“Seems to me we’re on all fours/Crawling on our knees someone help us please.”
Lily Allen, “Everything’s Just Wonderful,” 2006

“What, I’m going to say I like it? No, I don’t. Any woman who is honest will say it’s not as much fun.”
-Cher on getting older

Usually, when it comes to Miranda July’s work (whether literature or film), there is a tendency for her to disappoint you about halfway through it (or, at the bare minimum, by muddling the third act). Whether that means not fulfilling the potential of a premise or simply letting the plot jump the shark, this is typically her modus operandi. Until the arrival of All Fours. And perhaps it doesn’t disappoint because it addresses a subject that so few women “of a certain age” are willing to talk about: the fear of no longer being sexually desirable. It’s not “appropriate” or “ladylike” to discuss such things. Worse still, it puts an unwanted additional spotlight on how old a woman is in the first place. And yet, when a woman doesn’t talk about things specific to “being old,” she’s still castigated regardless. Take, for example, Madonna being called out for never talking about menopause. Because, yes, to talk about it would, for her, admit to being that unwanted thing July dissects throughout All Fours: sexually undesirable.

In 2021, Jenny Eclair put Madonna on blast for this by saying, “I have never heard Madonna say anything about being menopausal. She has never actually come out and said, ‘Jesus, some days are really hard girls!’ It’s always about being sexy at sixty, and that’s fantastic. She works very hard at it, but just now and again, it’d be nice to have a nod from some very big names…” Two years earlier, Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote a profile about Madonna turning sixty (which she did in 2018) for The New York Times Magazine. In it, she “lamented,” “I realized I couldn’t ask her about anything as personal as menopause, but I had to broach the topic of aging: if I had followed her this long, where were we going next?” But like Cher as Rachel Flax in Mermaids telling Lou Landsky (Bob Hoskins) that the key to avoiding aging is simply to “keep moving” (this meant more figuratively than referring to, say, literal exercise), it’s not about “next” so much as constantly “fluttering about.” And not necessarily with any one direction in mind.

Elsewhere in that same article, Grigoriadis added, “When we talked about aging, I was surprised when she turned the issue back on me. ‘I think you think about growing old too much,’ she said later. ‘I think you think about age too much. I think you should just stop thinking about it.’ She went on: ‘Stop thinking, just live your life and don’t be influenced by society trying to make you feel some type of way about your age or what it is you’re supposed to be doing.’ I told her that’s hard to do, and she agreed. ‘We are a marginalized group, women. And just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you stop fighting against it or defying it or refusing to be pigeonholed or put in a box or labeled or told you can and can’t do things.’ I felt a little foolish for thinking that she would want to talk to me about my own concern about aging, like an older sister.” Grigoriadis didn’t seem to get the message that the first rule of “being old” as a woman is: do not talk about “being old.” That term put in quotes because, in the current landscape, with vanity-driven Gen Z dictating taste, it can be argued that anyone over twenty-five is “old.” And when you’re a woman who still wants not only to be desired, but to be desired by people younger than you, mentioning age is the ultimate form of “turning on the light” (so to speak)—something Blanche DuBois rightly hated.

But the narrator of July’s All Fours is all about turning the light on full blast in terms of candidly exploring a woman’s initial revelations regarding being “old.” Those sneaking suspicions that start to build up the less you can attract a man as easily—something that women are indoctrinated to believe is the key source of their power. Luckily for the narrator, she’s queer, but just so happens to be married to a man (a Mike Mills-esque character) with whom she has a child named Sam. Of the differences between dating men versus women, the narrator notes, “The women I had dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us.” However, realizing she’s going to be “dead” soon (to straight men anyway), wanting an older man seems silly. Much better to go for someone younger.

