Latest news with #MirandaJuly
BBC News
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Some loved it and some tore it apart': How the erotic novel All Fours captured the zeitgeist
"Life-changing" for some, hateable to others, Miranda July's wildly successful erotic novel All Fours about the female midlife experience has dominated the conversation. Every year brings its share of buzzy books: the tomes that top TBR piles, pop up all over social media and are mentioned in countless best-of lists. But it's a rare novel that not only transcends the literary world to dominate the wider cultural conversation, but is still making waves a year after it was first published. That's the case with Miranda July's All Fours, a strange, sexy and surprising book about a woman tearing up her life in her mid-40s. When it came out last spring, it swiftly became a word-of-mouth sensation, and since then the buzz has only become louder. July has appeared on the cover of weekend supplements and been interviewed on national news programmes. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2025. Meanwhile the book has been optioned for a TV series and nominated for several prizes, including the National Book Awards and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Yet arguably the novel's biggest impact has been the conversations it has started. Women, especially, have pressed the book eagerly into the hands of friends, sisters, mothers, strangers, urging them to read it. Many have called it life-changing. Some have hated it. But everyone who reads this book has something to say about it. In the novel, an unnamed narrator – a 45-year-old semi-famous artist (like July herself) and married mother of one – sets off on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York, a gift to herself after a whiskey company pays $20,000 to use one of her phrases in an advert. She hopes the trip will turn her into "the sort of chill, grounded woman I'd always wanted to be". Except she doesn't make it to Manhattan. She barely makes it out of LA, pulling off the motorway for petrol in a town called Monrovia. There, an encounter with a younger man, Davey, leads her to check into a motel for the night, where she winds up spending the next three weeks (and blows her entire windfall on renovating the motel room in the style of a Parisian hotel). Her geographical journey is swapped for an emotional one. An all-consuming desire for Davey kickstarts not just a sexual reawakening but a complete reassessment of her life at its midway point. Back home, her doctor tells her she's in perimenopause, the transitional phase before menopause where fluctuating hormone levels can cause a host of physical and emotional changes. When she learns that, according to biology, her libido is about to "fall off a cliff", it propels her to ferociously pursue her desires, realising she must choose between "a life spent longing vs a life that was continually surprising". Besides desire, the narrator and the book consider subjects like ageing, ambition, creativity, mortality, motherhood and marriage, all the time questioning the expected path for women in the second half of their lives. If it sounds serious, it is - but it's funny, too. Tackling female experiences with honesty On its release, All Fours received largely rave reviews. The New York Times called it "the first great perimenopause novel". New York Magazine said it was "a spectacularly horny story about pursuing sexual and creative freedom". The Washington Post's review was prophetic, saying: "something about All Fours – its outrageous sexuality, its quirky humour, its earnest search for change – could, who knows, rally a generation of women." On her motivation for writing for book, July talked about the lack of art dedicated to this phase of life. "If men had this huge change, it would be considered monumental! There would be rituals. There'd be holidays. There'd be rights and religions," she told the Guardian. Treena Orchard, author and associate professor at the School of Health Studies at Canada's Western University recently presented a paper on All Fours at the Contemporary Women's Writing Association conference in the UK. She thinks July's novel is groundbreaking in its approach. "She's pushing back against the heteronormative frames that seem to seep into every aspect of our lives and tell us how we should and should not behave," Orchard tells the BBC. "She's helping create mythology and meaning by designating this phase of life as a culturally important rite of passage. That is political, and that is radical to me." To write the book, July interviewed gynaecologists, naturopaths and friends. Hers is not the first novel to explore perimenopause. Recent years have seen more fiction probing this period of life, including Catherine Newman's Sandwich, Fran Littlewood's Amazing Grace Adams and Joanne Harris's Broken Light. Nor is she the first to tackle female experiences with unflinching honesty — France's Annie Ernaux has been breaking taboos for decades, writing frankly about subjects including illegal abortion, sex with younger men and breast cancer. Yet none of these have captured the zeitgeist quite like All Fours, which has been likened to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying in terms of its impact. Jong's 1973 novel, about a frustrated married woman who pursues her sexual fantasies, caused a sensation on its release for its portrayal of female desire, and more than 50 years on is viewed as a classic of feminist fiction. "The timing couldn't have been more perfect," says Orchard. "She brings together multiple tendrils of things that are happening that are hot ticket items in the larger culture." That includes menopause, age-gap relationships (see last year's Babygirl and the upcoming I Want Your Sex) and polyamory. "Then you've got this juicy, wild sex," says Orchard. Ah yes, the sex. There's a lot of it in All Fours: not only having it, but wanting it, thinking about it, anticipating it. It's an intensely erotic book, and a graphic one, with one tampon-related