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Miranda July’s New Novel Will Ignite Your Group Chats
All Fours is a hot, weird, and utterly captivating book about a middle-aged woman’s sexual reawakening.
There is something vague and unseeing in the gaze young women cast at older ones.Those figures paddling across the slough of middle age, headed toward the glowing shores of the golden years — the ones no longer desirable but, inconveniently, not yet dead — are out there, on the horizon, but they’re a little … fuzzy. I see that I am squeezing a nipple and I die.” In All Fours, the specificity of observations about the body is staggering.The novelexcavates every sensation, every intriguing fold of flesh.In its attentiveness is an ecstatic liberation.At the book’s turning point, the narrator touches an older woman’s skin — it’s getting thinner, “like a banana’s” — and expects it to feel “gross”; instead, “it felt incredible, velvety warm water. For those days, the narrator imagined and talked to two babies, one struggling to live and one already dead: “I did not play favorites because regardless of the outcome I knew I would always have two babies.” Sometimes when she hears noises reminiscent of the hospital — the dings of a cash register or the pings of metal carts — she experiences flashbacks.
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