As for when the dreaded “o” word might be applied to a woman, it can start as soon as thirty (because society). In the narrator’s case, she’s forty-five (to July’s fifty). Described in the book’s summary as a “semi-famous artist” (likely how the hyper-niche July sees herself), she’s come into a fresh wad of cash (twenty thousand dollars for writing one really basic ad campaign slogan) and decides to use it on a lavish trip to New York. But rather than flying, she opts to drive from L.A. to New York (mostly to prove to her husband that she’s a “Driver” in life and not a “Parker,” as he accuses her of being). Or at least, that was the plan before she stopped off in Monrovia, a stone’s throw from “real” L.A. It’s an accident, really. The unintended consequence of which is encountering a younger man (boy, more accurately) named Davey. A townie that the narrator instantly finds herself drawn to. At first, it might be because of his looks alone, but soon, it becomes clear that there is something deeper than that about the attraction.

Alas, the narrator’s confidence level vis-à-vis her looks (ergo, ability to allure a man, let alone a young man) is at something of a nadir. This compounded by the fact that, at the start of the novel, she sums up a scene at a party where: “There was a small group of people dancing in the living room. I moved discreetly at first, getting my bearings, then the beat took hold and I let my vision blur. I fucked the air. All my limbs were in motion, making shaped that felt brand-new. My skirt was tight, my top was sheer, my heels were high. The people around me were nodding and smiling; I couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed for me or actually impressed. The host’s father looked me up and down and winked—he was in his eighties. Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days?”

It’s a line that’s brutally honest and endlessly resonant. For, even as disgusted as women are with men’s gross, constantly overt, wolf-like sexual appetites, it still appeals to their baser sense of vanity. A vanity that, again, can’t be helped when considering that women are indoctrinated from an early age to understand that the majority of their worth (thus, clout) is wrapped up in how they look. Far more than it is for men, who aren’t constantly marketed to with various beauty products and other assorted means for “cosmetic improvement.” And this is done to women even when they’re still young (hence, a greater increase in the number of twenty-somethings shelling out for plastic surgery and other related “non-invasive” procedures). Not only has this caused a collective sense of body dysmorphia, but also an even more irrational fear of aging, and the idea that it can be stopped. Which, well, it sort of can—if you have enough money (not just for the necessary creams and surgeries, but also to consistently live what’s called a “healthy lifestyle”). But most people don’t. Even “semi-famous artists.” Worse still, being the sort of “L.A.-based artist” that the narrator is only makes her all the more keenly aware of appearances—more specifically, the fading of them.

As the book goes on, it dawns on the narrator, “I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.” In short, although she’s “sort of” made it, by and large, she still considers herself and what she’s accomplished in life to be mediocre. And that there’s little time left to make it something more extraordinary. That’s where Davey comes in. To her, he seems like her “last best chance”—at least to fuck a hot younger guy who secretly knows exactly who she is. In other words, he’s a fan of her work. But will later insist that has no bearing on why he’s in love with her. As for the narrator, it’s also plenty about lust as she describes, “…for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art… And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself.” A body like Davey’s to fuck, that is. (Spoiler: the two never actually “consummate” the attraction.)

While her proverbial “midlife crisis” starts to make her behave more and more irrationally, including spending the bulk of her tens of thousands of dollars on remodeling the skeevy room she’s staying at in Monrovia (in a motel called the Excelsior)—and asking Davey’s “interior designer” girlfriend to do it without ever mentioning it to him—she can’t help but think of the history of suicide among the women in her family (her grandmother and aunt). Suicide committed after they were no longer young. Referencing her Grandma Esther and Aunt Ruthie, the narrator wonders, “How crazy and vain did you have to be to kill yourself when you found out that your main thrill [i.e., attracting men], the thing that really got you going, was gone forever? Maybe not so crazy. If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising.” Especially when the person in question is a woman. The narrator continues, “The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.” But at least when you’re “falling” as a man, you can still lure the opposite sex (or even the same one) if you’ve got a “silver fox” thing going on and/or are rich enough to provide the proverbial bait to get someone on the hook.

This is something that keeps hitting the narrator as she grapples with the notion of never being able to fuck whoever she wants again due to her sudden “age limitation.” Reflecting back to that moment at the very beginning of the novel, when the elderly dad winked at her, the narrator describes, “I paced around the new carpet, remembering when my friend’s eighty-year-old dad winked at me while I was dancing. This wasn’t a funny anomaly; this was the order of the day. In the future I might be grateful when this happened, even if the man was ninety, one hundred, one hundred twenty. A man of any age. Trans men, women and less gendered people were another story (always), but if my hetero tale mattered (and suddenly it seemed like it did) then this was a very abrupt conclusion. I had not seen this coming and so I had not lived my life accordingly. I had not gone out and done all the straight things I wanted to do while I still could. I had sat on my nest like a complacent hen, certain that when I felt like strutting about again everything would be exactly as it was before.”