scene particularly notorious. July doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable, whether it's an awkward sexual encounter or a thorny conversation. She has spoken of her wish in writing the book to turn the intimate exchanges she was having with friends into a public dialogue. "I was writing with the sense that I was in conversation with a lot of other women, if not all women," she said. By that measure, All Fours has been an unequivocal success. On July's Substack page, a community of women have gathered to share not just their love for the book, but how it has changed their lives. They talk of feeling seen, understood and liberated after reading it; that it's made them feel less alone, less crazy, braver. For some it's prompted them to end relationships, leave jobs or confront loved ones. Groups have splintered off and arranged real-life meet-ups. In Paris, Los Angeles, London, Texas, Seattle and more, women have gathered for conversations sparked by the book. And it's not just those in July's age bracket that have connected with it - plenty of young women have, too. Mia Morongell, who is 24, read All Fours late last year. "The whole book is a meditation on womanhood that I think transcends age," she tells the BBC. What does she think makes it so radical? "Its shamelessness, its refusal to keep quiet about the things women don't often speak about, like the lives we dream of living or the freedom we crave or our deepest fears." For Morongell the book came at exactly the right time. "It made me rethink my relationship both with my boyfriend and with sex itself, realising it was possible to claim agency over the type of intimacy I desire without shame." One line in particular, a quote from Simone de Beauvoir referenced in the book, has stayed with her: "You can't have everything you want but you can want everything you want." Why some can't stomach All Fours But while for many the book has been transformational, for others it's been a turn-off, leading to some fiery book club debates over its merits. "In my network of feminist friends, authors, writers, it was divisive," says Orchard. Some critics think the book is trying a little too hard to be edgy. That was the case for Katie Krug, whose book club – a diverse mix of 15 women in New Jersey - was split down the middle on it. "Some really loved it and some tore it apart," she says. "There was little to no middle ground." Krug herself felt that July was being "provocative for provocation's sake. Maybe she felt she had to get people's attention, but it came across to me as phoney and inauthentic." On Goodreads – where the book has an average score of 3.5 stars - the one-star reviews call it "icky", "cringey", "unrelatable" and even "a nightmarish read". One reader says: "I've had hot flashes that were better than this book." There's been a healthy dose of outrage over the narrator's moral choices – from pursuing an affair with a younger man to (later in the book) opting for an open marriage. Her privileged domestic situation is a sticking point for some – after all, not many have the time, money or childcare to take off for a three-week road trip. And some readers just can't stomach her as a character, calling her narcissistic, immature and obnoxious. "I don't mind unlikeable characters, but I found the narrator to be exhausting to spend time with," says Krug. "I didn't understand her, I didn't like her, and I just wanted her to stop already." More like this:• The 12 best books of 2025 so far• Clinton: 'I was more a storyline than a story'• The lost 1934 novel warning of Nazi horrors For some, the book is just too weird. There's plenty of absurdity in both the writing and the character's choices - not least blowing $20,000 on lavishly redecorating a motel room she doesn't own. Room 321 at the Excelsior becomes the narrator's "Room of One's Own", to use Virginia Woolf's phrase: a place away from the domestic in which she experiments with her sexual and creative impulses. Later, it's a parlour, too, when she invites friends over to quiz them about the menopause and libidos. "The motel room is a symbol," says Orchard. "The room is about her enjoying and spending her money however she pleases, and spending that money on beauty. It's a place to play. It's also a place to burn down ideas. Though Krug didn't personally like All Fours, she appreciates the discussions it's sparked, in her book club and beyond. "So many novels deal with men at midlife, it's refreshing to see one from a female perspective receive so much attention." Orchard resists the idea that All Fours is a midlife crisis novel, though, at least in the traditional sense. "She's actively engaging with this change. She's questioning it, she's talking to her doctor and her friends about it, she's trying to advocate for herself. In my mind, that's quite different to how we think about the midlife crisis." Crisis or not, July has shown that there's a hunger for art which truly lays bare the transformative, messy and sometimes magical female midlife experience. One of the author's favourite quotes comes from Albert Camus: "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."With her novel she's opened the door for more radical emotional honesty, and with the paperback recently released, the conversations about All Fours - and the arguments - look set to continue for some time yet. All Fours by Miranda July is out in paperback now. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Women's Prize for Fiction winner on The Safekeep, being intersex and her childhood in Israel
