Dutch Treat

Miranda July’s​ first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. July wrote, directed and acted in it, playing Christine, a fragile visual artist who moonlights as a taxi driver for the elderly. While ferrying a customer to a shoe shop, she notices a goldfish in a bag perched on top of a moving car. Sensing that the creature is in danger, she feels compelled to address it: ‘I don’t know you, but I want you to die knowing that you were loved. I love you.’ The scene is very weird, which is a good thing because the off-beat humour saves it from dissolving into pure schmaltz. In July’s work, we’re never sure how seriously to take things. This is part of the fun.

July is best known as a filmmaker, but she is also a digital and performance artist, as well as a writer. Her 2009 Venice Biennale installation, Eleven Heavy Things, featured a series of interactive steel and fibreglass sculptures. One piece included three pedestals labelled ‘The Guilty One’, ‘The Guiltier One’, ‘The Guiltiest One’, arranged in ascending height. Visitors were invited to choose a pedestal to stand on and position their own guilt in relation to that of others. July knows that performance tips easily into farce, and one of the refreshing things about her work is her willingness to laugh at herself and her characters. In Me and You and Everyone We Know, Christine becomes obsessed with a recently divorced shoe shop worker with a bandaged hand: in an effort to capture his children’s attention, he set it on fire. Having accidentally used lighter fluid instead of rubbing alcohol, the visual trick turned into self-immolation.

With interdisciplinarity comes the risk of being seen as a dilettante, but July’s first short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), was well received and won the Frank O’Connor Award. Like her films, these stories are filled with oddballs, many of whom have sexual kinks. In ‘The Moves’, a dying man offers his daughter an unconventional parting gift: strategies for pleasuring women. (‘He said he didn’t know if they’d be of use to me, seeing as how I was a woman myself, but it was all he had in the way of a dowry.’) In ‘Majesty’, a woman fantasises about fucking Prince William. (‘Gradually I realised he had lifted up the back of my skirt and was nuzzling his face between my buns.’) The book is not without its flaws; reading the stories back to back, many of the narrators seem interchangeable. There are too many paedophiles. ‘Making Love in 2003’, a sympathetic portrait of a teacher who seduces her special-needs student, feels like a stunt.

July’s most memorable characters are women prone to what she calls ‘fantasy benders’, unsure whether what they are experiencing is genuine connection or erotic delusion. In her novel, The First Bad Man (2015), Cheryl Glickman, a plain woman in her forties with a potato-like nose, is obsessed with her co-worker Phillip and tries to convince him they’ve lived together in a series of past lives: a medieval king and queen, a pair of nuns, an elderly couple in the 1940s, a prehistoric twosome with apelike features. (‘Do you see where I’m going?’ ‘Kind of? In that I see you’re talking about cavemen who look like us.’) She fantasises about her boss’s daughter getting ‘creamed’ by construction workers. The only way she can quiet these intrusive thoughts is by singing the first line of David Bowie’s ‘Kooks’ over and over.

All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It would be easy to conflate her with the author, but July is keen to emphasise that All Fours is not autofiction. ‘I didn’t need very much real life,’ she explained in an interview. ‘It’s strong, like a tiny drop of red food colouring.’ The unnamed narrator is 45 and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, a music producer called Harris, and their non-binary child, Sam. Her domestic life is routine: on Sundays, she makes protein waffles to freeze for the week ahead and dutifully massages kale for multi-compartment bento lunch boxes. She likens herself and Harris to ‘two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.’ Sex fills her with dread: ‘Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a tea kettle, at higher and higher pitches, until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.’

When a drinks manufacturer licenses a line she wrote years ago for an advertising campaign, the narrator receives an unexpected windfall. ‘It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey.’ She decides to use the money to offset her midlife crisis and take a three-week road trip to New York and back. Half an hour from home, at a petrol station in Monrovia, she locks eyes with a young man called Davey who works at a nearby Hertz. They encounter each other again at a local restaurant and flirt a little. The next thing we know, she has decided to stay put. She checks into a drab motel called the Excelsior and, on a whim, hires Davey’s wife, Claire, who works for an interior design company, to redecorate her room, Louis XIV style. She covers the walls with ‘rich botanical prints … right out of the 18th century’, lays a rich maroon ‘Grand Parterre Sarouk carpet made of New Zealand wool’, redoes the bathroom with vintage hexagonal tiles from Portugal and hangs ‘chintz drapes patterned with pink peonies and apricot dahlias’.

Blowing a small fortune on an outlandish ‘project’ is a playful wink at critics who dismiss July’s work as gimmicky. The whiskey windfall has a basis in reality. Johnnie Walker bought a line from July’s story about the father who gives sex tips to his daughter – ‘Don’t wait to be sure. Move, move, move’ – for a marketing campaign. The commercial appeal of her prose is obvious. Her sentences are zingy. But July is also interested in advertising as a form. Like much of her work, it depends on projection, on the fallacy of what she calls, in another context, ‘harmless make-believe’. While writing the script for her second film, The Future (2011), she became interested in a classifieds magazine called PennySaver and interviewed local advertisers about their lives. These conversations became the backbone of her non-fiction book It Chooses You (2011). The challenge of writing it, July admitted, was the ‘constant vigilance’ required to avoid replacing the people she interviewed ‘with my own fictional versions of them’.

