To accompany our fall 2024 issue (21.2), we have curated a folio on writing about sex (reviews and craft essays) after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include sex, especially the play excerpt by Gloria Oladipo, John Fulton’s story “Emily Leaves Switzerland,” Karolina Letunova’s story “Turn Your Back to the Forest,” and poems by Keetje Kuipers and Jessica Nirvana Ram. We reached out to five writers to get their contribution to the conversation.
Here is Gwen E. Kirby’s review of a novel about sex:
Middle Age Has Never Been So Sexy:
Role Play and Erotic Binaries in All Fours
All Fours. Miranda July. Riverhead, 2024. 336 pp. $29.00 (cloth)
At forty-five, the unnamed protagonist of Miranda July’s novel All Fours is long past the point of demurring—the novel is frank about dicks and pussies, bodily fluids and guttural moans, and full of explicit sex scenes and honest discussions between women about their sexuality, particularly in the shadow of approaching (arriving!) menopause. All Fours commits to the radical act of depicting an aroused and arousal-seeking middle-aged woman, with a plot that creates and then dashes genre expectations. At first, All Fours promises a road-trip novel; then, it seems it will be a classic midlife-crisis novel with a woman substituted into the role of older lover. Then, it blossoms into a form that seems entirely its own, built on individual sexual experiences. This is no bildungsroman but a middleage-roman, a novel that deals not in the unformed youth becoming her actualized self but in the ongoing struggle to discover the potential within a woman’s limitations.
As the novel begins, the unnamed protagonist (I’ll call her U.P.) is beset by binaries: young and old, artist and mother, lover and wife, a car crash of identities that seem inseparable, contradictory, and perhaps inherent to middle age, when the trappings of youth—ambition and sex in particular—do not drop away but instead become entwined with the products of those trappings: a career and a family. (It feels like a relief, a joy, in fact, that though this woman has a small child whose role in the text is not insignificant, this essay will not discuss the child at all! The child, and motherhood, though important, are not the point.)
Two binaries emerge early and explicitly in the text. First, at a party, U.P. and her husband Harris chat with another couple and Harris comes up with a theory: everyone is either a “driver” or a “parker.” A driver is “able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring” while a parker “need[s] a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause.” U.P. knows her husband is labeling her as a parker, a designation she resents, because it seems to be the worst of the two.
Then, only a few pages later, when U.P. and her best friend, Jordi, are discussing their sex lives, each describes a typical sexual encounter for them. Jordi, it turns out, is “a body-rooted fucker” and U.P. is “mind-rooted.” U.P. finds herself on the wrong side of this second binary too, body-rooted being intrinsically better, the mind a distraction from Jordi’s form of pure animal sex. “It wasn’t a matter of having lost at this conversation; I had lost at life,” U.P. thinks.
Unwilling to resign herself to being a mind-rooted parker, U.P. makes the choice that a bildungsroman character might: to undertake a journey. She decides to defy her parker nature and drive rather than fly to New York City from her home in Los Angeles. Tragically, however, she is not twenty-two, and she will not find her true self in a roadhouse in Tuscaloosa after a series of misadventures. Instead, she gets less than an hour away from home before she stops, buys lunch, stops again immediately, rents a hotel room, and meets Davey, the much younger man with whom she will start an affair, albeit one that is never fully consummated. She will never get farther away from home than this hotel room. She is, indeed, a parker. And readers can revel in the ultimate expression of her parking, the cheap hotel room that she spends twenty thousand dollars renovating into what may be the peak of a “room of one’s own.”
In a quest to be the best, most-fully actualized, and limited self, how exactly does a mind-rooted parker fuck? Initially, U.P. describes sex with her husband as being “completely inside the movie in my head. It’s like I have a screen clamped in front of my face.” Clamped feels particularly unerotic here, even though U.P. does say that she enjoys the sex once she’s having it. U.P. values her ability to come, wants to touch and be touched, and if she does not want to have sex with her husband, well, it is not because she is “frigid,” that old sexist standby, or because he is BadTM, but because her arousal is complicated and her understanding of it underdeveloped. “What’s on the screen?” Jordi asks, and U.P. says, “Oh, you know, I’m a gross stepfather getting a blow job from my nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, or I’m the stepdaughter, getting tucked in. Or I’m flipping back and forth between them.” When asked if she thinks about her husband, Harris, at all while having sex with him, she says that she does but “Usually I’m Harris being seduced by [his assistant]. She’s reassuring me that my wife will never know and finally I just let her suck it.”
Here is the long shadow of the male midlife crisis novel with which All Fours is clearly in conversation, that particular brand of “professor has sex with his student”/“businessman has sex with his secretary” wish fulfillment, except that for U.P. the taboo exists entirely in her head and U.P. inhabits both gazes, flipping back and forth between the male and female, the powerful and the vulnerable. July never argues that these taboos don’t have power (how could she?) or that they don’t have a place in the sexual imagination. And crucially, July understands that first and foremost, a sex scene is a scene: an opportunity to develop character or move the plot along, to increase intimacy between two or more characters, to enhance or destroy their dynamic. So with no squeamishness, just delightful, sometimes-sexy directness, July sets out through the rest of the book to explore how these imagined taboos can move from being clinical and rote—a lone, imagined sex act within the shared sex act—to being shared and collaborative.