It sounds like a hectic afternoon in London when I speak to Yael van der Wouden , author of The Safekeep and winner last Thursday of this year's Women's Prize for Fiction . Speaking on Friday, she says life since hearing she had won the prestigious British literary award and its £30,000 (€35,000) prize has been 'like this, absolutely chaotic', referring to the sirens and beeping noises intruding through the open window. 'It was unreal,' says van der Wouden. 'You prepare yourself for every single scenario and you try to imagine how you would feel with every single scenario, but you can't.' Beyond promoting her work, 'I just get to live my life,' says the Dutch-Israeli author. 'The Netherlands is a very sober country, so no one goes into any kind of heightened emotion over an author existing.' 'It's good because I come here and they give me prizes and then I go home and I'm just a lady in a store,' she says. READ MORE Van der Wouden's debut was up against stiff competition for the prize, including novels by established American writers Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July, along with three other debuts: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis and Good Girl by Aria Aber. In her acceptance speech, van der Wouden shared that she was intersex. 'I was a girl until I turned 13, and then as I hit puberty all that was supposed to happen did not quite happen, or if it did happen it happened too much,' she said. 'I won't thrill you too much with the specifics but the long and the short of it is that hormonally I am intersex. [ The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden: Beguiling love story told in language that entertains and enthrals Opens in new window ] 'This little fact defined my life throughout my teens until I advocated for the healthcare that I needed. 'In the few precious moments here on stage I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women's Prize and that is because of every single trans person who's fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.' What prompted her to share this information? 'To me, that's an integral part of my life and the conversations I have with myself, with my friends and family, with my trans loved ones,' she says. So why now? 'Because it just happened to be that the moment where I and a room full of 800 people met for the first time and so they got to hear me speak for the first time. But it's not anything new on my part. It simply was a new moment for all of us together.' Creativity comes from curiosity. And when you're in survival mode, there's no space for curiosity The Safekeep, which also made the Booker Prize shortlist last year, is based on a repressed and melancholic central character, Isabel, whose world is upended when her brother's girlfriend, Ava, stays with her for the summer. A passionate love affair develops between the women, leading to a thrilling plot twist that van der Wouden asks me to be careful not to reveal. It is not exposing too much to say the novel, set in the Netherlands in 1961, concerns itself with the legacy of the second World War. Does she think there might be a through-line between how the Dutch government of the time treated Jewish people during the war and its contemporary policies under its right-wing government? 'The Netherlands has a specific penchant in using bureaucracy as a form of violence, against migrants, immigrants, refugees, poor people, marginalised people. 'This happened in the fallout of the war, this happened with every single migrant crisis that the country has had, and this specifically happened also around what we call the 'toeslagenaffaire'.' This was a scandal in which Dutch tax authorities used an algorithm to spot suspected benefits fraud. It penalised many low-income, ethnic-minority families. 'And that's what I mean with using bureaucracy as a form of violence: using the minutiae of forms and documents and having people fill in that and fill in that ... the small things that you don't think represent violence and end up creating so much suffering for so many people. 'I don't think [the Netherlands] is unique in that, but I can only speak to my country,' she adds. Being an artist in the Netherlands is more difficult than ever, she says, with funding being 'slashed' in education and the arts. She says her parents, both of whom are animators, received a universal income when they moved to the Netherlands, where her father is from, when van der Wouden was 10, after the family had spent the first decade of her life living in her mother's native Israel. She is now in the very privileged position of being an author who can live off her work, she says, but all of her friends working in education and the arts are struggling. 'They are all splitting themselves in so many ways just to make ends meet and it's hard to do that and keep going, and allow themselves to [be creative]. You can't and it's devastating, and it's infuriating. 'Anxiety shuts down the desire for creativity, but also the ability to be curious, and I think creativity comes from curiosity. And when you're in survival mode, there's no space for curiosity. There's only the next moment, the next day. How will I pay rent? How will I eat? 'I've spent many years [where] I've been on welfare, I've definitely lived off ramen, while trying to avoid medical checks and getting further and further into debt. I've done all of it. And it is possible, but it's very hard to escape into fantasy and escape into curiosity,' she says. She also noted in her acceptance speech that the conversation The Safekeep became part of 'felt all the more important to me, in the face of violence in Gaza and the West Bank and as I've said, the violence my own queer and trans community faces worldwide', she said. Asked about her relationship with Israel, where her mother is from and where she lived until the age of 10, she says, 'I want to be very careful to not create a nostalgic cloud around my childhood, even though my parents made sure I had a fantastic childhood very heavy in the arts ... I had a very creative and very free childhood. 'But I also know that – you know, speaking of what shuts down creativity – living under occupation, living in war, and that's what many Palestinians experience, have experienced then and still experience now, in even more extreme circumstances. 