Miranda July Ages in the Spotlight

For a moment in the spring of last year, it seemed — at least in my circle — that all anyone could talk about was Miranda July. Her latest book, All Fours, was released in May 2024 and explored the intersection of creativity, womanhood, marriage, and parenting in a way only July could. 

The novel was shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. It was a National Book Award Finalist. The book sparked group chats and in-person meetups around the world. During the initial promotion for the book, July sat down with Esther Perel for The Cut, NPR Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, and The New York Times’ “Modern Love.” The book itself was performative, fantastical and a little bit insane, but also held a much larger place in modern vernacular when it came to women’s bodies, aging, and identity. She didn’t just create a piece of art — she created a piece of dialogue. 

In countless interviews, July has always made a point to note that the book was intentionally set to incite a societal transformation centered around women’s silent performance of perimenopause and menopause. All Fours was a chance for women’s performance to step out of the shadows and throw a spotlight on misogyny, women’s bodies, and aging that rarely gets portrayed in the media. 

This silent performance is something that terrified July in her mid-forties, just as the pandemic broke out and she could no longer rely on live performances as an outlet for her happiness. But the origins of the book stemmed much earlier for her, she told audiences this week during an intimate UCSB Arts & Lectures interview on January 20 at Campbell Hall. 

It actually began when she was skimming through Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters: Forty Years at an art museum shop. Nixon’s project, which was first published in 1999, captures the portraits of Nixon’s wife, Bebe Brown, and her three sisters every year beginning in 1974. July recalled to audience members that the book left a sense of the sort of horrifying reality on the inevitable step of aging, as she saw the beautiful Brown sisters slowly start to whither away into ugliness and age. Years later, July came to the realization that her reaction to the book was more about her fear and terror of aging, than their looks. It started her thinking about aging and looks, womanhood, and creativity. All Fours  is what it became.    

When she first announced the book to her Instagram followers in September 2023, she admitted it was a deeply personal one. And indeed, for anyone who has followed July since she first catapulted into the spotlight at age 21, the book felt like a portrait of her personal life. July, who is now 51, has come out the other side. She’s stepped in front of the chair (literally, for those of us there at Campbell Hall) into a post-menopause world in which she’s more confident than ever, more assured of herself, and more comfortable in her own skin.  

July has always been a force to be reckoned with. She lives in a world that is intriguing, terrifying, disgusting, unnerving, and freeing. Each time she releases a new piece of art, she gives audiences a snapshot into this world she’s been living in. 

We saw a little bit of this new world she’s living in on stage that night in January. The woman with more than 350,000 followers on Instagram, which she likens to a club, was clearly inhabiting a new world — one far from All Fours. For many, we read All Fours last year or a year and a half ago. July revealed in an A21 documentary that she began working on this book more than five years ago. It seems now, she’s embodying a new kind of person. She’s fully embraced this post-menopause world she was so terrified of, and now onto something new. What is that? Well, I hope we find out soon.