I finished Miranda July’s All Fours this week and I think it’s a great book to work out if you’re going to get someone. I can easily see certain people loving it and certain people hating it and how this love or hate could be used as shorthand for so many other things. I’d wager that if you hate this book, we’re never going to be friends friends. I would prickle at someone saying they hated this book because I would be a bitch and press: what did you hate exactly? Because I think this book is important, not that important things are above reproach, but rather that what’s important isn’t about likeability or prudishness or shutting the fuck up, which I suspect are what all the critiques circle around. To which they might say it’s about an unhinged woman and a motel room. To which I think we’d agree (after maybe a little fight that I would retell to close friends over a voicenote) that we should just leave it because we don’t get each other.
There was one part that I dog-eared because it captured something that rang so true for me lately:
“…but I’m just realizing this dynamic I have with my husband where I express my problem so dramatically that I become the problem, which makes me desperate to win back his favor. It’s a cycle that keeps us from ever moving forward with our issues.”
In the book, the protagonist makes a distinction between being either body-rooted and mind-rooted when it comes to sex — being grounded in the physicality of the act or floating somewhere above it with what she describes as an imaginary screen strapped to her eyes watching a story about the sex. In the same way, I think some people can be grounded in their relationship, seeing it almost logically and thoughtfully considering their next steps based on what is actually apparent. Then there are the people (like me) who see things through the lens of their story, which consists mostly of their emotions, past experiences, future fears, and likely unrealistic expectations. This soup of everything is what leads to shrill expressions of problems when a short but calm conversation would have done the trick.
A million years ago, Lillian Ahenkan aka flex.mami posted a tweet that said something like: You only get what you ask for, and yet you still don’t ask. I think expressing things dramatically is often because those needs and desires have been so quashed that they only rise to the surface angrily and unpredictably because they were never given a fair chance to exist fully formed and clear in their instruction. I think there’s an underlying fear that what if you plainly ask for what you want and the answer is no? So, better then to try to subjugate yourself to some sort of “cool girl” existence living mind-rooted for life not just sex. In the liminal space between desire and expression of desire, you can freely blame everyone and everything, and nothing has to change.