All Fours, and the Swerve Thirty Minutes From Home

A woman of forty-five packs a car in Los Angeles and tells her husband and her child that she is driving to New York. Thirty minutes later she comes off the freeway, checks into an unremarkable motel in a suburb she could have reached on a bicycle, and stays there. The publisher’s own description of the book says this much and stops: she exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey. She does not complete the drive. She never intended to tell anyone that she did not.

The book is All Fours, Miranda July’s second novel, published by Riverhead Books in May 2024. Almost everything written about it in its first year was about the sex, and there is a great deal of sex in it, some of it strange, and the strangeness was the part the reviews reached for. That emphasis is understandable and it is a misdirection. The sex is the most quotable thing in the book. It is not the most dangerous thing in it.

The dangerous claim sits underneath and is almost never stated outright: that a person may arrive at a point where the life she has built is not wrong — not a mistake, not a trap, not somebody else’s fault — and is nonetheless not survivable in its present form. And that once she has arrived there, every response the culture has ready for her is inadequate. Leaving is inadequate. Staying unchanged is inadequate. Waiting to feel differently is not a response at all, it is a delay with a respectable name.

What the novel proposes instead is a third thing, and this essay is mostly about that third thing: the renegotiation of the terms of a marriage, conducted in the open, at an age at which the surrounding culture has largely stopped expecting a woman to want anything. It is also about a second argument the book makes almost in passing, about the timeline of a body, and about what happened when a very large number of readers wrote back to say that nobody had told them either. Everything below describes a novel. Nothing below is medical information, and where the book makes claims about bodies this essay says so and points at where the authority actually sits.

All Fours was published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on 14 May 2024, running to four hundred pages in the hardcover edition, with a paperback following on 13 May 2025. It is Miranda July’s second novel. She was born in 1974, which made her fifty in the year the book appeared, and her narrator forty-five.

July did not arrive as a novelist. She wrote and directed Me and You and Everyone We Know in 2005, which took the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance; The Future in 2011, which competed for the Golden Bear at Berlin and did not win it; and Kajillionaire in 2020. Her story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007) won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; It Chooses You followed from McSweeney’s in 2011 and a first novel, The First Bad Man, from Scribner in 2015. Alongside all of it she has worked as a performance and installation artist. This matters to a reading of All Fours in one structural respect: the narrator is a semi-famous artist whose income arrives in irregular lumps, and the author knows that economy from the inside.

The prize record should be stated precisely, because it is routinely inflated. All Fours was longlisted and then named one of five finalists for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. It did not win; the award went to Percival Everett for James. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, won by Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep, and for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, won by Canisia Lubrin for Code Noir. Three shortlists, three losses. That is a very strong year and it is not a sweep, and a publication that rounds a finalist up to a winner has told its readers something false about how the book was received.

It was, separately, a commercial and list success: a New York Times bestseller, one of that paper’s ten best books of 2024, and a book of the year at a long list of outlets. In February 2025 Starz announced that it had acquired television rights and had a series in development, with a statement from July about the network. No series order, no cast, no writer and no transmission date could be verified for this essay, and none is asserted here. Critical reception ran heavily to praise and was also genuinely divided, which are not incompatible: the dissent is not about craft but about what the book is doing, and the two most serious objections appear later, at the point where they do the most damage.

Consider the shape of the opening gesture rather than its content. The announced journey is transcontinental. The actual journey is half an hour. She does not drive to a different state, a different coast or a different life. She drives to a motel near enough that she could be home for dinner, and then she does not go home.

What she does there is the part that reads as absurd and is in fact precise. Published accounts of the novel describe her spending a windfall of twenty thousand dollars — money that arrives unexpectedly — on having the motel room remodelled to her specification. She does not find a room. She commissions one. The object she buys is not distance and not anonymity. It is a room that is hers, made deliberately, thirty minutes from the rooms she already has.

The road trip is one of the most heavily used forms in American storytelling, and its entire logic is departure. Distance is supposed to do the work; the form promises that if you go far enough the old self falls off somewhere around the state line. All Fours takes that form, starts it, and declines it in the first thirty minutes, which is a structural joke and also a thesis. The escape narrative is the wrong instrument, and what is actually wanted is much smaller and much harder to ask for than escape.

This matters because leaving is the only culturally legible plot available to a woman who wants something other than what she has. The forms on offer are the affair, the divorce, the breakdown and the departure, and each is a story other people already know how to tell about her. None is a description of what she wants. The thirty minutes is therefore not a joke about cowardice; it is the measurement of the thing. She is not trying to get away from her family. She is trying to get out of a role for a specified period and then back into it, and no arrangement in any script available to her permits that.

