All Fours: A Novel

"There’s no way to get around this, it’s weird. I love its weirdness. It’s about a woman who is a semi-famous artist who embarks on a road trip from one side of America to the other. She’s been given some money and she’s always wanted to do this. She says goodbye to her husband and child, gets to the next town and stops. The whole book is about what happens in that next town. She never makes it across the country. It is so unusual, I’ve never read a book like it. The concept of the book and the way it’s a woman speaking about a distinct time in a woman’s life—it’s like: ‘Who am I? What do I want? Am I a mum, doing small town things? Am I more than that? Do I want an adventure? Should I completely derail my life? It’s chock, chock full of life. Literally bursting with life. I’m slightly sick of the perimenopause or menopause being presented as a catalyst for change. Is that when you’re allowed to be a bit weird, to take control of your life? Do we now have to have a reason to reclaim our lives? So I’m not keen on ‘the menopause made me do it.’ Or ‘the menopause made me realise…’ You’re talking to a woman who had the menopause at 39, and it did upend my life. So I understand. But it’s a bit of a convenience that women have to have a medical reason for their reclamation. Men just ‘realise.’ Absolutely. I think when fiction engages with a woman at a certain stage of life, it resonates. So that’s why people say ‘menopause novel’ or ‘mother’s novel.’ It’s a shorthand for: if you have this life event going on, there will be resonances. Of course that speaks to women, and it’s an important thing, but I don’t think we have to have that. I mean, thinking of Miranda July’s book, I certainly didn’t do that. I understand that there’s a time of life when it might hit you. But these life events don’t necessarily hit you when they ‘should.’ For example: people are having children later. So you can’t say, ‘Oh, you’re 27, you’ve just had your first baby…’ You might be 45 and just had your first baby! Women are changing careers at 55. Or women are discovering they want to be in a same-sex relationship at 32. It’s all a mishmash. I think we should give permission to have these life events when we have these life events, not by nailing them to motherhood, or the menopause, old age, coming of age. Although, no doubt, there are definite patterns in what you feel at a certain age."

"I mentioned the filmmaker Miranda July’s exuberant, autofictional All Fours as a forthcoming title in my spring highlights . Well, it’s now out and is shaping up to be something of a literary phenomenon. It’s a midlife crisis novel ( The New York Times reviewer hailed it “the first great perimenopause novel”) in which the protagonist, a married artist in her forties, upends her life, departs on a cross-country road trip, but instead holes up in a roadside motel barely 20 miles from home where she embarks on an affair with a much younger man. Soon the relationship is over, but she keeps the motel room where she interviews friends and loved ones about relationships and ageing. “The narrator of All Fours is in the process of losing her ability to carry a child,” explains Vox. “She fears she is losing her ability to attract men. She looks those problems straight in the face. Then she explodes them open with effervescent joy.” It’s saucy, strange, and “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40,” according to Alyson Krueger in the NYT. If you’re ready to radically reimagine what monogamy and midlife might look like, this is the book for you."