'Some people might say a kaleidoscope shouldn't get married'

Miranda July's 'All Fours' tangles with desire, intimacy, loneliness, and the fractured self within marriage and motherhood.

Miranda July, author of ‘All Fours,’ a novel about a woman longing to be herself.

“I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned,” says the unnamed protagonist of Miranda July’s new novel All Fours. She is a 45-year-old mother, wife, and semi-famous multi-hyphenate artist who has recently embarked on a cross-country road trip as a hopeful journey of personal transformation—not into someone else but into her real self. She imagines telling people of the trip: “That's when I finally learned to just be myself.”

She was already herself with her best friend and in her artistic work. At home, though, was where she performed the “dangerous lie” of attempting to “compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand.”

On the road trip, she hopes to leave that “dangerous” lie behind. Instead, she makes it all of 30 minutes away from home before settling into a motel, where she stays put for weeks while telling her husband that she is driving across the country as planned. Then she embarks on an emotional affair with a younger married man who sees her in a way her husband does not.

There is so much packed into this thrilling, wholly original, and at times deliriously bizarre novel—from its treatment of perimenopause as a last call for sexual adventure to a scatological callback to Me and You and Everyone We Know. What stood out to me most, though, was its rendering of deep loneliness and a lack of intimacy within heteronormative marriage, motherhood, and domesticity.

After having a kid, “a latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth,” the protagonist says of her relationship with her husband Harris. She couldn’t help but to see that he was “openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things.” This disparity drove a wedge between them: “Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn't do,” she says. “Harris couldn't see the haunting and this was the worst part: to be living with someone who fundamentally didn't believe me and was really, really sick of having to pretend to empathize—or else be the bad guy! In his own home!”

She struggles with the required daily shifts between her roles of artist, mom, and wife. “At five o'clock I have to consciously dial myself down before reentering the house, like astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon,” she says. Harris, a record producer who is equally a “workaholic,” isn’t conflicted about the “domestic sphere.” Neither was she until having a baby. “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era,” she says, “whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.”

All of this created a cavernous rift within the marriage. When Harris expresses disinterest in a line of conversation that she wants to pursue, she gets “that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting.” Oh well, she rationalizes, you don’t need to be able to talk to your husband about everything. “That's what friends are for.” These two might be married, but they aren’t friends, not really. “Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren't sure if the other one has poisoned our drink,” she says. “Forever thirsty but forever waiting for the other one to take the first sip.”

With Harris, sex feels like a duty to her. “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,” she says. After initiating, which she compares to “ripping off a Band-Aid,” she retreats into her mind during the act. “It's like I have a screen clamped in front of my face,” she explains, where debauched fantasy scenarios play out, including one about her own husband being seduced by an intern. She imagines herself as Harris, not the intern.

Her most intimate domestic moments happen in the bath with her 7-year-old Sam, who lays “languorously between my legs, like a slipper inside a slipper, using my chest as a pillow.” They eat “apple slices dipped in honey, our wet crunching the only sound until one of us said something about water or time or our bodies—in this otherworldly place we had only big thoughts, like proper stoners,” she says.

She doesn’t tell Harris about the screen or the intern fantasy, and that is the least of her omissions. She omits so much of herself at home—the implied reason being both the sexist pressures around parenthood and that Harris only wants to see certain parts of her. In her art, though, she lets loose. When Harris laughs at her fans for conflating the artist with the art, she thinks, “The real me is in my work. Any fan of my work knows me better than you do.”

Perhaps her greatest fantasy is that one day—one day—she will be truly known and understood by her husband:

When we were both ready I would reveal my whole self to Harris; this would be like presenting a sweater knitted in secrecy.

Oh. My God, he would say. How did you find time to do this?!

Just here and there, whenever I could. Sometimes even with you right there beside me.

Once she has settled into the motel and started her emotional affair with Davey—the younger married man, who is not only physically beautiful but also a fan of her work—she tells her best friend Jordi about her kaleidoscopic sense of self. “Some people might say a kaleidoscope shouldn't get married,” Jordi responds. But what about men, the protagonist wants to know? They “get their sense of self from their work and from the power and majesty with which they walk through this world as a self-owning creature,” she protests.

Davey is happy to secretly rendezvous with her every day for a couple weeks, but he has one rule: they can’t have sex. Instead, they engage in tame forms of closeness—two socked feet touching or a finger sucked. (“I wanted to eat his day; everything he had done that day,” she says, wishing his finger were dirtier.) There are weirder intimacies: she sticks her hand into his stream of hot pee; he removes her tampon and inserts a new one for her. At home, she has sex without intimacy; with Davey, there is intimacy without sex.

The story continues to unspool in unpredictable ways, which I won’t spoil here because you should absolutely read this book, but I kept coming back to the protagonist’s sense of a kaleidoscopic self. It’s a familiar metaphor in sociology and gender studies. In the book The Kaleidoscope of Gender, Joan Spade and Catherine Valentine write:

As is the case with prisms in a kaleidoscope, the interaction of gender with other social prisms creates complex patterns of identity and relationships for people across groups and situations. … Socially constructed categories serve as prisms that create life experiences.

The sociologist Erving Goffman argued that we create a “self” through a series of unending performances within which we’re constantly managing impressions through cultural norms and gauging how our “audience” is reacting to us.

Cultural norms trap the protagonist of All Fours in the performance of wife and mother; she is stuck in the “dangerous lie” of making herself comprehendible to her husband. Her dilemma is that all those glittering pieces of glass create a sense of fracture and contradiction, as opposed to richness and multiplicity. After her eventual return home, she briefly finds a way to bring more of herself to her relationship with her husband. It isn’t the full knit sweater; more like the revelation that she’s been knitting. She muses, “Maybe it all began now, my life as a wife comfortable in her own home, a real wife.”

Without revealing too much, I’ll just say: her sweater of self cannot be worn by what she thinks of as a “real wife.” One of these things will have to change.