Writing Sex: Miranda July's All Fours

On the weirdness of desire

Miranda July

This newsletter is part of what I hope will become an occasional, running series of essays and close readings about writing sex, which is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and was also the subject of the seminar I offered at NYU this past year. You can read the first post, on writing the moments after sex (with reference to James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Kenyon, and one of my own scenes) here. There are also musings about representing sex scattered across other posts, maybe especially the conversation I had with Edmund White last year, and in one of the first pieces I wrote for this space (they were longer back when I only posted once a month), which covered, among other things, a two-man opera about sex work, Trade by Emma O’Halloran.

But before this week’s essay, a few notes:

• Some news that can finally be public: the operatic adaptation of my first novel, What Belongs to You, written by David T. Little and starring Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman, will be directed by the legendary choreographer and dancer Mark Morris. The score is gorgeous: David has entered into the novel with extraordinary sympathy and insight; and Karim’s voice has become the sound of the book for me. It will be premiered September 26 and 28 at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center. Please come if you can. There will be a panel discussion on the 27^th, and I’ll also be giving a reading on the 25^th, as part of the University’s Writers Series. You can find more information about the opera here; tickets will be available in July.

• Speaking of Edmund White, several months ago I wrote an essay on his second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which came out in 1978. That year was a kind of annus mirabilis for gay literature, seeing the publication of two books that would enter the queer canon: Larry Kramer’s Faggots, which is a novel I really don’t like at all, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, which I adore. Edmund White’s third novel, A Boy’s Own Story, would also become a classic. But Nocturnes, despite having fervent devotees, has long languished out of print; I once heard White himself describe it as the most neglected of his novels. I’m hoping that the new edition McNally Editions has just put out will change that. My essay appears in that book as a foreword, and it was also published last week by The New Yorker. You can read it here. (And if you’d like more thoughts about 1978’s queer lit, The Yale Review published my intro to a new edition of Dancer from the Dance not too long ago.)

• Finally, my third book, Small Rain, comes out on September 3. Please pre-order by asking for it at your local bookstore, or through any of these links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page.

I love this Duncan Grant cover

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Miranda July’s fiction is drawn again and again to the body in crisis. Sometimes that crisis is situational: in “The Man on the Stairs,” a tiny, terrific story from No one belongs here more than you, a woman leans into the dark of a stairwell, where (maybe) a man has been creeping, intending her harm, breathing out “the bitter air that makes women doubt everything.” Sometimes the crisis is medical: the central movement of her debut novel, The First Bad Man, features a traumatic pregnancy and an infant battling for life; it’s one of the remarkable novelistic hospital sequences I’ve read. (I started compiling a list of these while I worked on my own hospital novel.) In fact, I think this middle movement of The First Bad Man goes places art seldom dares, and reaches enormous heights of drama and pathos; it’s one of the great things I’ve experienced in recent fiction. Sometimes the crisis is aesthetic, as in a scene in All Fours where the narrator records herself performing a wild, physically demanding dance, a video she will post publicly on Instagram that is really a private message, or rather a kind of spell, meant to summon a singular other. And sometimes, often, the crisis is erotic.

Sex is a preoccupation throughout July’s career, and it has been much commented upon in discussions of her work—and that commentary has in turn been subject to a lot of second guessing. Is the sex in July’s work really remarkable? Would is seem so remarkable, so shocking even, if it were written by a man? Sometimes the commentary and the second guessing come from the same source, sometimes from the same paragraph, as happened in Alexandra Jacobs’s NYT review of All Fours:

It is gaspingly graphic, sometimes verging on gross (urine, tampons and a suspected polyp — “hopefully benign”— all come into play), and supplemented with masturbation galore. Compelled to read these definitely not twee-rated passages, I briefly considered filing a complaint with human resources. Then I remembered the protracted and messy sex scenes released with such fanfare into the culture by Philip Roth, Harold Brodkey, et al., and decided I was being discriminatory and prudish.

The problem with this is not that it holds July to a different standard than Roth or Brodkey (nice to see him get a Times mention, one worries he’s being forgotten) but instead that it dismisses the whole company in a way that is dismayingly unserious. “Verging on gross,” “definitely not twee-rated,” “filing a complaint with human resources,” “protracted and messy.” Jacobs’s jokiness is a way of holding the sex in these books at arm’s length, not treating it seriously as a resource for art. All of these writers deserve better.

