I finished a book that I would like to recommend to you but I cannot. Instead I will tell you about it, and you can decide for yourself if you would like it to be a recommendation.
(image from Amazon.com)
Relatedly, this headline from The Onion:
(image from theonion.com)
This book READS LIKE autobiographical fiction. I’m not in any way saying it IS autobiographical fiction: I don’t know what Miranda July’s whole thing is. But it READS that way. Often that is one of my favorite kinds of fiction: either the author is writing about what actually happened, or they are writing realistically about another way their life could have gone with the same real cast of characters they have, and either way I am ALL IN.
I try to wait awhile before looking at an author’s photo, because it can strongly influence how I perceive the book. In this case, I looked at the author’s photo about 1/4th of the way through the book, and my thought was “Yep, that checks out.” It made me like the book MORE, because it FIT. The author’s photo makes her look MISERABLE and COOL, and that was the vibe I was getting.
The ONLY reason I can’t recommend this book is the sex stuff: I can’t recommend it, and then imagine you reading it and thinking about how I read it too. And we can spend hours and hours unpicking why exactly someone might not like to read really explicit sex scenes in books, but the enduring fact is that I don’t like to read really explicit sex scenes in books. Maybe you LOVE to! In which case you can consider this a recommendation! Unless you only like CERTAIN KINDS of explicit sex scenes, and find OTHER kinds of explicit sex scenes upsetting! And maybe you’d like to spend hours and hours unpicking THAT, or maybe you’d just like to say you prefer not, and move on!
But MOST of the book is the kind of thing I would really like to recommend to you. ONE: the narrator is a perimenopausal woman! TWO: I liked the way the narrator thought about herself, and about this stage of life: I felt she was SMART and INTROSPECTIVE and INTERESTING. THREE: the narrator consults with her friends in ways I found appealing and aspirational; I ended up loving her friends as much as I loved her! FOUR: despite the fact that the narrator sort of persistently and convincingly describes herself as a difficult person, I found her very likeable and interesting, to the point of consistently and significantly preferring her over her husband who is described much more favorably (see also: Catherine Newman). FIVE: the narrator makes the kind of life choices that many of us in more mainstream timelines might like to explore mentally if not actually! SIX: the room she creates with a decorator makes me want to CRY, because I want that exact thing so much for myself! SEVEN: I love the characters and the dialogue. The exchanges the narrator has with the decorator and with the motel owner! I made Paul listen to me read them out loud.
I liked this weird book! When I was reading it I listened to a podcast that mentioned it, and one of the cohosts said “Have you got to the weird part yet?” And I thought – what weird part, the whole thing is a weird part! I also heard an interview with the author who did say there were a lot of autobiographical elements. Probably the dog poop part. I think that had to have come from real life. My favourite part is when she puts on a button down shirt and then giant underwear, and tucks the shirt into the underwear so it’s hanging down through the leg holes, and thinks “This is a new outfit he’s never seen before” as she dances around.
If I hadn’t already put the book on hold from my library, I think your description of her thoughts and actions while assembling this outfit would have sealed the deal.
Interesting! I hated this book So Much. I viewed the protagonist as an entitled narcissistic manic pixie dream girl, and not smart or interesting at all.
That was absolutely how I felt about this book. And disappointed: everyone had been talking about this book for so long! I had in on hold at the library and had waited months because of these recommendations!
I couldn’t finiah it. Not because of the sex scenes, but I just hated the narrator as a person. She seemed both self-centered and not terribly interesting. Maybe I just didn’t care for her decorating style, but I just kept thinking “Why? Why are you doing this thing? And then that other thing? Why that?”
I haven’t read the book but years ago I saw a movie that Miranda July made and starred in and I found her incredibly irritating. It was a similar “is it autobiographical or not??” set up plus weird “auteur” perspective and it just wasn’t for me. I feel like I should read the book, because girl power/perimenopause/I do actually like reading sex scenes. Plus, Swistle stamp of approval! But, my previous experience with Ms. July makes me doubtful.
