An Erotic Novel Spotlights Perimenopause

The BBC recently ran an article titled, “Some loved it and some tore it apart: How the erotic novel All Fours captured the zeitgeist—and divided readers”. The headline provided me the immediate impetus to pick up a novel that one has largely heard about through many a girl friend.

Published in May 2024 Miranda July’s All Fours is once again in the public conversation. For a novel that is middle age crisis meets erotica it has a host of accolades to its name. Thanks to All Fours, July was named by Time in ‘The 100 Most Influential Creators of 2025.’ The American film director, screenwriter, actress and author’s novel was celebrated because even if it is “not about overthrowing monarchies…it is about dismantling something quieter, yet no less insidious: the expectation that women, as they age, should disappear,” Time cooed, “July doesn’t just tap into the zeitgeist; she helps shape it.”

The novel essentially takes the idea of a road trip and subverts it by making it a trip of inner discovery. A 45-year-old unnamed, semi-famous artist married to a music producer Harris and mother to a non-gendered child, Sam, declares that she will embark on a solo road trip from New York to Los Angeles. (We are never quite sure what kind of art she makes but we do learn, “I worked in so many mediums that I was able to debut many times; for about fifteen years I just kept emerging, like a bud opening over and over again. But that was a long time ago now.”) She decides to splurge as a whiskey commercial has paid her $20,000 for the use of one of her more prurient lines on a hand job for a commercial. During the trip she hopes to change from a “mind-rooted f****r” to a “body-rooted f****r”. (Depending on a reader’s own proclivities such phrases can either be revelatory or eye rolling.)

She doesn’t get too far as 30 minutes away from home and in the idle pursuit of a dashing Davey, who works at Hertz, she checks herself into a motel. She then decides to use all of the money redoing one room of the hotel, with the assistance of Davey’s wife. The sloppy motel room is soon converted into a Parisian boudoir, where she has both sex and fantasies of sex. When she sees the redone room she exclaims, “As I walked around the suite I began to weep. The wallpaper had pink roses and the carpet and curtains had pink roses and the bed was a beautiful bosom you’d never want to leave.” Such descriptions might leave a reader in tears too.

While Davey spurs the immediate change of her plans and heart, the emergency siren drumming in her ears is that of perimenopause (the time around menopause when a woman’s body begins to change) and all its ensuing recalibrations. While it is true that perimenopause hasn’t been laboured over in literature, July’s alarmist attitude towards it is hardly helpful. Many an Indian reader might remember Pooja Bhatt (Rani)’s hot flashes from the recent Netflix show Bombay Begums, which was much truer to life. In All Fours perimenopause and menopause are not just natural occurrences of the body (and mind) rather they are an excuse to go not weird… but outlandish.

I am all for weird characters and authors who specialise in them (think Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman or Ottessa Moshfegh’s many memorable characters). But I found All Fours a slog and the unnamed narrator a bore. She is constantly turning to her artist friend Jordi with every detail of every sexual peccadillo, but we learn nothing about the friend. July often takes out the romance of sex and makes it animal like, which is all fine. But the problem is that the main character is so utterly self-absorbed. So, whether she is in the throes of passion or self-pity, the reader can hardly be bothered. The sex here is so fixated on bodily excretions from blood to urine that after a point it just seems like provocation for the sake of provocation. When I read parts about Davey’s relationship with his mother, his relationship with his mother’s friend all I could write in the margins was ‘baffling’.

While the sexuality can feel laboured to some readers (like this one) the motherhood aspect of All Fours is more tender. The narrator battles with the guilt of “making a show of going away but then hiding out nearby” from her child. Her child’s birth was traumatic as they (no gendered pronoun is used throughout the novel for the child) were born premature and spent the first few months tied to tubes and machines in the intensive care unit. It was a time when her husband and she soldiered together, a time she still can’t surmount. It is with her child that her battle between real and imaginary reaches its most fevered pitch. Fantasies are fine for an individual, but a mother’s responsibilities keep her tethered to this life.

The narrator’s inner awakening will make her reconfigure the parameters of her own marriage. She will discover new bodies and new relationships, and her own self. Her big discovery seems to be, “Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity was my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was. Was this the skeleton in civilization’s closet?”

All Fours often makes adulthood sound like adolescence—a stage where everything must be upended, where all norms must be subverted, where promiscuity is seen as a battle cry. Maybe that is the zeitgeist of our time—the inability and unwillingness to ever grow up.

All FourseroticagenderMiranda JulymotherhoodnovelperimenopausesexualitywomenZeitgeist