Something about this revelation smacks of Pierre de Ronsard’s taunting poem, “Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille.” Mind you, a poem that was written to the sixteen-year-old cousin who rejected his advances. Still, it speaks to how men (especially, “jilted” men) know that they’ll always have the last laugh as the script flips in favor of older men instead of older women. So it is that Ronsard cruelly wrote, “When you are very old, at evening, by the fire, spinning wool by candlelight and winding it in skeins, you will say in wonderment as you recite my lines: ‘Ronsard admired me in the days when I was fair.’” In the last verse, he digs the knife further with, “…you’ll be an old woman, nodding towards life’s close, regretting my love, and regretting your disdain. Heed me, and live for now: this time won’t come again. Come, pluck now—today —life’s so quickly-fading rose.” Well alright then.

Of course, men are well-known for commenting frequently on a woman’s age and calling her out as “day-old bread” (a term that will come up again below). Like July, Lily Allen might be among the few other “mainstream women” to have acknowledged, in an ultra-blunt manner, the way that women “lose their stock” once they leave their twenties. Oh sure, Anna Karina also said, “A woman should never be over twenty-five,” but that was just her being Jean-Luc Godard’s mouthpiece in a movie. Allen, on the other hand, sang straight from her own heart on 2009’s “22,” “When she was twenty-two the future looked bright/But she’s nearly thirty now and she’s out every night/I see that look in her face she’s got that look in her eye/She’s thinking how did I get here and wondering why/It’s sad but it’s true how society says/Her life is already over/There’s nothing to do and there’s nothing to say.” But July has plenty to say, not just about “losing your power” as a woman once you’re “officially old,” but how, in truth, it sets up an entirely new act in one’s life, free of the burden of being influenced by men and how they perceive you, looks-wise. One of the women that the narrator surveys about menopause in a mass text sums it up best when she says, “As someone treated a certain way their entire adult life because they were voluptuous and pretty, it’s become a joy to be unseen. But it was a bit of a journey, letting go, and boy how I wish I could tell other women struggling with the fade of their bloom how great life is once you let go of the flower.”

Naturally, not every woman is going to come to this conclusion. Take, for example Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) in the season three episode “The Big Time.” In this storyline, she mistakenly believes she’s going into menopause because she hasn’t gotten her period for thirty-five days. To Samantha, the very idea of it signals her into panic mode, billing herself as “day-old bread,” specifically telling her trio of menstruating friends, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis), “I’m day-old bread. My time is up. Enjoy your flows.”

This blow to her ego comes fresh after being sent a pre-menopausal-themed catalogue in the mail called New Transitions. Samantha seethes, “Why don’t they call it what it is? J. Crew for women who are drying up.” The idea of being “sans rag” for the rest of her life is not only abhorrent to Samantha, but it makes her believe she should just settle for any gross guy who still hits on her. Namely, Len Schneider (Robert LuPone), a white-haired sleazoid with a chode ponytail that lives in Samantha’s new building. When the two first meet, he tries to get her to come up to his apartment later that night. Carrie narrates Samantha’s viewpoint on such an invitation: “When did it become acceptable for over-the-hill losers to ask out hot women like her?” The answer is, to men of all ages, it’s always acceptable. Later, Samantha decides to take Len up on his offer for a date, assuming she might as well give in to his advances because “day-old bread needed to stick together.” Fortunately for Samantha’s ego, her period does end up coming—but it seems to take Len coming as well (while she’s in corpse pose) in order to bring it back.

The narrator of All Fours doesn’t necessarily totally embrace her age and what it means for her dick quotient by the end of the book, but she’s at least found enough “zen”—enough understanding—about the nature of her future. Leading her to say, in a manner rife with metaphor, “There was plenty of time. I decided to walk. The sun was just beginning to set. Golden light everywhere.”