One of the things I like most about reading is the freedom to understand, at least to a certain extent anyway, what you want to understand, without anyone to say to you (as they would in real life), but that’s not actually what I said. As with most things, what you want to understand probably has a lot to do with what’s going on in your own life. For instance, I just finished Miranda July’s All Fours. Like most people I’ve talked to, I loved it and I can’t stop thinking about it.
It wasn’t actually the sex that I was into, although there’s a lot of fantastic sex in the book (I refer you all to Garth Greenwell on this)—I had a baby five months ago and it’s simply not the time for that kind of adventure. It was also not the perimenopause part—I had a baby five months ago after four years of body-horror miscarriages and I just want hormonal stability for a while, please and thank you. What I really thought was that All Fours had some gorgeous descriptions of mothering and of marriage—of their joys. Maybe just overall: it is nice to read a joyful book.
Is this reading against the grain? For the marriage part, maybe. If you look at it one way, the novel is about a marriage that is in the process of failing, maybe doomed to fail. July’s narrator does at one point actually call it “joyless.” I’m trying to figure out how much of my affection for Harris, the husband, comes from the fact that (spoiler) he was not having an affair with his twenty-seven year old collaborator—low bar! And yet. One scene I particularly loved involves one of those minor domestic mishaps that are, in the moment, both hilarious and terrifying. In it, the family has neglected to groom the dog, a poodle mix, and a sort of delicate triage operation must be performed. It is, and all is well again. Afterwards July’s narrator speculates on the past lives of herself and her husband:
Who the fuck had we been? Starving hunters? Had we crested Donner Pass together? Or had we tried to and died trying. And now in this lifetime we only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway; we only became us against insurmountable odds.
The “only” is a problem here, of course. But, but, but. There’s a part of marriage that is like this, that is real and vital—the part where something happens and you both spring effortlessly into motion, each doing your part, moving like dancers to do whatever act of care-taking is required of you. One of you googles “urgent care near me” while the other has already found the thermometer and holds it out wordlessly. One of you reaches for the diaper and the other is already there with it. There’s more to be said about the bravery and generosity of July’s married characters. But since the caricature of a heterosexual marriage is a clueless bumbling husband who requires taking care of, rather than being an equal participant in the work of dailiness, and in defense of Harris here, I just want to say that that feeling of “us against insurmountable odds” is itself a joy.
A second joy in the book is July’s description of parenting. There’s a lot of grief here, too, intertwined—the narrator’s seven-year-old child, Sam, is a sort of a miracle child whose survival as a baby has not stopped stopping the narrator breathless every now and again, and the traumatic circumstances of whose birth keep irrupting in horrible flashbacks into the narrator’s life. When the narrator’s meeting with a mega-celebrity turns out to be (spoiler again) a conversation about the medical condition they both shared in childbirth, I started to feel a little dizzy. If I could fan-girl at Miranda July one day (hello, hi), it would be all—I don’t think I’ve ever read about what it does to your relationship with your child to have to look into the abyss of them potentially not existing. I know every child is a miracle, and I’m not stupid enough to claim that there’s something different about the “against the medical odds” child. But if we’re talking about the representation of experience in fiction, I was tremulously glad to read about this one.
More, though. I’m reading another book that involves so much dithering over the impossible contradiction between art-making and mothering. I feel this; any mother does. But I guess I feel it in a different way than I might if I’d had children younger, or if I hadn’t spent, say, the better part of the past twenty years thinking about it and writing about it (I wrote my dissertation about poetry and work, with whole big part about domestic and reproductive work). I’ve read most of what there is to read, and so much of it says that it’s hard, it’s impossible, and overall it’s bad. Here’s the thing: making art feels—to me, at least—almost always impossible. Before I had a baby, there wasn’t enough time. Now there’s still not enough time.
What I like, in other words, is that July doesn’t dither here. She has to do her work because she’s herself. She loves her child because she’s herself and her child is her child. Are the two activities incompatible? Well, yes, since she cannot be in two places at the same time. But none of that makes her less of an artist, and she knows this. None of it makes her less of a mother, and she knows this too. Maybe one day I’ll get it together and write my own theory of art-making and mothering, which at this early juncture at least is not so fraught and is, yes, very joyful, although of course I depend on a very fortunate set of material circumstances. Meanwhile, here’s July’s description of the narrator and Sam taking one of their regular baths—such true sweetness, such real joy:
We ate apple slices dipped in honey, our wet crunching the only sound until one of us said something about water or time or our bodies—in this otherworldly place we had only big thoughts, like proper stoners. Often we mused about our love and how we would always take baths together like this. I knew we wouldn’t, but we might always remember this feeling. Sometimes I cried, just from love, and Sam said, “Oh, Mama.”
I love that you pulled out some of the themes that most of the discourse has submerged. Her traumatic childbirth experience, which seems to provide the energy for much of the action (black hole to the quasar), is sometimes not even mentioned!
Thanks for this!