You describe this novel as ‘very close to the bone’. Your work has danced along the lines of fiction and autobiography before but is this the closest to a thinly veiled version of your own story? It’s actually pretty thickly veiled if you know me. My friends are like ‘oh wow, you’ve managed to tell a whole story that’s not your story, but holds all the feelings of your story.’ I loaned some basic things about myself to the narrator; my job, my body. And she shares my excited, curious, hopeful feeling about life; this love of exploring, even if it’s a mess.

But there’s no scene in the book that’s not fictional. I feel so protective of my family. I set out to write a novel. That’s the one thing I knew. I didn’t know all the things that would happen in the book. I was married with a child. Yes, my questions entered the book, as I would hope they would. This book was like my joy and my companion; this story and this narrator. At times I felt like I got to go in like a role and play the character. I’m happy for everyone reading it to be entirely, enjoyably confused. 

You’ve often been described as a fearless artist, but All Fours faces new fears . . . What’s new is I risked more. I went into things I was ashamed of. Starting with outing myself as being not young anymore. I was like ‘do I really want to tie my name to ageing and perimenopause?’ That seemed pretty unappealing. I thought maybe I could dodge the whole thing. But it started taking up more room in my head. It was this grain of sand in my shoe that didn’t seem to be as dismissible as I initially thought. I knew I was heading into a mapless place, and there was nothing it wouldn’t touch. I just thought, maybe I use everything I have to go into it. I’m not going to avoid it in any way. It’s a sort of jumping in. It’s not even that [perimenopause] is so bad (I think there is a lot of colouring of that, through patriarchal structures and this sort of humiliating lens) but we are actually believing that it’s humiliating and gross. That something about life stops being interesting or exciting?

I mean if you look at the WebMD list of medical things that happen when you get your period, there’s not a lot of positives on that list, you know? And yet you’re kind of filled with this sense, I mean, because it’s very good for men, of course we are able to get fucked and have children. It’s like [puts on male deep voice] ‘trust us! Yes, you should be embarrassed. I mean you’re gross! Don’t get us wrong. But on the whole, this is very good!’

If society was a matriarchy and we knew, [during perimenopause] here’s a time when a woman really comes into herself and her power, and she might become president or become huge in her field or whatever, then we would enter this time so differently. It’s not like we even need to create the meaning to this stage in life. The meaning is already there. We’re just not going to be given access to it through men or through patriarchal structures. That’s the beauty of this being a novel. We actually need the power of fiction to access it.

The novel has some brilliant recurring metaphors about spoons and forks. This notion of a fork in the road, and women reaching crossroads and leaving behind the patriarchal notion of being shrivelled, depleted and boring after they can no longer reproduce, or feeling unseen and misunderstood as they enter their mid-life, and instead making this decision to do the braver thing, to follow beauty, to feel full of vitality, to keep exploring . . . Sure. The thing that allowed me to be braver than before was all the conversations I was having with other women, like a whisper network or something. That is a difference between this book and any of my other fiction; that sense of writing with and for other women, not just in an imaginary way. Like, having a conversation with a woman at a party that was fairly intense and I’ll probably never see her again, but now I’m writing for her. The excitement that drove the daring, and the labour of four years of sitting there writing it, did come from those conversations. 

The narrator’s best friend is a lesbian sculptor called Jordi. I wondered if some of the characters in the book are amalgams of real people from your own life? Who were your inspirations? Two writers who are also dear friends, and also gave notes on this book; Maggie Nelson and Sheila Heti, these are my two closest writer friends. I feel so ‘Hollywood’ because I love characters, I love plot, I love twists and turns and reveals. Neither of those writers who I admire so much are invested in those things. 

I remember reading Marina Abramović’s autobiography and thinking ‘my god, this is such a weird, unconventional life’, and you could do that. You could enjoy reading about a life that was pretty unrelatable. A lot of the stuff I pulled from more famous friends. Sure, yeah, Jordi is an amalgam. The book is dedicated to ‘Isabelle’, Isabelle Albuquerque, the sculptor. Very specifically, Jordi is a sculptor. While a lot of my friends can see themselves in Jordi, Isabelle does most of all. 

