David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. Miranda July is an actor, a filmmaker, and a writer, and she's got a new novel out called All Fours. Staff writer Alexandra Schwartz has been reading and watching Miranda July for nearly 20 years.

Alexandra Schwartz: I saw her first movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which came out in 2005, the same year that I graduated from high school. When I heard she had a new book coming out, I was very curious and I was blown away. It was funny, it was fast-moving. It was exciting, it was scary. Here's Miranda July reading her book.

Miranda July: Originally, I had planned to get to New York the normal way, fly there but then Harris and I had gotten into an odd conversation with another couple at a party. Our friends--

Alexandra Schwartz: I think this is a book that readers will read while biting their nails or covering their eyes. It is really moving. It's wild and it's adventurous, and it has to do with a woman whose life changes and who changes her own life totally when she reaches middle age. At the start of the book, she goes on a road trip. She's headed to New York but surprise, she doesn't make it to New York. Basically, less than an hour outside of LA, she pulls into a small town called Monrovia, goes to a gas station, meets a young guy there, and what follows this encounter upends her entire life.

Miranda July: How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far, each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit, a mad woman, probably but my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues, their many and sharp tongues, and give this new girl a chance.

David Remnick: Alexandra Schwartz sat down with Miranda July recently to talk about her new book.

Alexandra Schwartz: Hi, Miranda.

Miranda July: Hi.

Alexandra Schwartz: Where did this book come from for you?

Miranda July: This book is about a woman in the middle of her life, and it tries to be as honest as possible. It's about the body, the changing body, perimenopause, desire, marriage, being a mother, and how all those things maybe stop fitting together in a way that makes sense or has enough room in it for this narrator and maybe for a lot of women as they come into themselves.

I really think it probably began in my 40s, having this new, grim feeling about the future, which was weird because I'm a very excited, hopeful person but it seemed like this wasn't my decision. Like there was now, in the future, this maplessness and even basic medical facts about my body, which was so weird because literally just a few years before, there was an over-involvement in my reproductive system and so much information.

Alexandra Schwartz: July has a 12-year-old with the filmmaker Mike Mills. They got married in 2009. They're now getting a divorce. As she approached middle age, she kept her eyes peeled and her ears open for anything that she could learn from other women about what might come next.

Miranda July: A woman would say something, or I'd read something, I'd write it down, and I was like, maybe it's worth it to not age gracefully. Maybe it's worth it to not be cool about this because there's so much here and what a gold mine. It's not that we haven't read women writing at this age, but to specifically name everything. That seemed to be the project to me, and then to keep living as I wrote it.

Alexandra Schwartz: I think it may be fair to say that some of the things that the narrator in your novel was going through, you were also going through as you were writing the book. Some of the things that started happening to her started happening to you too. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Miranda July: Yes. Eventually, as I kept living while writing this, and as I kept creating room for myself through the writing of the book, interesting things were happening in my life. I was having conversations with all the women I knew and my husband about the structure of marriage and why do we do it the way we do it. There was another work I was doing, talking to other women, gynecologists and naturopaths, and older women who had already been through this time that I was writing about this perimenopausal time.

There was a version of the book that existed for quite a long time that was almost more of a manual because I was so filled with information. At that point I began to realize like, oh yes, there can be information in there, but it should be entirely warped by this narrator's desires, which are thick. One thing, there was this tension, like, oh, I'm not used to writing at the speed of life. How do you do that? Because the whole thing about fiction is you need to process things, they need to go into your unconscious and then come out in surprising ways so you can be surprised, and so you can just have the whole thing crystallize in a way that it doesn't in real life.

Alexandra Schwartz: The novel focuses a lot on something you call the cliff. It's both a literal thing in the book, it's a graph and it's a metaphor for the narrator's fear of life after 50. Can you explain what this idea, the cliff, is for you?

Miranda July: In a literal sense, in the book, this is the first book I've written that has a graph in it. I was very excited about the graph. The graph is a hormone graph, and it shows if you picture a hat or something, women's hormones go up really steeply in puberty. Then there's the top of the hat, and that's your whole adult life. Until then, you're going down the other side of the hat. It's good I didn't use the hat instead of the cliff in the book because I think the cliff packs more punch, don't you?

Alexandra Schwartz: Yes. The hat doesn't convey the terror of the bottom in the same way that the cliff does.

Miranda July: No one's ever walked on a hat. Scale is actually a big issue. This looks like an actual thing you would feel in your life, that steep slope. In fact, the whole book takes place in that slope, that transition from the top of the cliff to the bottom. She's not at the bottom by the end, but it is a book that takes seriously, that just transitions and transformations of all kind.

Alexandra Schwartz: On the one hand, the cliff is this idea about middle age, and especially for women, that, as you say, literally hormones will drop. What came before will be different than what comes next but it does strike me that this is an idea you've dealt with before and not just about midlife. I'm thinking about your film The Future from 2011, which is a movie I really love. You play a character who's in her 30s, who's terrified of whatever the next stage in life might hold. Let's listen to a clip from that film.

Speaker 1: It could just be six months.

Miranda July: That's if we do a bad job. We're not going to do a bad job.

Speaker 1: Well, I have to be able to go to New York with my parents.

Miranda July: No. One of us always has to be here now.

Speaker 1: I always have to be home. What if I don't want to be doing tech support for five more years?

Miranda July: We'll be 40 in five years.

Speaker 1: Well, 40 is basically 50. Then after 50, the rest is just loose change.

Miranda July: Loose change?

Speaker 1: Like, not quite enough to get anything you really want.