The book’s proposal only makes sense once the three standard responses have failed, so take them in order.

Leaving is inadequate for two separate reasons. The first is that it misidentifies the problem: it treats the husband as the thing that has stopped working, when what has stopped working is the terms. A person who leaves without changing the terms will, in most cases, rebuild the same terms somewhere else, with different furniture. The second reason is material and unequal, and the counter-reading returns to it: the costs of dissolving a household do not land evenly, and for many women they are not a difficult season but a durable change in circumstances.

Staying unchanged is inadequate for a reason usually mistaken for ingratitude. If the life is not wrong, the argument goes, then the person should be able to want it. But the life being good is exactly what makes the situation insoluble. There is nothing to reform, nobody to blame, no incident to point at. A marriage in which someone has behaved badly at least supplies a subject for a conversation. A marriage in which nobody has behaved badly and one person can no longer breathe in it supplies nothing except the suspicion that the problem is her. And waiting is not a third response; it is the first two deferred. It is very often what people mean when they say they are working on themselves, it can be perfectly honourable, and it has no mechanism.

The book’s proposal is different in kind. Published summaries and reviews describe the couple arriving, over the last third of the novel, at an arrangement in which the marriage continues and is reorganised: scheduled time apart, other relationships permitted on both sides, the narrator returning to the remodelled motel room on a regular day. The marriage is not dissolved. The terms are rewritten and the rewriting is done out loud, between the two people bound by them.

The load-bearing words are out loud. An affair changes nothing structural; it is a private breach that leaves the official terms intact and adds a second full-time job of concealment. The novel’s move is to convert the breach into a stated arrangement, which is harder, slower and far more exposing, because it requires naming the want to the one person who is entitled to answer. That is the third thing. It is not a recommendation, it is not a template, and the next sections are about everything that makes it difficult, expensive and in many cases unavailable.

Running underneath the plot is a second argument, and it is the one that produced the loudest response. The narrator becomes preoccupied with the idea that a woman’s hormonal timeline does not taper gently but falls steeply in the late forties, and she treats the discovery as an outrage: not because the timeline exists, but because it was public information and nobody had handed it to her.

This Library will be exact about what that is. It is a novel’s material: a character’s preoccupation, written by a novelist, inside a work of fiction that is not obliged to be a textbook and does not claim to be one. Nothing here uses the book as a source of medical information, and no reader should. Clinical authority for this subject sits with clinicians and with the professional bodies that issue guidance — in Japan, among others, the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology — not with a novel, a magazine, or a publication that sells evenings.

What the book does have standing to describe is the part that travelled: the experience of receiving information about your own body late, sideways, and from the wrong source. That is not a claim about physiology. It is a claim about distribution, and unlike a claim about physiology it is checkable.

It has been checked, imperfectly. In 2022 Joyce Harper and colleagues published an online survey in the journal Women’s Health; of the 3,150 women who began it, data from 947 perimenopausal respondents were analysed. More than ninety per cent reported never having been taught about the menopause at school. More than sixty per cent reported not feeling informed about it at all. Around sixty-eight per cent had only gone looking once symptoms began, turning to friends and to an assortment of websites. The limits of that study belong in the same breath as its findings: it was promoted through social media, so the people who answered are the people who saw it and chose to, which is not a sample of a population. It cannot tell you how many women anywhere are uninformed. It can tell you that among a sizeable group who took the trouble to respond, the reported gap was close to universal, and that the gap described is educational rather than bodily.

The shape of that gap is itself argued over by people with standing, and this essay will not paper over it. In February 2023 Susan Dominus published a long article in the New York Times Magazine arguing that women had been misled about menopause and hormone therapy; it won a National Magazine Award, and July has said she came across it while revising her novel. A fortnight later the Steering Committee of the Women’s Health Initiative published a response objecting that the article had mischaracterised the purpose of its hormone trials, which tested disease prevention rather than symptom treatment, while agreeing that for perimenopausal women the benefit of symptom relief may well outweigh small risks, and agreeing too that women’s health concerns are discounted. This Library does not adjudicate between them and has no competence to. It notes only that even the question of what women were and were not told is contested at the level of the researchers — a strong sign that a novelist was never going to settle it, and did not try.