When this book was having a moment, I put it on my tbr list. It seemed like everyone loved it and as a perimenopausal woman I should read it, if not love it. I have considered ordering it several times and each time I can’t quite convince myself I want to read it. I have a strong suspicion it will be like Eat, Pray, Love. The world love that book and I *hated* it. I spent the whole book wanting to tell her to get over herself. (Not stay married or stay in the life, just make the changes she needs without the dramatics.) I am very much in the minority there, I know, and I suspect I would feel much the same way about this book. Your description just reinforces that. I think I may skip this one.
I am SO DELIGHTED to find a discussion of this book! When I listened to it, none of my friends had read it. I had SO MANY FEELINGS about this book. For me, it was one of those books where you were supposed to think her life was normal and then she took this weird detour on the fake road trip. But I could not get into her “normal” life. She seemed to me like she hated her life and hated her husband. I felt like every other sentence I was like, “You do realize you don’t have to live like this, right????”
This book has been on my person Do I / Don’t I teeter totter for a long time! I do not care to read about explicit sex scenes, but also it sounds like such an interesting and different book??? I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.
* personal
Thank you for providing the Amazon link. I’ve only read the Sample so far and this sentence is killing me right now:
“Sometimes I could hear Harris’ dick whistling impatiently like a tea kettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.”
I feel so seen.
So… I stayed up until 2am reading this thing and now that I’m finished I Have Thoughts (apologies in advance):
-I’m almost the same age as Ms. July
-I did a bunch of admittedly Weird Shit when I was 40-41 that, looking back, was probably peri being peri
-the Weird Shit felt like how she describes driving back to the hotel instead of forward, to NY, like it was a compulsion and out of my hands but I was doing it anyway? Which was part of the Weird Shit but not all of it, since I am a chronic overthinker and I was not thinking but instead doing, but doing like I was the manchurian candidate
-She reminds me of Anne Lamott + Fleabag
–specifically how Anne weaves her real life from her memoirs/non-fiction into her fiction, and Blue Shoe in particular
—the entire Davey Thing reminded me of Blue Shoe’s relationship with the guy that came to exterminate her rats (Daniel?)
–If you haven’t watched Fleabag I don’t know if I can recommend it because it is a LOT but i’m glad I watched it
—I recommended it to my mom (!) with the caveat that she pretty much needed to sit tight through the very first scene & not judge it (or me).
-I’m going to stop now because this is your blog, not mine :)
-PS: thank you again for the link, I kinda hated this book and also kinda really needed to read it
P.P.S: I forgot to mention she also reminds me of dear sugar / Cheryl Strayed
I, personally, would like even more of this commentary (while acknowledging this is not my blog either :)
Swistle Book Club! :)
I think Melissa H. is right that the real joy of this book is DISCUSSING IT WITH EACH OTHER. I read your thoughts AVIDLY.
<3 <3 <3
Thank you for creating a space for us to share with the best comment section ever.
This is fascinating! I loved Fleabag and hated All Fours…I wonder if it’s just a personal response to the narrator, or if it’s that Fleabag is more of a story arc where she’s making adult choices and taking responsibility, despite all the other people doing bizarre and bad things. And All Fours just seemed like someone taking the least kind and responsible way out of a life they didn’t like (but maybe that’s my read because I didn’t vibe with the narrator??)
Oh, I loved Fleabag too. <3 I meant it was a lot in terms of uncomfortable sex scenes if you are not into sex scenes at all, though I guess I didn't specify that. I couldn't watch it with my mom, even though I recommended it to her.
