All Fours is the kind of novel that people either press into your hands with evangelical intensity or warn you away from with a grimace. Miranda July’s second novel follows an unnamed narrator, a forty-five-year-old artist, wife, and mother, who sets out on a solo road trip from Los Angeles to New York but gets no farther than a town thirty minutes from home. She checks into a motel, becomes obsessed with redesigning the room and with a younger man named Davey, and begins a wholesale interrogation of her marriage, her desires, and her aging body. What sounds like a midlife crisis story becomes something stranger, more uncomfortable, and more ambitious than that label suggests.
The response to All Fours has been intense and sharply divided. It became one of 2024’s most discussed novels almost immediately, with passionate defenders calling it a groundbreaking work of feminist fiction and equally passionate detractors calling it self-indulgent and exasperating. The conversation around the book often generated as much heat as the book itself, particularly regarding its frank treatment of perimenopause, female desire, and the structures of heterosexual marriage.
The Unbearable Honesty of Wanting
The praise for All Fours clusters around July’s willingness to go to places most novelists won’t. The novel’s treatment of perimenopause and the physical experience of aging in a female body is startlingly direct. Readers who connected with this material described feeling seen in a way that fiction rarely achieves. The hormonal shifts, the changing relationship to desire, the invisibility that creeps in as a woman ages past cultural relevance: July renders all of this with a specificity that borders on confrontational.
The narrator’s obsessive redesign of the motel room functions as a brilliant metaphor without ever feeling like one. She’s remaking her environment because she can’t yet articulate what she wants to remake about her life. The consumer frenzy of it, the hundreds of dollars spent on throw pillows and paint for a room she doesn’t own, captures something true about the way people displace emotional needs onto material projects.
July’s prose is another major strength. She writes with a deceptive simplicity that can make you miss how precise her observations are. The humor is dry, often arriving in the gap between what the narrator says she’s doing and what she’s actually doing. There’s a fearlessness to the voice that readers either find thrilling or alienating, but rarely boring.
The treatment of marriage is perhaps the book’s most resonant thread. July doesn’t write the narrator’s husband as a villain or a saint. He’s a good-enough partner in a good-enough marriage, and the novel’s real provocation is its suggestion that good enough might not be enough. The narrator’s desire for Davey isn’t really about Davey. It’s about the gap between the life she has and the life she can still feel humming somewhere beneath it.
The Privilege Problem and the Patience Tax
The most consistent criticism of All Fours is that the narrator is, to put it plainly, a lot. Her self-absorption is the point, but that doesn’t make it any easier to spend 336 pages in her company. Readers who bounced off the book frequently cited exhaustion with a protagonist whose problems are inseparable from her considerable privilege: a successful artist with money, time, a supportive spouse, and a healthy child, having a crisis that many people would consider a luxury.
The motel room section, which dominates the first half, tested patience even among admirers. The granular detail of the redesign, the cycling through desire and guilt with Davey, the narrator’s spiraling internal monologue: all of this can feel repetitive, as though the novel is circling the same small space both literally and figuratively. Some readers felt the book needed a firmer editorial hand to trim the repetition without losing the intensity.
The novel’s second half, when the narrator returns home and begins implementing changes in her marriage, struck some readers as less compelling than the motel section. The domestic negotiations that follow feel at times like a therapy transcript, earnest and detailed but lacking the electric strangeness of the earlier chapters. The ending, without revealing specifics, divided readers further, with some finding it earned and others finding it abrupt.
There’s also a thread of criticism about the book’s relationship to class and self-awareness. The narrator reflects extensively on gender and aging but rarely on the economic conditions that make her particular brand of crisis possible. For some readers, this blind spot weakened the novel’s claim to universality.
Freedom Is the Wrong Word for It
The core tension of All Fours isn’t between freedom and constraint, though it might look that way from the outside. It’s between the self a woman has built over decades and the self that still wants things the built self was supposed to have outgrown. July isn’t interested in the fantasy of escape. Her narrator doesn’t run away, not really. She drives thirty minutes, checks into a motel, and confronts the fact that what she wants can’t be solved by distance. The novel’s real bravery is in sitting with that realization rather than resolving it neatly.
This is messy fiction in the best and most frustrating sense. It refuses to make its protagonist likable, refuses to offer clean answers, and refuses to pretend that the questions it raises have solutions. Whether that messiness registers as courage or indulgence depends entirely on what you bring to the reading.
Should You Read All Fours?
If you’re drawn to fiction that takes female interiority seriously, that isn’t afraid of making you uncomfortable, and that treats the body and its changes as legitimate literary territory, All Fours delivers something rare. Readers who loved July’s earlier work, particularly her short stories and her first novel The First Bad Man, will find her at her most ambitious here. It’s also a strong pick for anyone who felt seen by writers like Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, or Sheila Heti.
If you need to like or at least respect your protagonist, if you find extended interior monologue tedious, or if novels about affluent women in crisis feel exhausting to you on principle, this one will be a difficult read. It asks a lot of the reader and doesn’t always repay the investment equally.
The Verdict on All Fours
All Fours is a novel that demands a reaction, and it almost always gets one. Miranda July has written something genuinely brave about the experience of being a woman at the midpoint of life, and the conversations it has sparked about perimenopause, desire, and marriage have been valuable far beyond the book itself. It’s also uneven, self-indulgent in stretches, and occasionally blind to its own limitations. The best parts are extraordinary. The weakest parts test your commitment. Whether the highs justify the lows is the question every reader has to answer for themselves, and that very division might be the most honest thing about it.