All Fours

Miranda July is a writer, visual artist, filmmaker, director, and actress. Her expansive body of multimedia works has been heavily influenced by her participation in riot grrrl, an underground feminist punk movement that began in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. Throughout her rich creative career, July has directed, written, and/or starred in productions including Joanie4Jackie, Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future, Kajillionaire, The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, and several other indie and short films. She also has experience in performance art, music, and spoken word. Her musical endeavors include projects like the 1996 EP Margie Ruskie Stops Time and the 1997 and 1998 LPs, 10 Million Hours A Mile and The Binet-Simon Test. All of these projects, including her written publications, feature feminist themes and conflicts surrounding relationships and intimacy.

Born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, July grew up with her parents Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger, both writers. They encouraged her to pursue writing and the arts from a young age. She later studied film at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but dropped out less than two years into her program to move to Portland, Oregon. Her experiences in Portland introduced her to the riot grrrl movement and inspired her early film projects. Although she began her artistic career in filmmaking, July claimed in a 2016 interview to be very unconfident in her filmmaking due to the industry’s heavy emphasis on rigid hierarchies in production (“Dialogue: ‘Being Miranda July.’” YouTube, uploaded by Idaho Public Television).

July has continued to work on theatrical and cinematic productions as she simultaneously develops her writing career. She has published two short-story collections and two novels. These titles include the 2007 Scribner fiction collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, the 2011 McSweeny’s nonfiction collection It Chooses You, her 2015 Scribner debut novel The First Bad Man, and her 2024 Penguin Random House sophomore novel All Fours. As in her films, July’s writing explores themes regarding intimacy, feminism, sexuality, and relationships. July has stated that what inspires her to pursue these recurring topics and thematic examinations is that she’s “desperate to bring people together” (“Dialogue”). Like July’s earlier writing, All Fours continues to explore these topics, this time from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged narrator, whose background, circumstances, and character traits starkly resemble July’s. In her interview about the novel on the Daily Show with Desi Lydic, July skirted questions about the similarities between herself and the All Fours narrator but suggested that readers can intuit whether the narrator’s experiences are inspired by true events (“Miranda July – All Fours | The Daily Show.” YouTube, uploaded by The Daily Show). This conversation aligns with July’s examinations of the intersection between art and life in All Fours. Indeed, July’s characters are often artists themselves and frequently use their experiences to inspire their creative projects.

July’s rich artistic background has earned her a renowned reputation in the film and literary worlds. Her work is known for its boldness, experimentation, and fearlessness. In her films, music, books, and visual art, July pushes the boundaries of convention and creates language for inarticulable facets of the human and female experience.