'And I'm in stark opposition to the [Israeli] government [and] I don't want my nostalgia for my childhood to overshadow that,' she says. On whether she would set a novel in Israel, she says: 'I think I would set a novel in a diaspora that is connected to there, but I don't think it's possible for me to set a novel entirely there because I left when I was 10, so it would be the perspective of a 10-year-old in one way or another. But perhaps one day, you never know. But for now, we're sticking to the Netherlands for a little while longer.' She completed a draft of her second novel just before going to London for the Women's Prize festivities. In her research for the book, set in a Dutch fishing village in 1929, she found further evidence of the then-government's use of what she terms 'bureaucracy as violence', as many of the men who lost their jobs in the process of the South Sea being closed off from the North Sea in the early 1930s never received the funding they were promised. And there is also a titillating premise to the novel likely to pique the interest of fans of The Safekeep: a married woman enlists the help of another woman to seduce her husband and frame him for adultery so she can divorce him. Asked why she writes in English, she says her parents mainly spoke English to each other when she was a child, although her mother is now an excellent Dutch speaker. 'I was three years old and my parents were still rummaging around the apartment, and I was already at the door with my little dress and my little sunglasses, very impatient to leave the house. And then I shouted at them, 'Let's go, we gotta go!' And suddenly they realised that they were raising a child in English,' she says, laughing at the memory. Author Paul Murray in Dublin. Photograph: Barry Cronin Van der Wouden has also spoken previously about her love of The Bee Sting by Irish author Paul Murray , and asks, laughing, if I have a spare three hours to discuss its merits. She particularly admires how Murray portrays Imelda, a leading character whose inner life and background are revealed as the book progresses. 'With Imelda, you think, because up until that moment you only see her through the other characters' perspective, and she's quite awful in their POV [point of view]. And then you go to her POV and, honestly, that was ... the most wonderful experience of being proven wrong about a character and falling in love with character, but the language just completely upended my understanding of what we could do with language in character work in novels. And she still is, and I think forever will be, one of my favourite characters in literature.'
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Can Menopause Be Funny?
For the past couple years, menopause has been the hot topic among Gen X and Xennials now that they're in its unrelenting, sweaty grip. Halle Berry and the best-selling memoirist Naomi Watts have been promoting menopause-wellness programs and beauty and health products. And a year after it first hit shelves, readers are still unpacking Miranda July's critically acclaimed book 'All Fours,' the irreverent autofictional portrait of a perimenopausal woman's voracious sexual awakening. The havoc that menopause wreaks on bodies and minds can feel nothing short of absurd. But, while it has provided an abundance of great material, can it actually be the basis for an entertaining TV sitcom? The veteran comedy writers and actors Meredith MacNeill, 50, and Jennifer Whalen, 55, are the creators, executive-producers and stars of 'Small Achievable Goals,' a boldly candid half-hour workplace sitcom on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that depicts two Gen X women going through menopause, much as they are experiencing it themselves. The premise alone is a large achievable goal: selling what Ms. Whalen described as 'a joyful comedy about menopause' to Canada's premiere network, especially amid a culture that is squeamish discussing anything related to the menstrual cycle. Then again, the comedians have a proven track record at CBC, with multiple writing and acting awards to their names. They're considered 'Canadian comedy royalty,' according to, among others, their castmate Alexander Nunez. Though Canada has exported the comic actors Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy, as a Toronto resident Lisa Levy (no relation to Mr. Levy) explained it, our neighbors to the north do not have an obsessive celebrity culture like Americans do, unless they're 'athletes or Drake,' so there is not, say, a Tina-and-Amy equivalent in Canada (referencing Tina Fey and Amy Poehler). But if there were, these two would qualify. 'Small Achievable Goals' — or 'SAG,' as the women appropriately call it — deftly strikes the balance between raucous comedy and heart-rending poignancy as an unlikely work partnership unfolds between polar opposites whose hormones have gone haywire, amid an office full of bewildered young millennials and zoomers. 'This is a crazy time of life, but we wanted to make a laugh-out-loud comedy about [menopause] and talk about these things openly,' Ms. Whalen said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The risk was worth it': All Fours author Miranda July on sex, power and giving women permission to blow up their lives
When Miranda July's All Fours was published in May last year, it triggered what felt like both a spontaneous resistance movement and the sort of mania last experienced when the final Twilight book dropped, except this time for women in midlife rather than teenage girls. Two friends separately brought it to my house, like contraband dropped out of a biplane. Book groups hastily convened, strategically timed for when the men were out of the picture. The story opens with a 45-year-old woman about to take a road trip, a break from her husband and child and general domestic noise. She's intending to drive from LA to New York, but is derailed in the first half hour by a young guy, Davey, in a car hire place, to whom she is passionately attracted. The next several weeks pass in a lust so intense, so overpowering, so lusciously drawn, it's like a cross between ayahuasca and encephalitis. The narrator is subsumed by her obsession, and disappears her normal life. The road trip is a bust from the start, but