Three key sexual experiences track U.P.’s journey to better understanding how to be a mind-rooted fucker who is still present in the experience of fucking (the thing that, presumably, makes body-rooted fucking the better, more “honest” of the two). Which is to say, these experiences show her how to be a better version of her limited self. First is U.P.’s sexual relationship with Davey, the much-younger man whose works for a rental car company. After the two meet, it’s soon clear that U.P. desires Davey in part because of who he is not: namely, her husband. “This was what I had always wanted,” she says; “he was real enough to love and love me back but not so real that I couldn’t desire him.” Their love has the tropes of youth—Davey sneaks in her hotel window, U.P. meets Davey’s mother—but with the restrictions of age and marital status.
Because of these restrictions, no matter how much they want each other, their desire is never fully realized. After a long session of making out, U.P. imagines them finally having sex: “We would touch a little bit more each day. . . . And it would be real life. Real smells and wet tongues and cum and pubic hair. . . . A new world would open up and yes it would be rife with new problems but oh the joy that would come from pausing, midsentence, to kiss.” In the entire passage, July uses would seven times, the emphasis always on the possible, not the now. U.P. has found a new lover, but although she is hornier than she has ever been, she does not understand herself better. She has simply cast herself into a new role, the star-crossed lover.
For the duration of the affair with Davey, U.P. lies to her husband, describing her nonexistent cross-country journey to New York and back, and when the travel time is up, she returns home. This happens only a third of the way through the book and is where we leave familiar plots, perhaps any plot, behind. It is clear to U.P.’s husband that something is different, and things come to a head when U.P. makes a sexy Instagram video to attempt to get her lover’s attention, only to learn that he has moved away with his wife. Her husband tells her the sexy video is disrespectful to him, and she declares that the world is disrespectful to “Parker[s]” like her: “ I’m done trying to be the other kind of person. A Driver. . . . Must I become this other kind of person to be good? To deserve pleasure? Should I just never have desire? Or always be ashamed?” The fight evolves from there and it is the beginning of the end of their marriage.
The next time they really speak, it will be through sex. A few weeks after the fight, with no explanation, the husband tells her to put on the robe she was wearing when a telephotographer had been outside their house taking pictures—it was creepy, invasive, and dropped by the narrative until now. He begins in the car, as the telephotographer would have been, and comes into the house in character. He shows U.P. the photos he has just taken of her standing in the window, and he convinces her to “cheat” on her husband with him.
As soon as his dick is out, U.P. “shut my eyes, and got started thinking about the telephotographer”: she is still attempting to experience their sex from the audience, to experience it as a movie. But then, “with [her husband’s] eyes boring down I couldn’t shut mine, which was a problem—how could I think with him right there? A crisis actually, because suddenly it was clear that everything depended on this; I had to fuck the telephotographer without shutting my eyes.” The problem is how to have sex with her eyes open and have sex with the telephotographer, how to be the “mind-bodied” fucker that she is but also have a real, intimate connection with the person she is fucking.
I desperately tried to remember what I’d be doing if this were happening in my head. He jerks off in his car, shows you the pictures, takes out his dick—what do you do? You, the good-time girl. I could hear her pathetic begging and whining sounds, first in my head and then coming out of the depths of my throat like a soul channeled. . . . [T]here was a sort of salty-and-sweet combination of body and mind that made a brand-new thing, like alchemy. Or sex.
Just as she speaks of herself in the third person, she thinks of her husband as “this guy, this Asian photographer,” and says,
I couldn’t help thinking Harris would be so embarrassed after he came.
But he wasn’t—he wasn’t embarrassed and he wasn’t Harris.
Instead, he continues to pretend to be the photographer, telling her about his imaginary life until he falls asleep. This sex scene is the most present the husband and U.P. have been with each other in the entire book, which does not mean that it fixes the marriage. It does change U.P.’s understanding of her sexuality by forcing the visual in her head to overlay the actual visual of the person she is having sex with. The duality in her mind, her ability to flip from man to woman, aggressor to acceptor, has morphed into an ability to add reality to her dual visions, telephotographer and husband at once, both and neither. The sex is amazing, “brand-new,” and does not require her to be a different person, simply a more evolved version of her limited self.
Finally, back in her beloved hotel room, U.P. has sex with Kris, a woman she has begun dating. She tries one last time to be “body-rooted”: “I did the riskiest, most daring thing I could think of: nothing. I didn’t crank up a fantasy, I didn’t perform my lust; I just lay next to her.” And for a little while, perhaps half a page, perhaps ten minutes of kissing and fumbling, she succeeds. And then, “my imagination swelled involuntarily, aggressive and greedy—it didn’t care that this was a first date, it just wanted what it wanted,” and it wanted to call Kris “Daddy.” “It turned out Daddy was pissed that I had done this to him. Made him so hard.” Just as in the sex scene with her husband, U.P.’s lovers can change race or gender, change their relationship to her from safe partner to dangerous stranger or authority figure, for the duration of the sex act. The difference is that now there is no movie “clamped” over her eyes; she and her sex partner are not sitting side by side, each with a VR headset on playing a separate fantasy. Instead, they are actors sharing the stage, “Yes, and”-ing each other through a sexual experience.
Kris and U.P. don’t end up together (though for a little while, U.P. believes she is in that kind of story). U.P. and her husband don’t get back together either. As the story ends, with U.P.’s life utterly changed and yet the same—she’s still a mother, an artist, a mind-rooted parker—she thinks,
I could always be how I was in the [hotel] room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. . . .
There was plenty of time. I decided to walk. The sun was just beginning to set.
Golden light everywhere.
She does have “plenty of time.” Yes, and. All Fours is a joy of a book—funny, astute, and moving—but perhaps its greatest strength is its disinterest in plot and resolution, and the space that opens up for exploration as a result, as U.P. can more honestly play out her fantasies, inviting others to play with her.
Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw (Penguin, 2020) and her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Carleton College, where she teaches creative writing and literature.
