All Fours by Miranda July

"All Fours" is a Bold Exploration of Desire, Identity, and the Chaos of Self-Reinvention

All Fours by Miranda July.

Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing feared flying but braved the skies to attend the first psychoanalytic conference in Vienna since the Holocaust. Fifty years later, the unnamed heroine of Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours—let’s call her Amanda Huggenkiss—can barely manage a cross-country road trip.

Huggenkiss—never mind—the anonymous narrator is five years shy of 50: a “semi-famous” artist with a wobbly desk and a career to match. “I worked in so many mediums that I was able to debut many times,” she muses. “I just kept emerging, like a bud opening over and over again.”

She’s married to Harris, a music producer who classifies people as either Drivers or Parkers. Drivers, like him, are functional and content. Parkers, like his wife, are bored by ordinary life but thrive in crises, fueled by an insatiable need for applause.

One such crisis was the near-fatal birth of their child, Sam, after a fetal-maternal hemorrhage. Now a second grader, Sam is a nonbinary “theyby” whom the narrator adores with raw intensity, often weeping with love during their weekly candlelit baths. Yet she feels perpetually criticized and under-appreciated for her kale-massaging, bento-box-making parental efforts. Her sex life has stalled, dependent entirely on “mind-rooted” fantasy. Sometimes, when she delays initiating, she imagines her “body-rooted” husband’s penis “whistling impatiently like a teakettle.”

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The Estrogen Cliff

Angst about aging—what Jong might call “Fear of Fifty”—seems a family curse. At 55, her grandmother leapt fatally from a window, thoughtfully placing herself in a garbage bag first. An Aunt Ruthie followed suit, while her mother now battles cognitive decline, and her father remains trapped in a “deathfield” of depression and panic. But it’s the narrator’s looming loss of beauty, libido, and relevance—the dreaded “estrogen cliff” on a hormone-graph—that haunts her most.

After receiving a surprise $20,000 payout from a whiskey company licensing one of her provocative phrases, she decides to splurge on a birthday stay at Manhattan’s swanky Carlyle Hotel. But setting out from Los Angeles, she only makes it as far as a shabby motel in Monrovia—where things unravel in the distinctively surreal, Miranda July way that critics either adore or dismiss as twee.

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Enter Davey

She redecorates Room 321 with New Zealand wool carpets and tonka bean-scented candles before falling into an obsessive affair with her decorator’s husband, Davey, a hip-hop hobbyist working at Hertz who oddly resembles Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables. (Blythe and antique Sarouk carpets are the sorts of allusions July drops without explanation.)

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Let’s Talk About Sex

A few words about the sex in All Fours, named after what the narrator’s sculptor best friend calls “the most stable position. Like a table.” (Though not a wobbly one.) It’s explicit, visceral, and sometimes deliberately off-putting—featuring urine, tampons, and even a suspected polyp, “hopefully benign.” The frequency of masturbation scenes rivals anything from Philip Roth or Harold Brodkey, though more subversive and self-aware.

July’s portrayal of sex is unapologetically raw, stripped of any performative allure. Desire in All Fours is both primal and existential—rooted in survival, defiance, and longing for relevance. The narrator's sexual appetite is vast and indiscriminate, driven by a desperation to feel alive before the inevitable decline she anxiously anticipates.

Jong’s “zipless” intercourse has evolved into July’s “bottomless” desire—an insatiable, unbounded craving that roams across genders, ages, and identities. It’s a supernova of lust, an existential rebellion against the black hole of aging she fears awaits. Through unfiltered erotic encounters, July explores the boundaries between self-expression and self-destruction, forcing readers to confront the often messy, uncomfortable intersections of intimacy and identity.

Her unapologetic ageism, however, can startle in a narrative otherwise attuned to inclusivity and fluid identity. In a gynecologist’s office, she imagines an elderly woman’s “gray labia, long and loose” with disgust. At an antique mall, she confesses, “Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came so abruptly.” Hatred, of course, is fear in disguise—a deflection from confronting her own aging body.

The narrative’s brilliance lies in its refusal to sanitize these uncomfortable truths. Ageism here isn’t just a prejudice; it’s a mirror reflecting the narrator’s deepest insecurities about mortality, relevance, and the body’s inevitable decline. In All Fours, desire and revulsion coexist in sharp relief, tangled together in a restless search for meaning that refuses to be contained.

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The Real Journey

The real journey in All Fours isn’t along Route 66 but toward self-acceptance. To ride shotgun with this narrator, though, you’ll have to tolerate her relentless self-absorption and indifference to anything outside her personal sphere.

When she spray-paints “CALL ME” on a chair intended for the estranged Davey, it’s reminiscent of John Cusack’s boombox serenade in Say Anything. When she posts a frenzied, post-gym dance on Instagram in hopes of earning his Like, it’s the boombox turned up to arena volume.

Are the mental-health professionals back from Europe yet? One finally surfaces late in the story, on Harris’s arm as the marriage reconfigures—but otherwise, therapists remain conspicuously absent. The narrator, perched on the cusp of middle age, burns with the focus of an artist and the yearning intensity of an adolescent, always chasing a fleeting sense of purpose—or at least, a meaningful Like.