‘This book is my bible!’ The women who read Miranda July’s All Fours, then blew up their lives
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The wildly acclaimed novel about a perimenopausal woman going on a journey of erotic awakening has left a wave of women following in the protagonist’s wake. ‘I don’t read books that literally,” says Abra, 49, from Arizona. “I don’t read literature as self-help.” But we’re talking about All Fours, the second novel by the American artist and author Miranda July, which came out this year, and the way it changed her life. The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel” and “the talk of every group text”, having started “a whisper network of women fantasising about desire and freedom”. This is a novel that made women blow up their lives; every book group had a friend of a friend whose life had been shaken to its foundations.
![[Zoe Williams]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/09/Zoe-Williams,-L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
If you’ve not read the book, the plot can be summarised thus: an artist – wife to a Good Guy, mother to an under-10 – sets off on a road trip and gets distracted by a dancer. She moves into a motel room to stay near him, and remodels it in sumptuous fabrics. She can’t sleep, can’t think, definitely can’t go home, maddened with longing. The libidinous intensity of what’s later floated as a perimenopause effect is magical. I’d never seen that on a page before.
![[Abra McAndrew]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0d81f6660cdba048e465309dc00e40e683d17bfb/0_0_3804_4755/master/3804.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
At the start, online reviewers would refer quite elliptically to its influence: “This book was a lighthouse that called me home”; “This book sorta gave me a mental breakdown”; “This was a stick of dynamite disguised as a book.” I guess when you’re turning your life upside down, you don’t necessarily want to tell the whole internet. Other reviews were stridently angry. Sometimes that was because it was so explicit: “This book made me feel icky. Like, super-duper uncomfortable and nauseous. It’s extremely sexual, graphic, raunchy and disturbing.” But other times you could feel a vibrating, much more fundamental moral fury: how could the protagonist act on her ardour without thinking of the consequences? How could she destroy her happy home, not realise that her actions affected others? The anger was fascinating – readers were responding not as if to a character, but as if it were a manual they were being asked to follow. The author wanted them to sell out their loved ones for a glimpse of a stranger’s nipple, and really, how dare she? The haters were almost more locked in than the fans.
![[Lauren, who found All Fours transformative]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0ea6662ec7e5fd36e6c852edcf88c4536d648049/0_32_724_905/master/724.jpg?width=120&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