the effort of breaking the spell and going home looks, for a long time, like way too much for the narrator, and when she finally does, to borrow from Leonard Cohen (perhaps describing a similar situation), she's somebody's mother but nobody's wife. The New York Times called it 'the first great perimenopause novel', which is incorrect – not because you could easily name 10 others, rather because what it ignited was not an honest heart-to-heart about hormones, but something far more radical. What if a woman just told the truth, about sex, monogamy, marriage, mortality, domesticity, friendship, the life of the mind? The disruption of norms would be so immense that you wouldn't, as a reader, necessarily need your circumstances or feelings to correspond to the author's for that to upend your life. One woman who nearly divorced her husband after reading it said: 'I think what I felt, which I think is what a lot of us feel, is permission to be undone.' All Fours was an immediate success. It spent nearly a year on the Indie Bestseller list. It was a finalist in the National Book Awards in the US, as well as being named on the best books lists, 2024, by the New York Times, the New Yorker, Time, the Washington Post, PBS, Oprah, Vogue and Vulture. Now, a year on, the paperback is coming out, and I'm talking to July as she waits to find out whether she has won the Women's prize . Our conversation, which would normally be part-retrospective – there's a funny bit in All Fours when she talks about the female artist's lifecycle: first 'hot young thing', then wilderness years, and a final spurt of attention before you die – is instead all about the reaction to this book. 'I wrote it as if it was OK – as if everyone knew what I was talking about,' July says, looking bluestockingy in round glasses, from her home in Echo Park, Los Angeles. 'As if you could make a joke about something shameful, as if we had all already talked about that thing. Even though we hadn't. So it was skipping a few steps, even to have humour about it. I was building on an internal world that I believed existed, not just in me.' Miranda July is 51, was born in Vermont to two writer parents, and has the ultimate boho CV – she said once that her last shitty job was at the age of 23, as a car-door-unlocker at Pop-A-Lock, a US chain of locksmiths, which makes her ability to make a living as, variously, a performance artist, a film-maker, a writer, almost mythical. She came to indie prominence with Me and You and Everyone We Know, her first full-length film, in 2005 – it won the best first feature at Cannes that year. It has the most endearing, infuriating sequence: someone buys a goldfish and accidentally drives off, having left it on top of his car. July, starring in the film because, realistically, she was the only person who could have, decides from inside her own car that the fish will certainly perish, and delivers an ode: 'I didn't know you, but I want you to know that you were loved.' Her voice was incredibly distinctive – she nailed all those universal feelings such as awkwardness, futility, delight, yet was as far as you could imagine from being an everywoman. There followed an exquisite book of short stories – No One Belongs Here More Than You – in 2007, and her first full-length novel, The First Bad Man, in 2015. Certainly, she always blurred the lines between herself and her protagonists. But When All Fours was published, it couldn't escape anyone's notice that July herself has a child, roughly the same age as the narrator's, and separated from her husband two years before the book's publication. Of course, it's always assumed that authors borrow from life, but this seemed like a different order of autobiographical fiction. Being honest about feelings, even destructive, primitive, contradictory, overwhelming ones, is daring enough, but marrying them to real-life events felt cataclysmic, which almost created a feedback loop. Readers felt the story was so audacious it had to be true. They were invested in the truth of it, to the extent that, during a Q&A after a reading, 'someone asked about Davey being a dancer, why was he?' says July. 'And I went through the whole thing of my process, why I came up with that, and I could just feel the room kind of deflate. They wanted him to be a real dancer.' 'My actual friends,' July says, her voice rising in mock outrage, 'they know that so much of this didn't happen. It definitely didn't happen the way it's written in the book. But even as I was talking to a writer friend, she said, 'I keep forgetting that you didn't just do what you did in the book. You had years of couples therapy and this long conversation with your husband, it's totally different.' And I was, like, 'Are you kidding me?' You have to hold that in your head. How is anyone else going to believe this isn't real, if my friends can't even remember?' What about her ex, though – Mike Mills, also a film-maker, Oscar-nominated in 2017 for his movie 20th Century Women? Did he mind, or was he fine with it? July looks at me sardonically. 'I don't think those are the only two conceivable feelings.' The pair met at Sundance film festival in 2005, both there with their first movies. 'So we met as artists, and we always talked about how there's this bubble that's sacred for each of us, you keep the bubbles separate. You know, you each get your own world, and you have your freedom within that. And so it's not like it's always easy, and for sure, there were parts of this that were hard. There's a part of it that was very personal for him – this is the mother of my child, we'll know each other for ever. And then there's the part that's a fellow artist. I remember him saying to me, 'I think you're at your best when you're closest to the bone as a writer.' So it's not great, it's not safe, but that was helpful to me to hear. I felt like the risk was worth it. The reward for not risking it seemed too modest.' A couple of months in from the publication of All Fours, everyone had a story about a woman who'd read it and blown her life up. But if you took a stroll through Goodreads, which is a kind of all-comers citizen book review site, something else stuck out: the people who one-starred it (about 5% of almost 140,000) didn't just hate it, there were actively angry with it. The rage was fascinating. It was as if they'd been slapped. Many were angry at how graphic it was (there's a famous, sexy scene with a tampon that would probably be a spoiler to describe). Commenters took umbrage. 