All Fours
All Fours by Miranda July: I met with 4 friends to talk about this one the other week. Was it a book club? I guess — we were meeting to discuss a book. There did happen to be wine + cheese (+ Amelie’s macarons thanks to @librarian.in.the.woods). We were all women. But somehow it felt different than what popular culture thinks of as a book club. This open group — not everyone knew each other — was an outgrowth of the trio that met at my place a couple of months ago with History of the Rain (Niall Williams) as our catalyst.
If memory serves, none of us liked the narrator all that much but thought July’s ease with deceptively simple lines that nonetheless sneakily and profoundly — and accurately — illustrate a common thought was impressive. The friend who read on her Kindle pulled up some of her highlighted lines; I referenced my nerdy print-out of excerpts. We wondered if the narrator’s vision for the motel room she hires her wannabe lover’s wife to decorate in the style of a famous Parisian hotel (in lieu of actually embarking on her cross-country road trip to New York) is really as great as it is in her mind’s eye even though she keeps getting affirmation that it is. (i.e. Are we all deluding ourselves based on what we are told we should think? That’s my takeaway…) There were some quips pretending to be July’s editor telling her that “this is where you should insert some text messages from friends about perimenopause.” (Sorry, but I felt that crowdsourcing section was a bit heavy-handed…)
This one struck me the most: “But it wasn’t performance, was it? No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be understood, not made much of, just taken seriously like any honest speech. It was dumb, but anything smarter would miss the point. I was speaking now to all my friends and family: You have all missed the point of me.”
I think a lot of life is trying to figure out what the “point” is of oneself — and either subsequent grief that no one else gets you or astonishment that once in a while someone else expresses interest in trying to decipher you. I really adored that night. Thanks, friends.
originally published on instagram