In fact the sex in July’s work is worthy of comment, and there’s no double standard in noting that she’s drawn to the transgressive; there are pages in her books that would make Mickey Sabbath lick his fingers. In “Making Love in 2003,” from No one belongs here more than you, a narrator recounts a series of erotic encounters with a “dark shape,” a nebulous “sexual predator,” who appeared in her bedroom beginning when she was fifteen; as an adult, she believes this force has been reincarnated in her fourteen-year-old special-needs student, with whom she begins a relationship: “Now there was this extra thing, the boy, and the feeling I had carving into my gut, the feeling of wanting to fuck him, as he had fucked me when I was fifteen—into other galaxies.” In The First Bad Man, the narrator finds sexual satisfaction in staging bruising scenarios from self-defense videos with her roommate. Erotic scenes like these are noteworthy, I think; no need to worry about double standards.

In All Fours the crisis comes in not having sex. If you’ve seen any of the coverage of the book, you know the set-up: an unnamed, middle-aged, “moderately famous” artist gets a twenty thousand dollar windfall and treats herself to a stay in New York’s Carlyle Hotel. She plans a cross-country road trip to get there, but gets sidetracked in a town about thirty minutes from her house, where she spends the twenty thousand dollars turning her cheap motel room into a simulacrum of a luxury hotel. She stays there two weeks, reporting back to her husband and child as if she were following the original itinerary. The trigger for this extravagance is a seemingly chance encounter she has with a much younger man, Davey—he washes her windshield at a gas station, they lock eyes through the glass; this will blossom into nightly encounters in the motel room, which the narrator realizes she has made precisely for this purpose. A twenty thousand dollar love nest.

My very own copy in my very own hand

None of this is planned, exactly; it’s a cascading series of spur-of-the-moment decisions. That’s how the novel moves, too, its shape seemingly determined by impulse. This is true of all of July’s fiction, which often has an improvisatory feel. July is drawn to characters who privilege impulse over decorum; she’s fascinated by seemingly bizarre actions and their repercussions. In one of their early meetings, Davey buys her a bottle of water; in the enlivening light of her attraction for him, “it seemed to be drawn from the deepest, purest crack in the world.” She drinks until she can’t drink any more, then lets the water “pour over my lips and chin and down my dress, the whole while smiling at him while he smiled at me.” Davey takes this in stride, treating it as nothing out of the ordinary, and this makes the narrator think of him as “complicit,” like a collaborator in a performance. “But it wasn’t a performance, was it?” the narrator muses. “No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be understood, not made much of, just taken seriously like any honest speech. It was dumb, but anything smarter would miss the point. I was speaking now to all my friends and family: You have all missed the point of me.”

I sometimes resist fiction that moves like this, blown about by whim, lurching after impulse; it makes me think of what Leontes says in The Winter’s Tale: “I am a feather to each wind that blows.” My usual feeling is that virtue, in life as in art, comes from a steadier course. I like a sense of form, a discernibly well-wrought shape, charged with intention and durable commitments; in narrative, I like a structuring line of energy, something that anchors us in, and moves us through, time and intention. But July makes me question all these preferences; she wins me over. In part this is because her narrative impulses are so often brilliant, genuinely interesting and surprising, funny until they somersault into sadness; in part it’s because they so often lead to insight. Her narrative shapes are responsive to a vision of life: “We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago,” her narrator thinks at one point, surprised by her extravagant, vagrant self.

Like most of July’s characters, the narrator of All Fours takes what she calls “truths of the moment” to be the seat of authenticity; she resists, and often resents, the stable, sustaining, structuring shapes that make a life legible: marriage, family, motherhood. (These aren’t the only coherent shapes a life can take; they’re the shapes the narrator has chosen and resists.) “I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form,” she will think late in the novel; “A person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allowed for it.” (She also desperately loves her child, and lives in anticipation of a day when the conflict between authenticity and commitment will be magically resolved in her marriage.) As an artist, she has shifted medium and genre, so that her career can be a series of emergings, a constant debut. But a career of emergings isn’t exactly a career, maybe; one has to figure out middles, too; one has to confront the inevitability of an end. The narrative crisis of All Fours is spurred, finally, by slamming up against finitude. For the novel’s narrator this is epitomized by a medical diagram of sex hormone production over a life span, and what she calls the “cliff” of the drop-off in estrogen with menopause. Her attraction for Davey represents a last gasp, she thinks, a chance to feel, more intensely than she has felt it before, “the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth.”

