LIVE! #73
5 October 2025
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Miranda July
- Miranda July's parents are both writers the founders of North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles.
- Raised in Berkeley, California, she first began staging plays at a local punk rock club.
- July is a film director, screenwriter, actress and author. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations and live performance art.
- She has authored a book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007); a collection of nonfiction short stories, It Chooses You (2011); and the novels The First Bad Man (2015) and All Fours (2024).
- Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker.
- July lives in Los Angeles.
"Sex is already a fiction. It's art. You're already
doing something to get turned on or to turn someone on. Or to feel desirable. What I was trying to
do was be more honest, but how do you be more honest with something that is kind of inherently
made up—fictional?”
—Miranda July
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Voice
- • Character development
- • Horizontal structure
- • Pacing
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing All Fours
- Sometime after completing her first novel in 2015, July created a folder on her laptop entitled "Novel 2".
- Into it went all of her ideas for her next novel while she worked on film and art projects.
- In 2019 July began work on what would become All Fours.
- July created a book proposal for her editor, but upon looking back at it has admitted that "all the ideas were there, but not the story."
- Inspired by a NYT article, "Women have been misled about menopause," July researched her book by interviewing gynecologists, naturopaths, older women about menopause and perimenopause. July has said that it's "hard to get the info out." She was struck by the diversity of womens' body changes.
- Upon remarks that the unnamed narrator resembles July, she has replied that "I know it's fiction, but how do I prove that? . . . I took that me-like character and then . . . she can do anything she wants. I hope to also make it froth because I'm protecting my life & my privacy."
- To work on the novel she made a deal with her partner to stay in her studio every Wednesday, to have a block of time away from her parenting responsibilities.
- While writing, July eschews coffee and the Internet.
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Humorous Fiction, Family Life Fiction, Literary Fiction, Humorous Fiction & Satire
- Genre: Realistic Present-Day Long-Form Archplot
- Print Pages: 336; Word count: 103,272
Reading Grade: 7th; Avg. wds/sent.: 10.82
Lexical Density: 44.47; Flesch Reading Ease: 78.86 - POV: Unnamed Narrator; Person: 3rd; Tense: Past
- Publish date: May 14, 2024
- Publisher: Riverhead Books
- Audio book length: (10 hours, 13 mins)
- Narrator: Miranda July
- Recognition: NYT: one of the top 10 books of 2024; A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Vogue,
Financial Times, Oprah Daily, Vulture, Vox, Time, NPR, Washington Post
National Book Award finalist
January 2026
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