There are a lot of older women in the novel really enjoying their sexuality: ‘jerking off’, fantasising, having their hearts broken, having crushes in a way which is often reserved for younger women, or is often missing in Hollywood or in fiction? Yeah, it’s funny. When we’re younger, older women seem more ‘other’ to us. They’re not given a full sexuality and power. Whereas men . . . I mean, we’ve been made to think about the sexuality of all our presidents. It’s part of their ability to hold power. You might, as a little boy, think ‘oh, I want to grow up to be that and have that kind of power’. With older women it’s like a sad punchline: who in their right mind would affiliate themselves with that? You don’t do that. But you get closer and closer and it’s like a mirage; that’s not here, you know? You enter a land suddenly and everything that’s been presented to you isn’t lining up with your actual experience, or is it? Is it unsafe to live how I feel? What will happen? Looking around me I saw a lot of women making radical changes that they wouldn’t have when they were younger. 

The character of Davey reminded me in places of your character from the short story, ‘Roy Spivey’, where if everything fucks up, you’ve still got this person to turn to. That’s a theme as well; these fantasies that nourish you in times of difficulty? Yes, and it’s also a call to come out of fantasy. There’s been a lot of fantasy throughout my writings. Obviously as a writer you’re going to live in your head a lot. I think; I personally didn’t want to only do that at this time in my life. It seemed critical, at this time in your life, you don’t want to be on the bus daydreaming and miss your stop. You need to move at some point; make a decision, do something difficult. 

The character of Davey is described as this not very exotic guy, yet he’s a very talented dancer. He becomes very attractive to the narrator and awakens all these lustful feelings in her. Was there anyone you had in mind when you wrote him? There were a few different people. There was a particular dancer, who doesn’t look like Davey at all but some of his dance is related. The stuff about slowing down time. His name is Storyboard P.  

Oh wow, he performed in Glasgow at an Arika event, he’s incredible. His movement is so amazing, the levitating, the floating! He goes into this super expressive, emotional state, his performances are so intense, like he’s gone into a trance state . . . That’s cool that you know him and can get that reference. I was looking at his dance. We had a little interaction on Instagram during the pandemic, we talked on the phone once. In a way that character [Davey] is holding so many artforms and artists. Dance was the stand-in for all the arts. I’ve devoted my life to art in all these forms and one thing I wanted was a character who could speak knowingly about art. Like, there’s no one in The First Bad Man  [July’s 2015 novel] who could speak knowingly about art. I had to give the narrator that.  

I felt like I wanted to say ‘what is the power of this? What does this actually feel like, to be transformed by someone’s performance, or by something you read or whatever?’ In this case I made it this very literal, visual thing of him dancing. It’s a hard thing to get across, it’s one of the challenges I set out for myself. 

It definitely takes that crush to another level, that connection seems so much more important to her. It’s more than him having a nice torso: he has that artistic sensibility and that is clearly the focus of his life? Yeah! Right. That you can join with someone in art in a way that’s almost sexual: them dancing together. They don’t have sex, unless you count the tampon scene! I think there is something really exquisite about the romance of joining creatively.

The main character in All Fours is kind of a big deal, but she’s also a bit pissed off that she’s not more recognised. There’s a great line from her dentist, giving her a back-handed compliment when he keeps saying ‘my daughter has heard of you! What are the chances?’ How does that compare to the reality of being Miranda July? I think it’s just funny. I get the awkwardness of this level of fame as opposed to Arkanda [a huge celebrity in the novel] level of fame. There’s a fair amount of humour in it. My friends are like ‘maybe if you say your name you’ll get a reservation for us!’ And I call, and there’s just silence. On a deeper level, the book is about intimacy and the weirdness of intimacy with strangers that fame can create. But then also this barrier to intimacy. 

Do you attract people who feel they know you, because you often write characters that seem approachable or relatable? I remember after my first movie [Me And You And Everyone We Know ] came out, people thought I was the character in the movie. She’s so sweet and approachable. She could never make a movie, right? You have to be incredibly tough. People would come up to me (this still happens) and say ‘can I give you a hug?’ It’s like ‘you should be scared of me! When you think of all that I’ve done, and the darkness, you don’t know who I am!’ I mean, I would be intimidated by most filmmakers I didn’t know. 

As someone who loves to explore different artforms (dance, film, fiction, performance art, fashion) does it get harder to think of the next project or do you have a long list of ideas you want to work on next? No, it doesn’t really get harder. I guess I’m after different things now than when I was younger. I’m not so much trying to prove I can do something. Before I wanted to see if I could make a feature film or write a novel. The great challenges sort of shift. It’s more of a subtler, more personal thing.
Miranda July will be in conversation Monday 10–Thursday 13 June; All Fours is out now published by Canongate; main picture: Elizabeth Weinberg.