So: a novel of midlife crisis, then; a middle aged woman having an affair. Labels like “midlife crisis novel” (like “coming out novel”) are sometimes used dismissively, as if to say been there, done that; but as a response to art this is always cheap—not just cheap: ludicrous. All of human life might be dismissed with a blasé been there, done that; but this posture of sophistication, like all postures of sophistication, is just protectiveness, a defense against reality. The power of July’s fiction comes from its willingness to cast off defenses. It isn’t possible to wear out human experiences; we will always need more midlife crisis novels because human beings will always have midlife crises. It really always is, it really always will be, ineluctably, harrowingly unprecedented to confront the universal reality that death exists.

It’s true that there are fewer novels of this type centered on women than on men, but that isn’t really what makes All Fours interesting. What makes it interesting is, in part, how good July is at capturing the texture of desire, or of adulterous desire: not just the strobing ecstatic liberation but also the ambivalence, the vacillation, the irreality. When Davey states the obvious fact that the narrator is not going to leave her husband for him, she thinks, “It was like a ghost asking you to leave your husband for them—there was no kind way to say But you’re see-through.” The narrator describes her artistic practice as a “conversation with God,” but also as an attempt “to get across what life seemed like to me”; July is remarkably good at conveying the pungency of lived experience. “Midlife crisis” isn’t a collective trope in All Fours; it’s a terrifying, exhilarating, individual experience. You feel it on your pulses.

All Fours is also interesting because of Davey. He’s an artist, too, a dancer, though he hasn’t made a career of it. He hasn’t made a career at gas stations, either: he washed the narrator’s windshield because he recognized her; his life has been impacted by her art. This will thrill the narrator and also make her worry that “he’d been caught in the snare of my work. Whereas my feelings for him were totally pure, I’d simply been drawn to him.” But Davey, in turn, will fear (in another nice reversal of gendered expectations) that he’s just a “pretty face.” “We each worried that the other one adored something that wasn’t really us,” July writes. Of whose desire is that not true? Davey does adore her, her desire is reciprocated; but Davey is also married, and his commitment to his marriage outweighs the force of impulse. They hold each other, they have intimate talks, his evenings with the narrator do constitute a kind of infidelity; but also he draws firm lines. (Firm-ish.) It gradually dawns on the narrator that they really won’t have sex. “His restraint wasn’t a form of flirtation that would eventually evolve into sex,” the narrator thinks, with something like wonder; “it was actual restraint, he was sacrificing something he wanted” for his wife.

As the days (the nights) pass, this makes for an excruciating experience of withheld consummation, the best portrayal of desperate horniness I’ve read since the first forty pages of Raven Leilani’s Luster (whose narrator’s longing makes her dreams, in a line I’ve never forgotten, “delirious expressions of thirst—long stretches of yellow desert, cathedrals hemmed in dripping moss”). The narrator begins her time at the motel in hope, each day preparing for a fuck that never comes: “I spent the day preparing to see him, cleaning and smoothing my body. I pushed my finger deep inside my pussy and tasted it, as if his tongue would soon be in there and I might be able to adjust the flavor.” This is typical of the candor with which July approaches the body, a particular strength of her writing: there’s no prudishness, and so none of the prurience prudishness often alibis.

It’s clear that the narrator is up for anything, and so Davey, who has boundaries, calls the shots. But sometimes, often, the boundaries aren’t exactly clear. He initiates spooning, for instance, and then:

When he got too hard, we rolled apart. Our hands found each other; I pulled one of his fingers to my lips and he pushed it into my mouth. Throughout my life men had been pushing their big fingers into my mouth and although I went along with it, I always thought, Are you out of your mind? What should I put in there next? Your shoe? How about I just lick the pavement? But this was entirely different. I wished it was a little dirtier. I wanted to eat his day; everything he had done that day.

