Miranda July
Story Stream
Miranda July's Lucrative Fantasies February 24, 2025
I’ve always thought that, when you’re trying to plan your next move, when you’re making a choice, it’s essential step try and weed out both your most unrealistic fantasies and your most implausible fears. I know that sounds comically obvious. The tro...
The Pleasure and Peril of the Aftermath November 27, 2024
When I was a kid, the end of any athletic season brought with it an inexplicable, overwhelming emptiness. After winning the championship basketball game in seventh grade, I dug my face into the backseat of our Subaru and cried. It wasn’t that I had p...
Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy November 22, 2024
Like many middle-aged women I know, I spent my summer parsing the rallying calls of personhood and artmaking ringing out from the new roster of divorce books—books like All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and Splinters by Leslie Jamiso...
Love in the Time of Menopause November 14, 2024
Two novels of the moment—the film director and screenwriter Miranda July’s sparkly and funny All Fours; and the moody and emotional Don’t Be A Stranger, by Susan Minot—present middle-aged women sexually obsessed with unavailable younger men. The setu...
Books Even More Insane Than You August 14, 2024
When it comes to feeling summertime sadness, they say the only way out is through. But there's another option: The process can be expedited by books with protagonists and plots so deeply unwell that your own wretched emotions will look like a Hallmar...
The Oddball 1979 Novel Having A Summer Renaissance August 09, 2024
According to my feed, the book of the summer is a tie between Miranda July’s sexy midlife-crisis drama, All Fours; the new Sally Rooney galley; and a slim experimental novel published in 1979. Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street lyrically detai...
A Conversation with Miranda July June 17, 2024
IN THE MIDDLE of our conversation with Miranda July, she paused to tell us that she had found something in the pocket of her vest, newly purchased from eBay. The note, which she read aloud, reminded the previous wearer of an upcoming meeting that, in...
Book Publishing in Crisis June 17, 2024
You have to go all the way down to number 81 on Amazon’s bestseller list to find a book by a “literary” writer.That would be “All Fours,” by Miranda July, the writer-filmmaker-artist.Otherwise most of the top 100 is taken up Father’s Day books, Mothe...
Wonder Woman June 07, 2024
The mid to late aughts was a time of catastrophically delusional optimism. You didn’t need to be rich to buy a house; there were loans. You didn’t need to live in an expensive metropole to meet new people; online spaces were opening up. And you didn’...
Suspended Animation May 29, 2024
Miranda July reminds us that the weirdest parts of life are also often the most familiar. Throughout her work, the attentive magnification of granular detail yields the kind of hyper-specific revelation that feels both appealingly unmoored and quietl...
Miranda July on Emotional Honesty May 14, 2024
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 o...
"All Fours" by Miranda July May 13, 2024
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely diffe...
Miranda July on a Mid-Life Reawakening May 13, 2024
The writer, artist and filmmaker Miranda July is known for pushing boundaries. Her fiction provokes, not just with unconventional couplings and offbeat sexual acts, but by charting previously unmapped terrain. In All Fours, her first book in almost a...
Miranda July’s New Novel Will Ignite Your Group Chats May 07, 2024
There is something vague and unseeing in the gaze young women cast at older ones. Those figures paddling across the slough of middle age, headed toward the glowing shores of the golden years — the ones no longer desirable but, inconveniently, not yet...