[Relevant Fleabag spoilers]: Fleabag has a lot of sex to escape her feelings around her mom and her friend's deaths. She also dissociates to talk to the audience, breaking the 4th wall, as another form of escape. I recognize and empathize with these coping methods for dealing with grief, as well as her grief and guilt and overall effed-up-ed-ness. In the 2nd season, the Hot Priest realizes she's 'escaping' once they become close (there's a scene where he's like 'where did you just go?' and looks towards the camera to see who she's talking to). [/spoilers]
I'm not sure that I vibed with the All Fours narrator as much as I recognized myself in how she describes some of her feelings and weird behavior. Like, she was spot on about how not getting a response to a Risky Text feels (and I have social anxiety up the yipper, so EVERY text feels like a risky text without it being RISKY). She also overthinks everything which seems like it's in conflict with her free spirit persona? I feel a lot of us recognize that kind of tortured thinking, where you're basically twisting yourself into a pretzel over nothing but you can't stop your brain from doing the origami of becoming a pretzel. And peri is basically reverse puberty so her emotions are all over the place and almost like those of a teenager with how outsized and all consuming they are.
Both the narrator and Davey seemed like teenagers with all the sneaking around and dry humping they were doing, but they were also (awkwardly) sharing something they couldn't share with anyone else. TMI: I had a very weird relationship with a male coworker for a few months in that peri dangerzone that reminded me a lot of how she describes Davey, especially how she initially describes how he's not her type and goofy as sh!t and dresses like a kid and works at a gas station, but then she realizes she's in love with him when all those same things suddenly seem adorable. That sudden realization is such a eureka of OH NO WHAT IS HAPPENING.
This is verging on another blog post on not my blog, so I'll just throw in:
-her arty pretentiousness reminded me of Six Feet Under
–specifically Billy & Claire & Claire's art friends
-Davey's MOM reminded me of Brenda & Billy's mom, like way too involved there mom!
-Davey's background with Audra (the older lady) reminded me of Nate's relationship with the older lady he had sex with when he was a teenager.
–I'm wondering if she did a rewrite to make him 18 instead of underage because otherwise, yuck.
-It was really weird how everyone knew everybody else, like what are the odds the lady who sold you a bedspread is your Hertz branded platonic lover's ex-lover?
-Her having sex with bedspread lady was not on my bingo card.
-I really thought from the initial setup of Drivers and Parkers and her not being a Driver was that she fell asleep at the wheel somewhere in CA and hit a guard rail and all the weird coincidences were because she was in a coma. That's a entirely different book!
My take is that this isn’t a great book per se, but it’s a great book for the right reader at the right time. I loved it and felt like it was everything I needed when I read it. I’m thinking about reading it again, even. But I also felt like if I had come across it at different time in my life, I would have found it irritating.
I read this book last year and immediately invited over 4 women around my age (late 40s) to discuss. I mostly hated the book but loved discussing it. One friend found the sex scenes totally arousing, I found them totally weird. I disliked the narrator completely and could not get over the fact that she didn’t seem to pay for the supplies in the renovation? (just paid the decorator??) but I want everyone to read this book just to discuss it!
I found that very odd, and wondered if the author made a mistake. The narrator was so sure she was giving them their $20,000 nest egg, but she paid a total of $20,000, and of course MOST of that would go for the things the decorator purchased, and not end up with the decorator herself.
Exactly! I got so hung up on this it was distracting!
I borrowed this ebook and then it expired and I didn’t re-borrow it. I do not like explicit sex scenes in books, and I dislike saying that because I”m fine with them EXISTING, I just don’t like reading them. Everything else you’ve said about the book makes me want to try reading it again. I read Sandwich and I agree re liking the “difficult’ narrator more than her husband, but I’m not sure investigating that too closely would turn out too well for me, lol.
this is FASCINATING. I found her deeply unlikeable and selfish.
Same here! And she seemed so removed from her life — so passive.
But I’m glad I read the book: refreshingly different!
This is so interesting. I really disliked this book and didn’t resonate with the main character at all. I think part of it was feeling like I was SUPPOSED to be resonating with her because of being a Lady of a Certain Age, but I just did not relate to her and none of her decisions were decisions I would have made. Also weirdly I do not remember many sex scenes nor do I remember any of them being particularly explicit. Maybe I was too checked out by then or maybe they were Bad.
Fun story, a friend of mine went to high achool with the author and said she is exactly like the main character in the book (not in a complimentary way), so. There you go.
Oof, I could not stand this book- regardless of the sex scenes. It ranks as one of the most regrettable books I’ve spent time with.