The striking thing about All Fours is not its reviews but what happened after them. Within weeks it had become, in the New York Times’s phrase for its year-end list, the year’s literary conversation piece, and in June 2024 that paper ran a separate report by Alyson Krueger on readers reconsidering their marriages and family arrangements because of it — women texting each other passages, meeting to talk, describing a whisper network. July herself, interviewed by Meghan O’Rourke for The Yale Review in May 2024, described the same phenomenon from her side: a mother at a playdate, a stranger’s message, the whisper network strong on these subjects.

A publication ought to be careful with a fact like that, because it is seductive and easy to misuse. It is evidence about a channel. A novel published by a trade imprint became, for a large number of readers, the place where they first encountered a description of a hormonal transition and of midlife desire that matched something in their own experience. That is a fact about a distribution system. It says that the information was not reaching people through the channels that are supposed to carry it — school, a doctor, a mother, a friend early enough to be useful — because if it had been, a novel could not have arrived as news.

It is not evidence about prevalence, and this essay makes no prevalence claim anywhere. The readers who wrote in are the readers who responded. Nobody counted the women who read the book and felt nothing, or who found the narrator insufferable and put it down, or who never picked it up. The audience for a literary novel in translation-ready English is not a sample of anybody, and the correct description of what was collected is an enormous quantity of self-selected testimony, which is a different object from a measurement and should never be dressed as one.

The reason this Library still treats it as evidence is that the narrow claim survives the objection. You do not need a representative sample to establish that a novel functioned as an information channel; the existence of the traffic establishes that. You would need one to establish how many people were underserved, and nobody has one, and so nobody here will say a number.

It would be easy, and wrong, to write the next part as a comparison between a talkative elsewhere and a silent here. The vocabulary is not missing in Japanese. 更年期 is a precise professional term with a published definition: the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology defines it as the ten-year span made up of the five years before and the five years after 閉経, notes that the average age of menopause for Japanese women is around fifty, and reserves 更年期障害 for the case in which symptoms are severe enough to interfere with daily life. That is a more exact piece of public language than English had for a long time.

What a survey reports is a different matter. In March 2022 the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare conducted an awareness survey on 更年期症状 and 更年期障害 with five thousand respondents aged twenty to sixty-four, of whom 2,975 were women and 2,025 men. Among women in their forties, 28.3 per cent answered that they thought they might have 更年期障害, and among women in their fifties, 38.3 per cent. The proportions who reported having been given that diagnosis at a medical institution were 3.6 per cent and 9.1 per cent respectively. Among respondents who reported symptoms, roughly eight in ten of the women in their forties reported not having consulted anyone about them.

What that survey shows, and the boundary is not decorative: it shows what a large number of people answered when asked. It does not establish why they answered that way. It does not establish that consulting would have helped any particular person, and it is not evidence that anybody did anything wrong. It is not a statement about Japanese women, and this Library does not make statements about Japanese women. It is a reported distance between how many people suspect something about their own bodies and how many have taken that suspicion anywhere.

The claim this essay does make is narrower and is about language rather than about people. A word can be entirely available in the medical register and still have no ordinary register — no version of itself that can be said at a table, to a colleague, to a husband, without altering the temperature of the room. A term that lives only in the clinic is not the same thing as a subject that can be discussed, and the difference between the two is not a matter of vocabulary but of occasion. There is no occasion. That is the shortage.

The same shortage applies, more sharply, to the book’s other subject. There is no shortage of words in any language for a woman’s desire at twenty-five. There is a shortage of occasions on which a woman of forty-five may say, without the sentence being heard as a symptom, a complaint or a threat, that she wants something and does not know how to get it inside the arrangement she has. That is what All Fours put into circulation, and it is why the circulation happened in group chats rather than in public.

This Library has been here before, from several directions, and the earlier work should be credited rather than quietly recycled. There is an essay here on Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, about a long marriage re-read in the light of one new fact, where the crisis is epistemic rather than romantic. There is one on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, about the unease a woman’s wanting provokes in the people around her; two on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, one on who is permitted to explain a woman’s body and one on the body as a question of money; one on Brief Encounter, arguing that an interior event is an event; one on Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, about a decision with no available procedure; and one on The Lost Daughter, about a mother’s ambivalence and the sentence that has nowhere to be said.

What is new here is the direction of travel. Nearly all of those essays are about a want that has nowhere to go: unsaid, unsayable, or sayable only to a stranger. All Fours is about a want that is said, to the person it concerns, and answered — and the answer takes the form of a schedule. That is a different object, and it carries a different set of problems, most of which are practical.