'It would be great if I could read a book by a well-known female author who wasn't under the impression that descriptions of cutting matted hair from a dog's ass or running her hands under her lover's pee was 'original', 'sharp', or 'illuminating' writing,' wrote one. Many prefaced their scorn with the belief that women's bodies were brilliant territory for a writer – uncharted, tumultuous, mysterious – just not like this. This gave them the ick. More than that, though, they were angry with the narrator, and nowhere was the conflation of fiction and fact more complete; if she was narcissistic, self-involved, 'immature' then so was July. 'Yeah, I need to talk about that with someone,' July says, 'probably not you.' (I wish it could be me, but it sounds like she means a therapist.) Sometimes, it's just that they weren't expecting it – 'They thought it was going to be a beach read.' But more importantly, 'They're very sympathetic to the husband.' Of course, it's that – no question, he is betrayed by the narrator, not just with this brain fever emotional infidelity, but on an even more basic level; it's that he's so nice, so personable, so thoughtful, so empathetic, and yet … he's not enough. 'And I'm thinking, 'I created the husband, too! So he's also me!'' she says, laughing. This is possibly the most radical act of the book: not a woman getting divorced, but a woman leaving a Good Guy. The husband gets annoyed just once: when the narrator posts a photo of herself on Instagram, dancing suggestively. This section, which follows a period where the narrator works out in the gym and strives for a perfect physique, surprised me – it's such a mainstream thing to do. It's not a thousand miles from real life, either, as July also likes to uploads videos of herself shaking her insanely perfect, pretty much unshakeable ass (though fair play, the dances themselves are anything but mainstream). Today, July bristles a bit at the suggestion her character is in thrall to a beauty ideal when admiring her ass. 'No, she's been taking nude selfies, and then she's surprised to see, 'Hold on, it does look a little different down there.' I think that's what I was trying to capture.' Then she elaborates: 'If ever I have something to do with fashion, or frankly, even if I just get quite dressed up and I'm photographed because I enjoy that, I do have conversations with other prominent women writers that are like, 'I make sure that no one sees me having too good a time.' I think, for women, the measurement of what seriousness looks like is still masculine.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In November last year, July launched her Substack. It became a muster point for people who relished talking about the book, but an unusual number had also made a great change in their lives after reading it. What was interesting, when I interviewed some of them, was the sheer range of situations. There were readers who didn't need an LA literary novelist and performance artist to tell them they were allowed their own feelings – readers who were already queer or polyamorous or non-binary, who nevertheless found a new permission to just get out of whatever situation they were in, forgo the security of a relationship for something more authentic and exploratory. There were readers who were from incredibly conservative backgrounds. There were women who didn't leave their relationship, who simply left a job in which they felt no appreciation. There were women who changed the way they had sex. There were women who changed the way they related to their children, changed the time or attention they gave to friendships. We weren't looking at a divorce manual, in other words, but 'permission to be undone'. No wonder some people were angry. That is an incredibly dangerous licence, socially. A lot of things really rely on women who'll hold it together for others, regardless of their own feelings. July says that the scale of readers' responses has felt like more than an unusual wave of appreciation for a previously respected but niche artist and writer. 'I had this movie [Me and You and Everyone We Know], that was the big change for me,' she says. 'That experience was really about me, a new voice. All Fours is really about women. Reading and hearing about other people's stories – the sense of isolation, the shame that I had while I was writing the book, it's all been completely inverted.' This is one of the reasons 'perimenopause novel' irks, as a thumbnail – situating these explosive feelings hormonally is just another way to say these feelings will pass, so don't matter. But July is relaxed about that. 'There have been different phases of shame and fear while I'm writing – there was more shame when I was younger. Then I got to the perimenopause and that was the last thing I wanted to be associated with. All the time I was writing, I was just thinking, 'Why am I doing this? I can't stop myself.'' The menopause conversation is much more developed in the UK than the US, she says, where nobody talks about it. 'You could have a whole relationship with your gynaecologist and really not have it come up. Or you could say, 'I have these symptoms,' and they'd say, 'If you're suicidal, you can take hormones, but otherwise just ride it out.' And that's in LA!' It makes me think of all the other ways in which women in the US are peculiarly under-emancipated – not the recent, terrifying anti-abortion legislation, but the bread-and-butter stuff, such as the lack of significant maternity leave; does that feel connected? 