⚠️ mild spoilers for the premise and early plot developments.

miranda july understands that being a person is both an existential mystery and a deeply inconvenient thing to be trapped inside. all fours begins with a woman planning to drive from los angeles to new york, only to abandon the trip barely thirty minutes from home. there’s something wonderfully absurd about this failure to escape, about traveling almost nowhere and somehow arriving at the edge of a completely different life. july turns an ordinary motel room into a private little universe, a place where the narrator can experiment with another version of herself while remaining tethered to the marriage, motherhood, and familiar routines she has temporarily left behind. the distance between the life she inhabits and the life she imagines becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. as desire, sexuality, and perimenopause unsettle her sense of who she is, the body becomes both an unruly animal and an uncomfortable reminder that time is moving, whether or not we feel ready to meet it.

july has a peculiar gift for finding the existential inside the ridiculous. the narrator’s fixation on davey, a younger man whose dancing seems to offer a glimpse of something she cannot quite articulate, is funny and uncomfortable, yet unexpectedly tender. her feelings are enormous; the circumstances in which she tries to understand them are often almost comically small. july lets those proportions remain strange. she doesn’t tidy desire into a revelation or make reinvention look particularly graceful. instead, the novel moves through obsession, bodily awkwardness, loneliness, and sudden flashes of recognition, allowing the narrator to be contradictory without making her contradictions into a puzzle that must be solved. at times, that looseness can make the novel feel as though it is circling its questions rather than pushing them somewhere new, but perhaps that restlessness is also part of its honesty. becoming yourself, after all, is rarely a clean narrative with a satisfying arc.

what stayed with me most was the possibility that a life can be genuinely loved and still feel too small, that gratitude and longing can coexist without either canceling the other out. there is a particular loneliness in realizing that the roles you inhabit may be sincere and still fail to contain you, that you can love the people who know you best and remain a stranger to parts of yourself. i connected with that desire to step outside the familiar shape of a life, not necessarily because it is wrong, but because some part of you is still waiting to be met. july understands how frightening it can be to want something you cannot explain without making the wanting itself seem foolish. perhaps we spend so much time trying to become coherent, comprehensible creatures that we forget how strange it is to be alive inside a body, inside a history, inside a life we never fully chose and may still love. maybe reinvention isn’t becoming someone new so much as discovering that the person you’ve been was never going to contain all of you.

p.s. i've been a huge fan of miranda july for a long time, so perhaps i'm a little predisposed to loving whatever strange, tender little universe she dreams up. there's something about her particular blend of absurdity, loneliness, and dark whimsy that feels almost instinctively familiar to me. she makes the ridiculous feel profound and the profoundly sad feel strangely funny, and i'm endlessly susceptible to the way she finds tenderness in the most unlikely places. :)