Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Here's how Miranda July describes the

main character of her book, All Fours. She's 45. She decides to go on a kind of vision quest, road trip,

driving from L.A. to New York, says goodbye to her husband and child, sets out and stops about 20 minutes

from her house and checks into a motel and spends the three weeks that she's supposed to be in New York

there. And when she goes home from this supposed road trip, she doesn't fit back into her life

in the same way. Sex, desire, aging, and domesticity are the things she's examining with this book.

She did this interview with NPR's Brittany Luz from It's Been a Minute, and they got to talking

about perimenopause and romance and biology, and Miranda

July says, every love story is a hormone story. And so what does love look like when your

hormones are in transition? Find out after the break. In the U.S., national security news can feel

far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're here to talk about your new book, All Fours.

And a lot of the book is reckoning with a cultural lack of imagination around women in the middle of their lives.

And our society has so much imagination for what being young looks like. And you even say that youth is so heavily

marketed to us to the point that some of us end up disappointed by our youths not looking

the way we're told they would. Right. But after a woman that gets married and has kids,

it seems like in a cultural sense, nothing else will happen to her. Yeah, it's kind of the end of the story, right? Like, there, you did it. Yeah. Good job. Yeah. You're done. It's like you checked all the boxes and you're done. What kind of guidance were you hoping for for middle age? Right. As you said, like the road ahead just seemed to drop off like a cliff.

Not only was I having trouble finding like basic medical facts about my changing body,

all the aspirational imagery. Yeah, and stories, they just stopped as if what was coming was

just too humiliating to even talk about.

But meanwhile, among my friends, there was this kind of feverish whisper network about our bodies and our marriages and our desires.

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