Book Club Meets: Desire, hormones, and tampons, with Miranda July
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Would you rip up your current life and reinvent yourself if you had the chance? Do you have desires you’d want to explore? Maybe there are hidden parts of yourself you’ve never had the chance to get to know? Which societal rules would you want to ignore?
Author Miranda July asks all these questions in October’s Happy Place Book Club novel: All Fours. She picks apart how we can fall into the monotony of every day routine instead of acknowledging the wild emotions and longings inside us.
In this chat, Fearne and Miranda talk about fluctuating hormones, pressures of motherhood, sexual fantasies (some of which may or may not involve tampons), and menopause as an incredibly exciting and sacred transitional period.
Fearne asks Miranda to help her be even more painfully unfiltered in her own writing, while Miranda exclusively reveals how she originally intended the novel to end. Plus, what about this book made Fearne say it was the ‘one of the hottest, sexiest things’ she’d ever read...?
Thank you to Canongate Books for the use of All Fours audiobook, read by Miranda July.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. |
| 0:06.5 | Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. |
| 0:10.0 | Not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing. |
| 0:12.7 | Today, all fours by Miranda July. |
| 0:15.5 | Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren't sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. |
| 0:21.1 | Forever thirsty, but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip. |
| 0:25.7 | You go, no, you go ahead. No, no, please, after you. |
| 0:30.3 | This sort of walking on eggshells might sound stressful, |
| 0:33.5 | but I was pretty sure we would have the last laugh. |
| 0:36.8 | When everyone else was sick to death of each other, |
| 0:39.0 | we'd be just breaking through, having our honeymoon, probably in our 60s. My friend Cassie says, |
| 0:45.4 | love you every time she gets off the phone with her husband. Whenever I overhear this, I'm completely |
| 0:51.1 | mortified for her. But I do love him, she says. You were just talking about |
| 0:57.3 | how miserable and stuck you felt. Then she kind of laughs as if it's all out of her hands. I don't |
| 1:03.5 | expect her to be honest with her husband, but at least come clean with me. Other people's relationships |
| 1:09.1 | never make any sense. Once I got my best friend Jordy to record a |
| 1:14.4 | casual conversation between her wife and her. Jordy is a brilliant sculptor who can convincingly |
| 1:20.4 | theorize about anything, but in this conversation she barely said a word while her wife ranted about |
| 1:26.0 | the idiocy of a popular TV show. |
| 1:28.9 | Only occasionally would Jordie murmur a question. |
| 1:31.8 | Mostly she just giggled at all the things Mel said. |
| 1:35.1 | I thought she might be embarrassed, but she wasn't. |
... |
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