Miranda July
All Fours
New York City, USA: Riverhead Books, 2024
336 pp., 6 x 9”, hardcover
Edition size unknown
Miranda July’s second novel (after The First Bad Man in 2015, some artists books and non-fiction, and a collection of short stories) was written after her break-up with filmmaker Mike Mills, whom she married in 2009 and has a thirteen year old child with. The book follows a woman who abandons a planned cross-country road trip and settles into a nearby motel.
"For most of the writing, I thought it was just the relationship that most of us have to motels and hotels, which is that you don’t have your life around you. None of the clutter is there, and so there’s a kind of fresh and peaceful feeling. And it’s sexy—there’s something sexy about being dislocated and not having to do any laundry and things like that. Very late in the game, I realized that every summer until I was 12, I had driven across the whole country to a hotel. I just forgot that I had ever driven across the country. But in fact, this is something my family did to get to Grossinger’s, which was the dilapidated resort hotel that my grandparents owned. We were the poor relations from California, and this was a Jewish, formerly thriving, Borscht Belt hotel. And it was like a fairy tale for me: my parents weren’t anxious because there was no money needed there, and I had free rein as a child in this safe world. There had been this incredible feeling of relief and joy that I didn’t have in my daily life. The hotel went bankrupt when I was 12—the exact age my child is now.”
- Miranda July
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