Miranda July: Oh, God. So for all practical purposes, in a month, that's it for us.

Alexandra Schwartz: She doesn't really want to commit to a career or anything else that might tie her down and close off the possibilities that you have when you're a young person, that life can go in any direction. Choosing a direction means choosing against a bunch of other directions. Do you think the cliff is an idea that's been with you for a long time? Is it an idea that's changed for you over time?

Miranda July: Yes, you're right. I take each stage pretty hard. Each new part of life, I'm always-- I remember when everyone started getting married and I'd have to train myself to be like, "Oh, wonderful." When really I was like, "Isn't this weird? Why are we all doing this? What's next? Children, what?" These things that really don't bear-- Literally, you could not think about them and the culture does the work for you. Yes, I've been thinking more than necessary about each stage for a long time.

Some of that comes from wanting freedom and seeing each stage as a external shaping of my life, and what it's allowed to mean. There were such built-in meanings to each stage until this one. The reason the cliff is so surprising is because you weren't connecting the dots, because no one was presenting the story. You don't present the story if it's not aspirational. It is just nothing. I think that's the startling feeling, and one that seems repairable to me, because if it's stories we need, dibs on menopause, something that literally no one wants dibs on. I felt like I was the man for the job. [laughs]

Alexandra Schwartz: We're talking a lot about life stages, and right now I think we may be at a moment where separation is starting to become its own life stage. Polyamory is in the air, people are talking about opening marriages. Certainly, this was not the case just a few years ago. Separation is something that you write about in All Fours. It's something you've gone through. How, as a writer and as a person, did you confront that stage of life?

Miranda July: Well, it's hard to answer that. Like, my best answer is the book in a way because it's too personal really to talk about. I'll say that I did have to have a space where I really felt free to say all the things with no repercussions, no judgment. That was my friend Isabelle's studio, Isabelle Albuquerque, the sculptor. During the time I was writing the book, and during the time that I was thinking about marriage and questioning its structure.

We would often leave with a task for ourselves over the next week before we met again. I remember one task was trying to live according to our cycles our menstrual cycles, which meant rest when you're tired. If you feel unhinged kind of, take that as gold, and questions about desire too. Is it possible that perimenopause, a time when your hormones are fluctuating is meant to make you alive to sides of yourself that were previously less important for this second half of your life? This is an important moment not to miss. That if you were to lock down during this moment, you might have a very bitter second half of your life.

Alexandra Schwartz: Hopefully not going to embarrass you by saying this, but I think of you as one of the great sex writers in part because you really get at how freaky and unreal and real at the same time sex can be. How do you sit down to write a great sex scene?

Miranda July: For one thing, you feel it in your body, and so much of it is longing and not having, especially in this book. I became especially interested in how much is the body. Like what is sex? Is it the fantasy? Like in the book, there's a distinction between body-rooted people and mind-rooted people sex-wise. I wrote so much stuff that just flowed out that was so fun to write and so exciting.

Then I would go back and I'd think that's not really true, which is so easy to do because so much of sex is about a story, right? Like in real life, sex is a fiction. How do you get at the truth of something that's already fictional? One way is to also talk about when you're not aroused. The narrator sometimes is inconveniently not feeling it.

Alexandra Schwartz: We're in this space, we're talking about the body. Of course, we've talked about sex, fine, but dance is huge in this book as well. The object of the narrator's obsession aspires to be a dancer. I know dance has increasingly been a part of your life. What place does dancing have for you in life and in and in your writing?

Miranda July: Yes, dance is crept up on me. I'm surprised these days when I look at old work and I'm like, well, that's dance too. That it's always been there, but maybe only as I've gotten older, and it like more interesting to be a dancing body when you're not a young body. Also, I was a stripper. I worked in peep shows at a time. That got very-- the meaning of a young dancing woman's body was so tied up in this certain show.

Then I outlived that and sometimes when I'd be writing and just my head is literally hot and my eyes are working so hard and maybe I'd feel I'd either done something good or I'd just had to give up and put on music, which is not intellectual in the same way. The freedom and the intelligence and even humor that comes in the body. I think in this book, I wanted to write maybe one thing about being this age, besides all the questioning, was the feeling that I maybe knew some things by now having devoted my whole life to art, to making things in all different forms.

[music]

Alexandra Schwartz: There's a great scene in your book where the narrator is with Davey, the object of her obsession. This Hertz employee who also happens to be a great dancer. They're in a motel room that she's rented in this podunk town, and they dance together. Let's hear some of that from your book.

Miranda July: We started dancing. By now, it didn't bother me that I wasn't at his skill level. I understood that total commitment was the only thing that mattered. The room appeared in shattered pieces. We saw each other, and then we didn't. In the brief instant when the strobe caught us, we were just souls meeting each other's eyes dead serious. This wasn't possible with language. Words always took things down a notch with their supposed knowing, their elaborate trying words kept you in two separate brains. Dance was the way to close the gap. What gap? How could there be a gap between any two living things when every living thing was so obviously one thing?

[music]

Dance was a good holder for me because of the body, because of the desire, because of this specific man's body. It gave me a way to also write about him. I remember just telling people like, he's a dancer. He's a hip-hop dancer. Being so horrified at my own creation. Can you believe I'm doing this? There was even something about the embarrassment of that. It's that embarrassment that lets you know you're onto something.

Alexandra Schwartz: Thank you so much, Miranda.

Miranda July: Thank you, Alex.

David Remnick: Miranda July speaking with New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz about her new novel All Fours. You can read Alex's profile of Miranda July at newyorker.com.

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