s way of showing the narrator’s aversion to bigger bodies as a limiting and illogical choice, and I felt oddly affirmed by it? This is not at ALL to say that I think my view is correct, I am historically terrible at understanding authorial intent, and I was overall left disappointed in the book despite finding so much of it electric.
I hope this isn’t coming across as me attempting to contradict how that passage landed for you and instead comes across as me having Big Feelings about this book.
Final hmm moment for me: the “clean eating” callouts throughout the book pinged on my past orthorexia, and for some reason I kept reading it as July showing how the narrator thought she could be a good person through her food choices, that she was desperate for others to praise her for the purity of what she was eating, which was what I wanted during my decades chasing the “good fatty” trope, and I read it as a criticism of that behavior. Reconsidering that July actually just included it without any of that depth, ugh!
Thanks again for writing about this! I hope my verbose reply didn’t come across as anything other than me reckoning with how I gave July a benefit of the doubt that I think was undeserved. I considered myself far past the point of excusing any media that is careless about hurting fat people!
Yes I have been waiting for some analysis of the portrayals of fatness in this book!! So thank you for writing this. I also enjoyed reading All Fours but was made uncomfortable by the same descriptions of Audra that you point out, along with the narrator's seemingly uninterrogated obsession with food, intense exercise, and weight (with the numbers being SO LOW and somehow she is still lifting weights and it's empowering or something??). At times I wanted to give a generous reading on this: was this meant to communicate something about the narrator's fear of aging and to critique her problematic inability to imagine a life after menopause that's not only good but GREAT? Some of the stuff about Audra was getting there but still gave me an ick. And then, on another note, I didn't love the narrative of "woman in heterosexual marriage finds new freedom through polyamory, something she thinks she is the first person ever to discover!!" I'm not even poly but was like, this is all just very ordinary for a lot of queer people and it's being presented here kind of like some miraculous solution or something.