The Book That Wouldn’t Leave Me Alone
I finished All Fours at three in the morning. Not because I couldn’t put it down in the traditional page-turner sense, but because I was too unsettled to sleep. Miranda July’s debut novel arrived last May and spent the entire year dominating conversations in ways that felt almost aggressive—the kind of book that didn’t ask permission to matter. Over 52 weeks on bestseller lists, countless readers cycling through rapturous five-star reviews and furious one-star denouncements. The polarization felt intentional. The discomfort, too.
I’d avoided it for months. Not out of principle exactly, but out of a specific kind of dread. Everyone was talking about it. Bookstores shelved it with urgent-looking stickers. My friends texted me fragments they’d highlighted, usually accompanied by some variation of: “This is about us, right?” I knew what they meant. Women in their forties. Women whose bodies were shifting in ways that felt both meteorological and invisible. Women who were supposed to be settled by now, grateful, gracious. The fact that July had written something that refused to perform that gratitude made me nervous.
The Sentence as Trap and Revelation
When I finally opened it, I understood the resistance immediately. The prose moves like a conversation with someone who keeps circling back to uncomfortable truths, who won’t let you off the hook with polite agreement. July’s sentences are deceptively simple. They accumulate weight through repetition and strange juxtaposition rather than syntactic complexity. Here’s a narrator who tells you directly what she’s thinking, then complicates it. Then contradicts it. Then admits she was lying.
This is where the close reading gets interesting. Take the way July constructs the narrator’s desire, not as a grand romantic awakening or even a crisis of meaning, but as a peculiar, almost clinical observation. The narrator wants. She notes this fact about herself the way she might note that the hotel room has two beds instead of one. There’s something almost aggressive about this flatness. It refuses to perform depth for you. It refuses to make wanting seem like the natural emotional crescendo of a well-constructed life narrative.
The sentences themselves embody this refusal. They don’t build toward catharsis. They plateau. They contradict themselves mid-thought. When I read an interview July gave to The Paris Review interviews in March, she explained this directly: she wrote the novel deliberately “not to be likable in the way women’s fiction is expected to be likable.” That quote went viral. It sparked fresh rounds of think pieces. Because of course it did. We don’t usually get to see the architecture of that expectation laid bare.
Perimenopause and the Politics of Naming
What struck me most was how thoroughly July refuses to make perimenopause metaphorical. The New York Times published three separate opinion pieces about this novel between June 2024 and March 2025, all wrestling with the same question: what does it mean for a major literary novel to center this particular biological experience not as symbol or secret but as simple fact? Not as something to overcome or transcend, but as the actual texture of being alive in this body at this moment.
This matters because literature has historically treated women’s bodies as either romantic subjects or medical problems. July’s approach is neither. The narrator experiences physical symptoms, heat, disruption, the strange unreliability of her own nervous system, and describes them with the same matter-of-fact tone she uses to describe hotel lobbies or conversations with strangers. There’s a radical ordinariness to it. The body is not a metaphor. It’s just where she lives.
The novel won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award, and that particular win is worth pausing on. It was the first time that prize went to a novel with explicit perimenopause as a central theme. Not buried in backstory. Not something the protagonist overcomes. Central. That shift in literary legitimacy represents something real about how we’re slowly expanding what gets to be serious art subject matter.
Why the Ratings Are So Polarized
I spent time on Miranda July’s All Fours on Goodreads reading through the reviews after finishing. Over 850,000 ratings by early 2026, with an almost mathematically clean split between five stars and one star. Literary critics have noted that this bimodal distribution isn’t random. It’s structural. The novel is doing something intentionally divisive, and that polarization is actually the point.
Some readers hated the narrator’s passivity. Hated what they read as selfishness. Hated the lack of redemptive arc. Others found all of that genuinely liberating. One reviewer wrote: “Finally, a woman character who isn’t required to learn her lesson.” Another: “Nothing happens and I felt trapped.” These aren’t contradictory readings. They’re both accurate descriptions of what the novel does.
What July pulls off here is subtle and strange. She’s created a book that functions like a mirror showing different reflections depending on where you’re standing. If you want the narrator to change, to grow, to move toward wisdom, you’ll find reasons to be frustrated. If you’re hungry for permission to sit in confusion without resolving it, to want things that don’t fit neatly into your life, to be complicated and uncertain and occasionally unbearable, you’ll find it.
What I’m Still Processing
I’m three weeks past finishing and I keep returning to specific sentences. The way July describes a casual sexual encounter without romance or shame or particular significance. The way the narrator talks about aging not as loss but as a kind of permission. The way the prose itself seems to shrug sometimes, as if to say: this is what it looks like when you stop trying to make the story make sense.
That three-in-the-morning feeling wasn’t gone the next day. I sat with it. July has written something that refuses to comfort you in the ways literary fiction often does. She’s built something that demands you actually pay attention to each sentence, notice what’s not being said, sit in the discomfort of a female character who won’t perform neatness for anyone. It respects your intelligence enough to refuse easy answers. That’s rarer than it should be.
I want to know what you think of it. Have you read All Fours yet? Are you among the five-star converts or the skeptical one-stars? Does the prose work for you, or does it feel like a deliberate refusal to let you enjoy yourself? Let’s talk about it in the comments. I’m still processing and I suspect you might be too.
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