Miranda July, the writer, filmmaker, and artist, has written “the First Great Perimenopause Novel,” as The New York Times Magazine proclaimed last week. I came to a similar conclusion while reading the novel in question, All Fours, which chronicles one woman’s journey into menopause and out of a marriage. The unnamed protagonist is forty-five years old and, like July, is a semi-famous artist who lives in Los Angeles with a husband and one young child. Despite these seemingly autobiographical details, she is not a stand-in for the author. Rather, July transformed her own questions about having a family, making art, and aging into those of a character who could embody but also transcend the author’s own experience. Among its other virtues, All Fours cleverly subverts the (often male) road trip novel: here, the protagonist sets out for New York City but stalls out in a motel not far from her home, where she begins an emotional and physical affair with a younger man, a would-be dancer. She contemplates perimenopause and its conclusion, menopause, as an existential state in which her identity must once again be refashioned—even as obdurate bits of her former self resist any such refashioning.
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