I wanted to eat his day: a line that precisely pins a certain pitch of erotic exuberance, that gets it exactly right. After a few moments, Davey pulls his finger from her mouth. There’s always a suspicion that Davey is a fuckboi, a pseudo-star pseudo-fucker, teasing the narrator, giving her a taste and then withdrawing what she wants. But actually I think the book treats him more generously. His desire for the narrator is genuine; so is his commitment to his real life, the life outside the faux-luxury love nest the narrator has made. (By the by, the designer the narrator hires for this transformation is Davey’s wife, which gives some sense of the Dickensian unhingedness of July’s plot shenanigans.)

This torturous physical intimacy comes to a climax, sort of, in the scene that gave Alexandra Jacobs the heebie-jeebies. I think it’s one of the most remarkable sex scenes, if we can call it that (I think we can), I’ve read in years. The chapter starts with Davey recounting a gay sex dream, something men of the narrator’s own generation have never been willing to do, which she has always seen as a failure “to inhabit the full range of their manhood.” “I loved him so much in that moment,” the narrator thinks, and this leads to her showing him her first girlfriend, which leads in turn to a torrent of tears she can’t explain.

So the scene is set by revelation, a new vulnerability. Then Davey draws, or redraws, boundaries. They can’t kiss, he tells the narrator, which isn’t a rejection but instead proof of his desire: “If I kissed you I’d have to fuck you.” He walks into the bathroom to piss, and, in a fascinating psychological notation of a kind I’m not sure I’ve seen before, the narrator has a thought she can’t quite access: “I’m thinking something, I thought. What am I thinking?” The thought is, in fact, an intention:

I jumped up and before he completely realized I was behind him, I stuck my open palm in the stream of his hot pee, catching an overflowing handful. He made a kind of laughing bark of surprise, then fell immediately silent—it seemed to take all his concentration to keep peeing now that it was into my hand. He had a lot, it kept coming in a hot, steady stream that smelled like cereal. The smell and the heat of the urine were disorienting; one is instructed so firmly to stay away from pee and yet there is no actual law or punishment, being peed on is the punishment. But you don’t die when it touches you and surviving pee makes you feel mighty. He was done, shaking the last few drips. I had been careful not to look at his penis. He tucked it away and I carried my hand to the sink. He watched me rinsing it off for a moment and then came over and squirted soap on his hands, lathered them up, and washed my palm and wrist, forearm and fingers. He did this with great focus, as if my hand was something very dear, a treasure.

This is just tremendously good. It sends one back to that scene with the water bottle earlier—a bizarre action, individually instigated, that becomes a kind of collaboration; liquid overflowing its vessel; an ecstatic transgression of the usual social order. I love that it doesn’t shy away from the physical sensations themselves: “a hot, steady stream that smelled like cereal”—how weirdly specific that is, how strange; I love how it tracks Davey’s response, his barked laugh and then his silence—the silence of shock but also, I think, of a kind of reverence, a sense that they’ve created an altered space that now they’ll inhabit together; I love how an acknowledgement of the public, social mores the narrator has violated is followed by her own private, internal experience, a sense of her own might. I love that, even as certain boundaries have been shattered, others hold firm—it feels perfectly judged, for the psychological balance of the scene, that she doesn’t look at his dick.

And then the beauty of the ending, the exit from the act. What sense to make of the wonderful estrangement in “I carried my hand to the sink,” which is at once a kind of vertiginous whirligig absurdity and also perfectly clear, or anyway I construe it as being perfectly clear: the hand that caught Davey’s urine is cradled in her other hand. Probably there are various ways to read this; as it strikes me, the hand has become a relic, something sanctified. This is suggested too by the immensely beautiful gesture Davey makes in washing her hand, not just washing her hand but individually each of its articulated parts—a kind of aftercare but also itself something like a sexual act, lubricated flesh (“lathered them up”) rubbing against lubricated flesh. And this act doubly consecrates the hand, marking it, for Davey and the narrator both, as “very dear, a treasure.”

Wonderful. But the scene doesn’t end there; it gets weirder, also tenderer and hotter. Neither of them has had an experience like this; the narrator says she isn’t turned on, exactly, “But I really liked it.” But Davey is turned on: “The bright, focused look in his eyes said that none of this had ever crossed his mind before but now that it had he was one hundred percent onboard.” (Note the lack of commas between the clauses in that sentence; Davey’s feeling is too urgent for punctuation.) He wants to continue the scene, to reciprocate the narrator’s action. The narrator doesn’t need to pee, but she does need to change her tampon. This is an amazing turn in the scene, an upping of the stakes—for this gay boy at least, having come of age during the AIDS crisis, blood is scarier than urine. Davey doesn’t blink.