The number matters too, and should be handled carefully. Forty-five is where the conventionally cited window begins, given a median menopause around fifty: the professional definition places a ten-year span either side of it, so a woman of forty-five sits at its front edge. The novel puts its crisis exactly there. It does not follow, and the book does not claim, that the body caused the crisis. What it suggests is subtler: that the two arrive together, that a person in the middle of an unannounced physiological transition is also a person with less patience for arrangements that were only just tolerable, and that having no language for the first makes the second impossible to raise without sounding unhinged.

And at that same age the ambient expectation changes. The plots available to a woman of forty-five in film, advertising and fiction are overwhelmingly about other people — a mother, a wife, a manager of someone else’s calendar — and rarely about a person with an appetite of her own that is treated as ordinary rather than as a late-life aberration. This is a claim about what gets represented, not about what any woman feels. But the expectation is doing work: it is the reason the sentence I want something is harder to say at forty-five than at twenty-five, even though the wanting is the same size. That is the gap All Fours drove into, at speed, and it is why the book was received as permission — which is also, as the counter-reading will argue, the problem.

The third thing sounds attractive in summary and is brutal in practice, and an essay that recommended the summary without the practice would be doing something dishonest. So here is what the proposal actually requires.

It requires a sentence said to a specific person who is entitled to say no. Not a resolution, not a realisation, not a decision made privately and then implemented. A renegotiation is an offer, and an offer can be declined, and the person declining it is the person you live with and will still live with the following morning. This is why it is more exposing than an affair and not less. An affair conceals the want; a renegotiation puts the want on the table with your name attached and waits.

It requires an interlocutor who will hear it. Not one who will agree — one who will stay in the room while it is said. That is not a given, and it is not distributed by merit. A person married to someone who cannot hear it has not failed at renegotiation; she has discovered that the instrument is unavailable to her, which is information but not a solution.

It requires material room. Time apart has to be paid for, in money or in childcare or in someone else’s labour, and every arrangement of this kind is quietly underwritten by resources that are not evenly held. This is the point at which the book’s own circumstances become impossible to ignore, and the next section but one takes it seriously rather than gesturing at it.

And it requires that a no be survivable. Where the consequences of raising the subject include the loss of housing, income, immigration status, custody or safety, the proposal is not merely difficult, it is unavailable, and calling it courageous is an insult. This Library says plainly that the third thing is a possibility that exists, not an option that is open, and that the difference between those two is mostly made of money and safety.

It is better to declare this before the counter-reading than to be caught by it. This house sells private companionship: bounded, scheduled, paid-for evenings in which a woman is attended to. A widely read novel arguing that a woman of forty-five may still want things, and may say so, is commercially convenient for us. We have an interest in the reader accepting the book’s premise. That interest is real and it is stated here rather than buried in a closing line.

So the constraints follow, and they are stated against our own interest. We claim no outcome. Nothing in these pages says that an evening resolves a marriage, relieves a symptom, restores a self or answers a question, and we will not say it, because it cannot be supported and because unfalsifiable promises are the standard mechanism by which people in this position are taken advantage of.

We are also not what the book proposes, and the distinction is the sharpest thing we can say against ourselves. The book’s third thing is a change in the terms of a shared life, negotiated with the other person bound by those terms. A paid evening has no such other person. There is nobody in the transaction with standing to say no to it, which is precisely what makes it easy and precisely what makes it not a renegotiation. It leaves the terms of a marriage exactly where it found them.

Which means there is a way for us to be actively harmful here, and it should be named. If an evening bought from this house functions as a substitute for a conversation that needed to happen, then we have not supplied a third thing at all. We have supplied an anaesthetic with good lighting, and we will have made the underlying arrangement more tolerable and therefore more durable. We cannot verify which of those two we are in any particular case, and we will not claim to. The most we can do is refuse the sentence that would sell the most evenings, which is the sentence that says you deserve this and it will help.

There are four serious objections: three against the novel, one against this essay. None is answered here by rebuttal. Each is answered, where it can be, by narrowing what is claimed.

The first is money, and it is the heaviest. The freedom to stop half an hour from home, take a motel room for weeks and spend twenty thousand dollars having it remodelled is a freedom almost nobody has. Writing in Liberties in October 2025, Devon Halliday made this case at length: the narrator’s circumstances — a house worth well over a million dollars, available childcare, a windfall cheque — insulate her from everything that makes the decision costly for other people, and Halliday sets against it the finding that the strain of separation on women is chronic rather than temporary, running through lost income, raised poverty risk and the odds of single parenting. In 4Columns in May 2024, Julie Phillips made an adjacent objection: the book reaches for individual solutions to structural problems. The novel does know about its own money; the sum is named and its arrival is a plot point. But knowing about a privilege is not paying for it, and a book that names its cushioning and then demonstrates that everything works out has not tested its proposal under any conditions except the most favourable available.