'I think it's very intertwined with the healthcare system. We just don't have reliable healthcare, period. So menopause is a luxury problem.' She notes, wryly, that 'we don't actually have a problem with rich, aspirational women' as protagonists, they just can't be dissatisfied. It's funny: on a Zoom she looks younger than her age, but not artificially so, or massively groomed; but in public, I've always found her stunning appearance incongruous, like, how can this woman feel out of place? July's The First Bad Man is 10 years old now, and even though it is mainly powered by sexual fantasies, they are so extravagantly weird that, when I read it, I didn't even realise it was meant to be erotic. (That was partly context – literary erotic fiction wasn't really a thing, then. You were either a Fifty Shades reader or you read grown-up stuff.) It wasn't until July spoke at a book festival and described how she was masturbating so much while working on the book that her writer-friend said she had to sublimate, the way athletes do, or she was never going to finish it. Which was news to the audience just because, you know, who's ever heard 'I was masturbating … ' at a book festival? Technically, All Fours is a work of erotic fiction, which has a definition: that the sex doesn't just happen, the characters are advanced by it. At the same time, it's not a sex-beach-read, because that's not July's style. 'Sometimes I pick up a book at the top of the bestseller lists, just to understand what's going on,' she says. 'I'm reading a romcom called Funny Story. I was shocked by how graphic it is … I don't think I'm prudish, I was a prostitute [shorthand for promiscuous, not literally a sex worker] at times in my life.' All Fours aims to do something different. 'The joy of it, for me, was writing a thing I hadn't seen written about sex, either because what constituted sex was new, or because nobody had ever described, like, a woman who takes a long time to come; the thoughts of the other person: is this a fool's errand? Will I be able to do this? It was just really funny to me: 'Tell me if you need a vibrator, tell me if I'm just gonna keep going at this. You know, if it's humanly possible.'' Yet this definitely isn't slapstick sex; it's meant, and felt. The narrator and her friend make a rigid distinction between mind-rooted fuckers and body-rooted fuckers – mind-fuckers are imagining a scene as they have sex (in one memorable description between the narrator and her husband, she says it's like she stuck a giant TV to his head); body-fuckers are absolutely engrossed in the sensations of the body, their mind is nowhere – and there's a memorable scene for that, too. What was the reason, creatively, that the narrator and Davey never have sex? 'The point was to build it to this place where you felt like those were the only two options: she's either going to have sex or she's going to go home. I wanted to use all that built-up energy, that obsessive loop, so another way of thinking would present itself. That playing field, while it's completely addictive to read about – and to live, frankly – is ultimately quite small. But it can be transformative, it can push you into the next area of your life. If the end result is that you fuck Davey, you might not get that birth of complexity.' Then she says the most surprisingly romantic thing. 'When someone sees you, in a particular way, and that part of your soul that hasn't really been seen is seen, it won't go back into the box. And that's a big problem, because your life isn't built for it to come out of the box.' We speak before July travels to the UK for the Women's prize. 'Sometimes people will tip you off that you're not gonna win. I've been looking for that email, and haven't had it yet. But the important thing about this book is what it's done to the conversation, for the culture. I don't know if that's the thing literary prizes are for.' ( In the end, she lost out to Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden.) It must feel strange and vulnerable, at this moment, to be an author who stands for – maybe not everything, but a huge amount of things that the US government absolutely cannot tolerate, whether that's female emancipation or sexual and gender fluidity. 'I tend to think the people who are most vulnerable to this are not so visible. What's the deal with my neighbours? I've known them for 20 years, but I don't know who's here legally, why would I know their business? Who's gonna notice if two of the people in that house are gone?' But it does touch her personally, and not just as a neighbour. 'It's really hard to get a grip on,' she says sadly. 'Whether the most extreme takes are actually the most clear-eyed. Whether the people who are moving [abroad] have it right. I'm trying to figure that out right now.' Unlike her narrator, July did make it to New York, last week, where she entertained her friends in her hotel room (which will, if you've read it, remind you a lot of All Fours). This is how she described the experience on her Substack: 'Two of my visiting friends were my age and both of them, in different ways, spoke about looking older, the hardness of that … One friend and I showed each other our thighs in the light to make sure the other one really saw our cellulite. I told her the truth: I had assumed hers was much more extreme because of how she had spoken about it over the years. For years, I had placed her in a different category from myself, cellulite-wise.' And that's July – the political, the personal, the public, the intimate, the things you're not supposed to think about if you want to be taken seriously or thought of as truthful, all with a voice that's entirely relatable yet completely idiosyncratic. All Fours is out now in paperback (Canongate Books). To support the Guardian, order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Women's prize winner Yael van der Wouden: ‘It's heartbreaking to see so much hatred towards queer people'
