Sex, intelligence, and humor: Miranda July descends into the deepest abyss of femininity

With this fourth novel, the film director and performer Miranda July –having just turned fifty– has overcome a kind of symbolic barrier that had been erected in the middle of the path of his life and has entered the realm of the Great Writers. But she didn't do it dressed as a distinguished lady, but rather, she got down on all fours and fucked everything that was in front of her: boys, older ladies, and girls, in abundance. She got dirty, she descended into the deepest abyss of femininity, and she emerged renewed, like the protagonist of this novel: "She could have always been like this, like in this room: imperfect, genderless, playful, shameless. She had everything she needed in her pockets, a complete soul."

But before reaching that enviable point of balance, a lot happens. There are more than four hundred pages of laughter and tears and incredibly erotic scenes: some of which are made of the least sexy material imaginable, but in the hands of a writer in a state of grace, it becomes pure dynamite. July has written a road movie which is rather one Trip around my room, because everything revolves around a dusty roadside motel room on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which somehow refracts vital and sexual energy in all directions. It's there that the protagonist, a forty-five-year-old married mother, questions all the evidence, commonplaces, and certainties that have led her to this vital moment, and from there everything begins to roll downhill, from her dignity to her sex hormone levels. July's shamelessness, humor, intelligence, and sensitivity turn the protagonist's life into a carousel of absurdities and successes that drag the reader along.

The protagonist under which Miranda July camouflages herself is a "semi-famous" artist who lives in Los Angeles and has macha tea for breakfast every morning before going to yoga. But a routine visit to the gynecologist puts her on the brink of perimenopause, just when she'd just made up the story that she felt older and menopausal to justify not wanting to sleep with her husband. The real reason? A spectacular guy she met at a gas station who's driving her crazy. For him and with him, she'll do the craziest things and perform the most incredible intimate acts (short of traditionally understood sex), and afterward, she'll enter a sort of personal refoundation that's more courageous than it might seem. Who am I? Where am I going? In what ditch is a heterosexual woman buried once she can no longer reproduce? These are questions that quite a few women have asked themselves when they reach the point where their period ends without leaving anyone to replace them. And they're questions that July confronts with audacity, skill, and a great sense of humor.

If novels about men lost in a given decade tend to ooze self-indulgence, On all fours and others that women of what we have always called "middle age" are starting to write about this same sense of loss are infinitely more cruel and ironic with their protagonists, they avoid self-flagellation and, even more importantly, they explore everything that surrounds the protagonist and her generation: the men of the later generation, the hook and the people of the future, embodied in a son on whom the mother does not want to impose a gender, women who have chosen other sexual options that have circulated outside of dominant heterosexuality and older people, who also have a lot to say about sex: bravo to Miranda July, because she turns an almost taboo subject into a dish in the center of the table mainstream it is not within everyone's reach.