The second is the spouse. The arrangement holds because the husband permits it to, and Halliday’s sharper charge is that he is barely drawn at all — so little character that it is difficult to know him, let alone to weigh what the arrangement costs him. If the other party to a renegotiation is not written, the renegotiation has not been dramatised, only asserted. This essay concedes it in full: All Fours demonstrates that the arrangement can be imagined and narrated, not that it can be sustained by two fully specified people with competing interests.

The third concerns permission. A novel received by a large readership as permission to change a life is doing something a novel is not accountable for. There is no duty of care in fiction and there should not be one, yet the asymmetry is real: the author bears none of the consequences of the decisions readers make with her book, and the reader who acts on it cannot bill anyone. This essay cannot repair that. What it can do is decline to pass the permission along — which is why nothing here tells a reader what to do, and why the earlier sections dwelt on what the proposal requires rather than on how good it feels.

The fourth is against this essay, and it is the one this Library should feel most. Reading a book through its reception is reasoning from an uncontrolled sample. The testimony is self-selected, the volume unmeasured, the people who felt nothing invisible; building an argument about an information gap on that traffic is exactly the move that produces confident, unfounded claims about populations. The honest narrowing is this: the reception is used to establish one thing only, that for a large number of readers the channel was a novel. It is not used to establish how many people are underserved, what proportion of anyone experiences anything, or what any individual should expect. No number in this essay is a prevalence.

And the sharpest form of the objection remains standing after all that. It is that this essay does to its reader what the book did: supplies a frame, at a moment when a frame is extremely welcome, on behalf of a party with something to sell. The only available answer is to keep the interest visible, to refuse the outcome claims that would make the frame more profitable, and to say what is said here — that the third thing exists as a possibility, that this Library cannot tell anyone whether it is available to her, and that a reader who finishes this page and concludes she wants none of it has understood it correctly.

This is literary and cultural analysis. It is not medical information, it diagnoses nobody, it recommends no treatment and no course of action, and nothing in it predicts what any reader will experience in her own body or her own marriage. Where the novel makes claims about hormones or a bodily timeline, those claims belong to the novel. Clinical authority rests with clinicians and with professional bodies, and a person with questions about her own health should take them to one.

The bibliographic details are taken from the publisher’s records and the award record from the awarding bodies. The book was a 2024 National Book Award for Fiction finalist and did not win, the award going to Percival Everett’s James; a 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlistee and did not win, the prize going to Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep; a 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction shortlistee and did not win, the prize going to Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir. Nothing here describes it as a prizewinner. On the adaptation: Starz announced in February 2025 that it had acquired television rights and had a series in development, and issued a statement from July. No series order, casting, writer, director or transmission date could be verified, and none is claimed. A project in development is not a programme.

The descriptions of the novel’s events come from the publisher’s own description and from published reviews and study guides rather than from a fresh reading conducted for this essay, and should be treated as such. No passage of the book is quoted anywhere. Where accounts of the ending differ — some describe the marriage as continuing in reorganised form, others speak of the couple as separated and co-parenting — this essay reports the more commonly given account and flags that the difference exists.

The peer-reviewed survey cited is Harper and colleagues, 2022, in the journal Women’s Health: an online survey promoted through social media, analysing 947 perimenopausal respondents out of 3,150 who began it. Its respondents are self-selected and it cannot establish prevalence in any population. The Dominus article and the Women’s Health Initiative Steering Committee’s published response are cited together to show that the characterisation of what women were told is contested among people with standing; this Library takes no position between them.

Nothing here is a statement about Japanese people, about Japanese reserve, or about national character of any kind. The Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology is cited for a definition only. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare survey of March 2022 is reported as what five thousand respondents aged twenty to sixty-four answered when asked; it establishes no cause, no reason and no fault, and describes no individual. The argument about occasion rather than vocabulary is this Library’s own interpretation and is offered as such.

All Fours is a novel. Its narrator is unnamed and the book has been widely discussed as close to autofiction; July has said the material is close to the bone while distinguishing what she writes from autobiography. This essay treats the narrator as a character, makes no claim about the author’s own marriage or family, and does not present any real person’s inner life as established fact. Neither Miranda July, nor her publishers, nor any critic, researcher, institution or ministry named above has any connection to this house, knows of it, or endorses it. Book references are for discovery only and no retail or affiliate link appears anywhere. This house’s commercial interest in the book’s premise is declared in the body of the essay rather than at the end, because a declaration that arrives after the argument has done its work is not a declaration.