The narrator of All Fours compulsively seeks out ‘strangely intimate interactions’ with random people. One of the questions July explores in the novel is whether make-believe can ever be truly harmless. Having realised her fantasy of redecorating the motel room, the narrator masturbates, watches TV and wrestles with guilt over abandoning her family, who believe she is still on the road: ‘What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby?’ Her focus soon shifts to Davey. When they meet for a walk, she chugs a bottle of water until she can’t drink anymore, then pours the rest down the front of her dress – ‘the whole while smiling at him while he smiled at me’. Davey isn’t put off by behaviour most people would see as cringe-worthy: as an aspiring hip-hop dancer (our hearts sink), he understands that theatricality doesn’t preclude sincerity. ‘It wasn’t a performance,’ the narrator explains. ‘Nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be understood.’ If she’s a phoney, she’s a real phoney.

Soon after this, their agonisingly chaste affair begins. Never has a motel room seen such creative erotics. Davey takes his vows to Claire seriously(ish). No kissing. But where in the Bible does it say that a woman should not attempt to catch a streaming handful of a married man’s piss? There’s a scene with a tampon that would make King Charles blush. The narrator tells her best friend, Jordi, about the affair, but conceals some embarrassing details: ‘I hadn’t said anything to her about his chest yet, the hairs around his nipples. My little crisis.’ For the next couple of weeks, Davey climbs in through the motel window every night; they spoon, drink cold orange juice from the minibar and eat sardines with their fingers. Then suddenly the trip is over.

Back home, the narrator avoids eye contact with Harris, cuddles their child, cleans the walls and snaps a rubber band on her wrist to ward off obsessive thoughts about Davey. Her time with him ‘was like having just one drink and ending up pantsless under a bridge’. She drives back to Monrovia, spray-paints CALL ME on a pink deckchair and leaves it near his bus stop. She makes a video of herself dancing outside the motel and crawling towards the camera, then posts it on Instagram as a thirst-trap. Davey is oblivious, but Harris hits the roof and their marriage falls apart.

The second half of the novel is less focused than the first, more haphazard and impressionistic, which is fitting since the narrator herself is in freefall. Having told Harris that the crisis he senses in their marriage is the menopause, she visits a gynaecologist and is told that she is in fact perimenopausal. Performance has become a reality. She feels stupid for missing the signs. After snapping a nude, she notices that her ass isn’t how she remembers it. The sense of injustice – that Harris’s testosterone will stay the same while her oestrogen ‘falls off a cliff’ – rankles. ‘Imagine what it feels like to be a man,’ Jordi reflects. ‘No cycles. No deaths-within-life. No transformation from one kind of person into another.’

The narrator has always struggled with change: ‘Any transition. Whatever state I’m in, I just want to stay in it, if that’s not too much to ask.’ This is one of the reasons she is given to imaginary flights. In fantasy, we have always already arrived at our destination. But no ‘fantasy bender’ can remove her from the reality of her diagnosis. ‘If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air,’ she thinks, ‘we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half.’ She must figure out how to manage the momentum. What she must not do is allow herself to lapse into the state of anxious paralysis her father calls ‘the deathfield’, or resort to the more complete form of escapism modelled by her grandmother Esther. At 52, Esther chucked herself out the window, ‘no warning except she had recently been lamenting all her grey hairs’. Before jumping, Esther wrestled her body into a bin-liner to save those who discovered her body from having to clean up the mess.

This all sounds fairly bleak, but what follows, as the narrator is forced to adjust to the here and now, is a lot of fun. There’s a wonderful scene involving a much older woman and a leather belt. In a desperate attempt to find out what it would be like to consummate things with Davey, the narrator grills one of his former lovers, Audra. But the wily older woman is unwilling to give up this information without something in return. The description of their encounter is almost unbearably awkward, even creepy, but sex with Audra opens up the ending of the novel in unexpected ways. Having long internalised the idea that older bodies are unappealing (‘grey labia’), the narrator begins to feel maybe they’re not so bad: ‘Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like a banana’s, but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water.’

Before they part, Audra gives her a pep talk about leaning into new experiences instead of retreating into the imagination:

‘Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age. Then you have to have lived experiences or you’ll go batty. Which is the normal thing: dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s – all more common in women. Fantasy consumes them until they can’t tell what from what.’

‘Aren’t those things … genetic?’ I said weakly.

‘Exactly. It’s passed down through the generations.’

The narrator’s gynaecologist reminds her that ‘in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.’ So that’s something.

But this would be a weaker novel if the narrator’s troubles ended with these quasi-epiphanies. Instead there are plenty of false starts and hilarious conversations with other women as she continues to crowd-source solutions to her midlife crisis. Harris’s attractive young client Caro tells her that she’s not worried about ageing:

I’m gonna have great skin … because I have literally not once been outside without sunblock. Lots of people my age haven’t … What about laugh lines and worry lines, you might be thinking … But we’re low affect – either because of autism or other stuff, emojis. I’ll smile if it’s, like, a friend’s birthday, but otherwise it feels over-the-top, you know? Kind of fake.

The narrator prepares for a date with a woman called Kris by buying three strains of weed that female reviewers have voted good for sex – Do-Si-Dos, Trainwreck and Dutch Treat – and masturbates on each to ensure they are neither too psychoactive nor too sedative.

Despite her very LA references (reiki, macros), July’s awkward humour is sometimes quite British. When a friend encourages her to enjoy her new-found freedom she responds with an embarrassing ‘little dance, a silly jig, like Humpty Dumpty or a lesser-known egg’. Jordi tells her about the Quaker concept of ‘the third thing’ and she rolls her eyes: ‘The fucking Quakers. They’d invented chocolate bars and maxipads and now this.’ In the hands of another writer, evangelical conversations about ethical non-monogamy, lesbian daddies, rubber dicks and soft molasses cookies might seem tediously superficial, but July’s comic pratfalls give the narrator some ballast. Menopause is the beginning of something. It’s all to play for, and playing is July’s thing.