Miranda July Wrestles with the Female Midlife Crisis in ‘All Fours’

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Miranda July’s new novel, “All Fours,” a 45-year-old artist embarks on a solo roadtrip to New York from her Los Angeles home. She makes it as far as Monrovia, a small town a half-hour from L.A., and waits out the rest of her trip in a motel room while pursuing an infatuation with a Hertz rental car employee. The novel, which shares similarities with July’s own life, explores themes of marital ennui, the fear of sexual irrelevance and the contours of the female midlife crisis. July grew up in Oakland and is known for her performance art, her films “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and “Kajillionaire,” and her fiction “No One Belongs Here More Than You” and “The First Bad Man.” We talk to her about her new novel and why she describes it as “closer to the bone.” Guests: Miranda July, actor, screenwriter, director and author - She’s known for her films “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and “Kajillionaire,” and her fiction includes “No One Belongs Here More Than You” and “The First Bad Man”. Her new novel is "All Fours" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:33.7	From KQED.
0:49.9	The From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim.
0:53.4	Coming up on Forum, around the age of 40, something changed for Miranda July.
0:58.5	The filmmaker of me and you and everyone we know, an author of The First Bad Man, started to get worried about the coming years.
1:05.5	She told the LA Times, when I looked forward, it looked shocking. It was a narrowing and dimming of the road ahead.
1:12.6	So July did what she does best.
1:14.9	Plunge into that unknown and write about it forcefully and uninhibited.
1:19.4	The result is all fours, which the New York Times calls the first great perimenopause novel.
1:26.0	We dive in right after this news.
1:36.9	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Miranda July has a new
1:43.7	novel about approaching menopause.
1:46.7	All Forres introduces us to a semi-famous L.A. artist who leaves for a cross-country road trip
	...

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