All Fours

All Fours (2024) is Miranda July's audacious, funny, and frank second novel — a midlife odyssey that barely leaves the neighborhood.

A semi-famous forty-five-year-old artist sets out to drive from Los Angeles to New York, a rare solo trip away from her husband and child. But twenty minutes from home she pulls off the highway, checks into a nondescript motel, and never leaves — spending the money and days she'd budgeted for the cross-country journey on an elaborate reinvention of a single room and an intense, mostly unconsummated fixation on a younger man who works nearby. What begins as a detour becomes a full reckoning with desire, marriage, art, aging, and the hormonal upheavals of perimenopause.

Wry, explicit, and disarmingly honest, the novel turns a stalled road trip into a radical inventory of a woman's inner life. A singular, polarizing read about wanting more from the second half.