Book Review: All Fours. By Miranda July. New York:  Riverhead, 2024,  400 pp., $29.00 hardcover.

All Fours, the best-selling semiautobiographical novel by Miranda July, is presented as the story of an unnamed narrator-protagonist. She is a 45-year-old woman who considers herself to be “pre”-perimenopausal, a condition characterized by anxiety and the expectation of a drastic free fall in estrogen levels. She contemplates her future with dismay, calculating that at her present age of 45, she is 20 years past her peak of 25 and about to confront the next 20 years to age 65. The approaching years loom ominously, as she believes she is facing a joyless postsexual life. This is a premise that may strike some as groundless, even absurd, but to others is objectively factual. Either way, the narrator's reflections are a contemporary meditation on one woman's anticipation of aging—idiosyncratic, yet recognizable to many readers and unsettling for those tempted to replicate her experiences (Williams, 2024).

At first less preoccupied by her mortality than by the losses to be endured along the way, she is nevertheless aware that her husband's grandmother and aunt both killed themselves at about her present age. In these two suicides, she sees evidence of the desperation to which some women in this phase of life are prone. Now, having determined that 45 is the last age at which she can plausibly attract a 30-year-old man, she readies herself, consciously or not, to do exactly that.

The narrator lives in Los Angeles, geographically and culturally, with a husband she loves in a distracted way. The couple have been brought together by their creative interests; he is a record producer and she, like

the author in real life, a noted multimedia personality. Their closest affinity is based on the fraught period they shared when their now 7-year-old child, Sam, was born “paper-white” from the syndrome of fetal-maternal hemorrhage. For r