The Awareness of Desire

Or, why everyone is talking about All Fours.

A friend texted me last night to say she’d finally read All Fours by Miranda July, and that it blew her mind.

I read the book last year and it did the same to me.

It’s a strange novel: I found it wildly funny, to the point where my children kept asking me if I was okay while I read it due to spasmodic and regular fits of giggling.

But its effects are kind of serious. It seems to be changing the lives of a lot of people.

Most of those people are women. Most of those women are middle aged. And married.

All Fours is spurring something. The novel seems to be causing many women to leave their marriages. There are memes on TikTok about it; the New York Times published an article last year titled “The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Life Because of Miranda July”.

Not the first-ever book about a midlife crisis.

Why is this novel in particular such a big deal?

People have written about being confused and miserable in middle age. There are thousands of books on that topic (although I’d wager most of them were by and about men).

People have also written at length about unhappy marriages — here’s a Good Reads list with 482 books on the topic.

But All Fours seems to hit different.

I think part of the reason is the protagonist.

How do we feel about this?

I’ve had a lot of conversations about the main character of All Fours (she’s never named in the book), and not one of the people I’ve spoken to has said, unabashedly and simply, that they like her.

She’s selfish. She’s privileged. She walks away from her family and hides from them and tells them (weird but mostly white) lies.

At the same time, she’s struck a huge chord with a ton of people — they see something in her that intrigues them and draws them in, and, if the Times is to be believed, causes many of them to leave their marriages.

What is it?

My theory is this: despite her privilege, her quirky insistence on pursuing her artistic whims, her self-involvement, the protagonist doesn’t actually think she’s allowed to be free.

There are invisible boundaries she is not allowed to cross.

And then, as the book progresses, she crosses them.

Desires shift — will you shift with them?

Of course that journey — from being bound by duty to breaking through it — isn’t rare at all. There are many stories like that.

What differentiates this one further, I think, is that the main character isn’t just stepping out of a marriage to seek greener pastures.

She goes through a — tortuous and hilarious — process of getting back in touch with her true desires. When she does, she realizes that they aren’t at all what they used to be.

She has built a life, with a marriage, a home, a child. It’s objectively a good life. She’s got money. Her husband is successful and kind and good looking. She has a solid relationship with her kid.

So the boundary she’s going to cross involves looking directly at that excellent life and recognizing that it’s not for her anymore.

The things she does as she’s figuring out how she really feels and what she really wants caused visceral reactions in a lot of my fellow readers.

“You can’t do that!” they would whisper, or shout, at the page.

But she can do that. She does.

Repression isn’t simple.

If you’re a people pleaser, you’ve learned to ignore your desires and your needs.

You had to. If you knew they were there, you wouldn’t be able to adapt yourself to the needs and expectations of the people around you. You’d be too distracted by the voice in your head and the feelings in your body.

Spend decades ignoring what you truly want, and the pathways between your brain and your body will atrophy.

You won’t even know that you don’t know what you need and want anymore.

This is an adaptive strategy if you want to fit in and please those around you. One great way to do that is: always want what they want; always believe what they believe.

The trouble is, your desires aren’t dead and gone.

They’re still down there doing their thing. You can’t consciously feel them, but they haven’t left.

Danger! Needs arising!

Martha Beck talks about a trope that crops up in a lot of movies about humans who make friends with wild animals: at the end of the movie, inevitably, the human character is standing at the edge of the woods, crying and covered in snot, yelling at the animal to go away, go back to nature, go live as you’re supposed to!

Beck says that animal — the one we think is separate from us and belongs back in the woods, not living in our house with us — actually is us.

It’s our essential self. The person we were before a lifetime of socialization taught us that all animal feelings are to be ignored and clamped down.

In All Fours, the protagonist’s rediscovery of some of those animal feelings is circuitous and complicated and crazy.

As a member of society, the main character can’t simply ignore her socialized self and run off into the woods to be an animal again.

What she does manage to do, through many false starts and experiments, is find the part of her that is truly alive, and start to embrace it.

Happy endings (are kind of bullshit).

Another consensus that’s come up as I’ve talked about the book is that the final pages are the weakest part of it.

I tend to agree.

After a narrative that is messy in a million ways, the ending feels rote: everyone’s doing well! We all got what we wanted!

If the rest of the book seems like a heightened, somewhat-out-of-control version of real life, the ending is way too pat to be believed.

That’s because none of this is that simple.

Rediscovering your desires, exploring your true, animal self and finding out what it needs, taking the risk of stepping outside the lines of what’s expected of you — it’s messy.

But it’s also beautiful. And hilarious. And joyful.

If any of what I just wrote made sense to you or seemed interesting, I recommend reading All Fours yourself.

And if you’ve already read it, I’d love to hear your take.

I’ll give the last word to Miranda July herself: she wrote this piece on her Substack recently with the subtitle “Should you blow up your life?” Whether or not you do is up to you.