At the beginning of Miranda July’s All Fours —one of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction finalists—the forty-five-year-old narrator is about to set off on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York.
But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this isn’t just an ordinary journey; there’s much more beneath the surface than meets the eye.
First we sense the weight of someone trapped in a marriage and yearning for freedom. It is only later that we come to understand her longing for escape.
The narrator, who regularly finds herself wondering whether her life is real, is the mother of a child, Sam. Born prematurely, his unusual arrival subjects her and her spouse,Harris, to eight long weeks of anguish.
The circumstances surrounding the child’s birth leave her feeling estranged from both her husband and reality.
In search of an escape from the confining space motherhood has placed her in, she turns to art—keeping her struggles hidden from her husband.
At times, she resorts to lies to conceal the truth, and relies on elaborate fantasies to sustain her sexual connection.
On her way to New York, just a few miles outside Los Angeles—in a quiet town called Monrovia—our narrator meets Davey, a young Hertz employee.
Choosing to rest in the small town, she books a room at a modest motel, its facilities well below her usual standard.
For reasons known only to her, she decides to renovate the room and hires Davey’s wife, Claire, as the interior decorator. Both the motel’s management and Claire are baffled by her decision to pour thousands of dollars into the redesign.
Her project extends her stay by another three weeks, much longer than she had planned and every afternoon, Davey pays her a visit.
With each visit and interaction, a mutual, unspoken passion begins to develop—tender yet unresolved.
She learns that Davey is a dancer, and through dance, they begin to explore new forms of intimacy which slowly draw her closer to reality.
The room offers her a blueprint for life.“I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.”
When she returns to Los Angeles, she is met with the daunting task of making sense of her life. Should she come clean with Harris or should what happened in Monrovia stay in Monriovia?
What is clear is that she must confront the quiet weight of menopause, the haunting memory of her Grandma Esther and Aunt Ruth who both took their lives in their fifties, and her own brush with death during the birth of her now-seven-year-old child.
She finds herself comparing the lives of men and women in their late forties, noticing the stark contrast in the ease with which men seem to glide through this phase.
Her husband’s experience, she muses, is like “ambling along a gently sloping country road with a piece of straw in the corner of his mouth, whistling” with effortless contentment.
Meanwhile, her situation makes her imagine “getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn’t discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped.”
The novel also delves into the theme of female friendship. We see this through the narrator’s bond with Jordi, her fellow artist. In their open conversations, the narrator confides in Jordi about her anxieties, fears, and the bizarre predicaments she often finds herself in.
Jordi serves as a guiding figure, offering advice and always taking her calls, no matter the time of night.
Through these exchanges, the narrator reveals that speaking with Jordi is “my one chance a week to be myself.”
At its core, All Fours is a humane and sympathetic exploration of aging and menopause, a subject often shrouded in silence and misunderstanding, as if it were something to conceal rather than acknowledge with empathy and honesty.
The author confronts this phase of life that society urges women to endure quietly. She addresses it in a way that calls out the society for its failure to support women through a delicate moment that the narrator’s friend, Mary, sees as a point in life when a woman must “decide what to do when you come to the fork in the road”.
Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of ‘In The Name of Our Father’, ‘Vaults of Secrets’, ‘United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales’ and ‘After The End’.