It has been a dramatic couple of years for 37-year-old Dutch author Yael van der Wouden: her first novel, The Safekeep, a love story that deals with the legacy of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, was the focus of a frenzied bidding war and shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. Last night it won the Women's prize for fiction. 'I wrote this book from a place of hopelessness,' she says when we meet. 'I was looking for a ray of sunshine.' This morning in London the sun is blazing. She could never have expected that her novel would see off shortlisted authors including Miranda July (of whose work she is a big fan) and Elizabeth Strout. Warm and open, the author is shorter than I expected. Coming as she does from a country of tall people, as she jokes: 'I have tall energy.' She has great energy, despite several glasses of champagne last night and only a few hours' sleep. On her shoulder is a tattoo of a hare – an important symbol in the novel – which she had done after completing the book. In her tearful acceptance speech, Van der Wouden told the audience that when she hit puberty: 'all at once, my girlhood became an uncertain fact.' The fact that she is hormonally intersex 'was a huge part of my 20s, and then I got the healthcare that I needed … I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women's prize and that is because of every single trans person who's fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.' It was the first time she has spoken about it publicly. Not to have done so she tells me, 'wouldn't have been me. I had my five minutes on stage and I figured what better moment to share something that I care about? It's heartbreaking to see so much hatred toward trans identities, queer identities.' Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep is a tense psychological thriller and tender love story between two very different women, Isabel and Eva. It is a story of dispossession and self-discovery, national and intimate secrets and shame. 'This is a novel about a woman who is obsessed with a house, and then a stranger comes and upends her life,' the author says. Isabel is gentile, Eva is Jewish. To say much more would be to give away clues in a narrative that unfolds in a series of jagged revelations, like the shards of broken china Isabel cherishes, that come together to make a devastating and beautiful whole. The idea for the novel came to her 'as a parting gift' in a car on the way to one of the funerals of her Dutch grandparents, who died within days of each other in 2021. 'It came from a place of trying to escape grief,' she says. 'I was trying to find distraction in my own head, as I've done since I was a kid.' Born in Israel in 1987 to a Jewish mother of Romanian and Bulgarian heritage and a Dutch father, Van der Wouden, who describes herself as a 'Dutch-Israeli mixed-bag-diaspora child', spent her first 10 years in Ramat Gan, a city just east of Tel Aviv. She is careful not to talk about her childhood through what she calls 'a pink cloud' of nostalgia because of her vehement opposition to the Israel-Gaza war – she would like to see 'a ceasefire with immediate aid'. Both her parents were animators (her father created an Israeli version of Sesame Street) and while she and her two younger sisters were encouraged to engage with all art forms, she was not at all bookish. It wasn't until the family moved to the Netherlands when she was 10 that Van der Wouden discovered books – with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden being a particular favourite. But she also discovered antisemitism, while living with her grandparents in a house in the forest. Though that home is still her 'happy place', going from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to 'being the only Jew in the village' wasn't easy. To her new Dutch classmates she resembled Anne Frank. Now, she has no time for the rhetoric of tolerance. 'I think that's a terrible word, because tolerance is putting up with somebody. I want to be desired. I want to be loved. Rather than writing a story about tolerance, I wanted to write a story about love in the aftermath of war.' With Isabel, she created a character who goes from prejudice and repulsion to desire. There is a lot (an entire chapter) of sex in the novel. She laughs. 'My goal was to imbue the whole book with a sense of tension, and that tension is erotic.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion She deliberately chose the perspective of Isabel rather than Eva, so as not just to tell the victim's story. 'There's also many parts of perpetrator within me, within my history,' she says. Van der Wouden had never read a novel that explored what she calls 'the psyche of quiet complicity'. Through Isabel she wanted to show that 'complicity comes from small and uninteresting acts of dismissal', and it is something of which we are all guilty. 'It's part of the human experience. The question is, how do we deal with knowing that we looked away from something terrible, how do we then move forward?' The emotional power of the novel rests on the way in which Isabel reveals herself to be someone completely different, even to herself. 'What's like me,' Isabel says to her brother. 'There's no such thing. Like me.' This speaks to Van der Wouden's personal experience. 'We don't leave this life in the same bodies were born into, we are always under flux,' she says. 'This is not to say that gender and sexuality is a choice followed by change, but rather that change is an inherent part of life.' On the question of the supreme court ruling on gender rights, she adds: 'To subject that to law feels baffling to me, especially as it is accompanied by legal, verbal and physical violence.' Much of The Safekeep was written during lockdown in Utrecht, where she had an attic apartment overlooking the canal. 'A beautiful golden cage,' she says. She now lives half an hour away in Rotterdam, where she is thrilled to have a garden. She has already completed the first draft of a second novel set in a fishing village in the Netherlands in 1929. Her greatest hope for the novel as it goes on to find a bigger audience, 'if this isn't too saccharine,' she says apologetically, 'is, in fact, hope.'