One of the pieces of advice I repeat most often to my students is that logistics are sexy: that taking the trouble to be clear about the arrangement of bodies in space, the way bodies fit together, the way things work, is crucial in writing sex (and everything else); the trouble always pays off. July gets a lot of traction out of the logistics of this scene. The narrator doesn’t want Davey to see her vagina, both out of a sense of fair play and because she worries about the effect on Davey of seeing it “dripping blood over the O of the toilet.” So Davey sits down on the toilet seat, his jeans still on (“Don’t want to poke you,” he says), and the narrator settles herself, facing the same direction (that is, with her back to Davey), on his lap. Davey is holding the new tampon, still wrapped; he asks what he should do. The narrator reaches down to take out the old one—“mechanically,” out of old habit—but Davey stops her:

He pushed my hand away. I sat there, feeling his big fingers fish around for the string as mine usually did. It was pressed up against the labia, which were probably not entirely free of blood. I felt close to tears, some combination of shame, excitement, and an unexpected kind of sadness, as if this were coming after a lifetime of neglect. I had been so completely alone with my period all these years. He found the string, wrapped his finger around it, tugged, and seemed surprised that it didn’t just pop out. With his breath heavy in my ear he gave it a long steady pull and very slowly it came into the light. He was so hard under my right thigh. He held it in the air by its string, the almost black creature from Middle-earth. I pulled off a long piece of toilet paper, ready to take over, but he wrapped it up himself with intense concentration, making various rookie mistakes and surprising choices, such as doubling up the toilet paper to begin with.

What’s wonderful about this is how new an experience it is for both of them, and how that newness is conveyed; how it makes what for the narrator is a routine, something that has become mechanical, new and strange. Saying something is routine is a way of saying it has become invisible; Davey gives her back an experience of herself, of her body, and makes it weird, foreign, monstrous maybe but also mythic, maybe even a little heroic—“the almost black creature from Middle-earth”; she experiences it, sees it—“it came into the light”—in a way that is vivid, fresh, awakened. It’s also hot, as the state of Davey’s dick makes clear. Most importantly, this moment takes what had been a solitary experience, maybe one not untinged by shame (so many of the functions of our body are tinged with shame) and returns it to the narrator as a shared experience. It’s hard to say how moving this is. “I had been so completely alone with my period all these years” is an extraordinary line, dense with feeling. Again, July luxuriates in logistics: the passage registers the physicality of removing a tampon, by which I mean it makes us experience the body as a body, not just an idea. I love Davey’s “intense concentration,” his “rookie mistakes” and “surprising choices,” the seriousness with which he takes this moment. “Shame, excitement, and an unexpected kind of sadness”—July is mixing colors, trying to notate an emotion we don’t have a word for; it’s pretty much right for the emotion I feel reading it, too. It’s an extraordinary scene.

And it doesn’t end there. Davey puts the new tampon in, and then they both seem paralyzed, with his finger inside her: “He was very careful not to move his finger or palm, but neither could he seem to leave.” But it does come to an end, finally, as all scenes must. The scene began with laughter shading to seriousness, and now that movement recurs in reverse: “We looked at each other in the mirror, very seriously and then slowly smiling. Sex was great, but this. This was something we’d never do with anyone else. Our thing.”

The whole scene is barely four pages, and yet it traverses a huge space, delivering these characters to new versions of themselves, and to a new sense of what—in the confined space of the narrator’s motel room, within the narrow span set by Davey’s boundaries—they’ve been able to become together. This is a sex scene that carries us from the frustration of sexlessness to a sense of intimacy that’s more precious because it’s not sex, exactly, but some unprecedented, undefined thing they’ve created with each other. A collaboration. As I say, it’s an extraordinary scene, a great example of writing the sexual body. Like much of July’s work, it’s at once hyper-refined and feral. Above all, what one feels in her books, not just in the sex scenes but maybe especially there, is the profound weirdness of knowing another human being, which means the weirdness of knowing oneself, that version of oneself one becomes with a particular and beloved other. She makes me feel that more pungently than almost any other recent writer, and it makes her work almost unbearably moving. It’s an extraordinary thing to be able to write like that.

I hope you’ll pick up All Fours.

As always, thank you for reading—

G.