Miranda July lets a female first person narrator tell the story of her mid-life crisis (I hesitate to use this cliché label because, though the crisis happens in mid-life, but there is more to it). She married her older husband, Harriss, when she was thirty. She moved into his house using its garage as her workspace (she is a semi-famous artist). Now, at forty-five and with a five-year-old son (who she refers to as “they”), their family life seems to be settled. It is this what increasingly becomes a problem for the narrator. Sex with Harriss was fixed at once a week, initiated by her wearing high heels and nothing much else upon entering his bedroom. Much later in the novel, a fried tells her about her sex during menopause. Since there was no longer any hormonal drive, “it all becomes mental. I have to create a narrative that makes it possible, otherwise it starts feeling like rape.” On which the narrator sonders, “This was new to her? I’d always had to get out ahead of sex, dig an inclined trough so it could flow easily downhill. Being walloped, pounded by lust was very recent. Very” (p. 175). Earlier, she already had the feeling that her marriage was not commensurate with her personality. “One day when we were both ready I would reveal my whole self to Harriss” (p. 40). But could she hide her growing feelings of alienation?

            She pushes things forward when she is supposed to drive from Los Angeles to New York. Intuitively, she stops at a motel (Excelsior) in Monrovia, just about a twenty-minute drive from her home. She redesigns one of the motel rooms with the 20,000 US Dollars that she had received for a small job and starts a three-week ecstatic conversational and sexual relationship with a young man, Davey. She dies to have him fuck her, but he cannot be unfaithful to his wife, Claire, who had carried out the redecoration of the room. All the while, she pretends to be on her way to New York. This experience brings to light her real self that she had planned to reveal to Harriss at a later point.

            After her return home, unsurprisingly, she is hit, not by regret, but by the feeling of having lost a vital part of what it meant to be her. “Before even opening my eyes, it was obvious that I had experienced too much joy in the Excelsior. Regular life—my actual life—was completely gray, a colorless, never-ending expanse. Just get through this one, first day. But this was too long. An hour was too long” (p. 141f; original italics). On page 150, we read, “I glanced at the sex high heels before bed, but there was no hurry now, there were still four days to initiate before the week  was up.” Soon enough, she “owed him several weeks’ worth of sex … my mood was impacting the household, its smooth runnings” (p. 158). She realized that she had “lost my bond to my actual family and formed an alliance with someone who might as well be fictional” (p. 152).

            There seemed to be no way out. A medical examination revealed that she was in perimenopause. This only increased her sense of urgency because menopause would mean the loss of her libido, though some of her friends advised her that true bodily autonomy only came with this physical change. Anyway, she had spent a day per week in her room at the Excelsior for some time, and the moment of truth with Harriss approached. On page 256, she is forced to admit that she had sex with a woman. Harriss asks her, “‘Is it going to happen again?’ No, no, it won’t happen again; I’m so sorry, can you ever forgive me? ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘It’s probably going to happen again’” (original italics). She has one day per week in Monrovia, Harriss has one day per week in his office. The narrator has a failed sexual relationship with a woman, Harriss has a “girlfriend” the age of his wife. When he tells her, she asks, “‘You guys used that word? Girlfriend?’ I was aghast. ‘Yeah; it’s quick, I know. But I’m not like you—I have no interest in exploring at this age’” (p. 261; original italics).

            Near the end of the novel, the narrator stays in a different room of the motel. When she wakes up, she finds herself mentally in the past. “Very gently, I took my laptop out of my bag and climbed back into the thin bed. I wrote it as I saw it, alive before my eyes” (p. 310). Thus, the author introduces a self-referential loop to have the narrator whom she had invented start writing the story told in this novel. Four years later, at forty-nine, while Harriss and his “girlfriend” are gone camping with Sam, she is on an airplane travelling to New York to promote her book.

MHN

Nonthaburi, Thailand

20 April 2025