In the summer of 2024, I left my marriage and, with it, my house, my hometown, and my job. A year later, I had a new partner, a new apartment, and a new job. A seamless transition—except for the guilt, shame, and self-loathing that followed me from one life to the next.
I soon found myself beset with recommendations to read Miranda July’s novel All Fours. “Recommendations” doesn’t do it justice—one friend actually mailed the book to my house. This was eight months after the novel’s publication, as hype was still building and articles were coming out with titles like “This Book Is My Bible!” My friends promised that the book would perfectly capture what I was going through, that it was quirky and sexy and hilarious, that it would make me feel “seen.”
Reading All Fours did not make me feel seen. It made me feel that I had asked for a hug and received instead a high-five and a blast of confetti.
All Fours has sold more than two hundred thousand copies, and engendered what the New York Times called a “whisper network” among women. The critical consensus hails the novel as a thoughtful examination of one woman’s search for a meaningful life against the strictures of heterosexual marriage. But embedded in this interrogation is the preening assumption that liberation is a matter of willpower, and that women who accept the compromises of marriage (and who fear the fallout of divorce) merely lack imagination.
The end of a marriage is so much more complicated, fraught, and fascinating than this portrait allows. To reduce marriage to a mere patriarchal imposition — and its breakdown to a badge of feminism — is a betrayal of the people who structure their lives around partnership, and who suffer material, social, and psychological consequences in the wake of its dissolution.
All Fours creates a world in which self-empowerment can be pursued with impunity, and insists that its world is the same as our world. This is a failure of empathy and a falsehood. It is not the message I wanted to receive in the aftermath of my own divorce, and it sets a discouraging precedent for conversations around divorce and self-discovery in contemporary culture.
All Fours is narrated by a nameless protagonist, whose biography mimics Miranda July’s in almost every particular: she is married, with a seven-year-old genderless child and a successful multimedia career in the arts. (We never learn exactly which arts or which media, though at the end of All Fours, the protagonist writes a bestselling book and goes on a book tour.)
The story kicks off with a planned road trip from LA to New York, but thirty minutes into the drive, the protagonist pulls over and checks into a local motel instead. For the next three weeks, she pursues an all-consuming affair with a married twenty-something, while lying to her family about her progress on the road. The twenty thousand dollars she had bookmarked for lavish New York hotels instead goes to an elaborate renovation of her motel room, transforming her shabby bolt hole into a sumptuously designed suite.
When the protagonist checks out and returns home, grieving the abrupt end to her love affair, she finds herself zombie-walking through the motions of motherhood and marriage. Her only reprieve is a new arrangement with her husband, wherein she spends one night a week “working” at the renovated motel room, and he spends one night a week at his office. This arrangement quickly progresses to non-monogamy, as the protagonist and her husband both find girlfriends, and non-monogamy then progresses to platonic cohabitation. The marriage survives only on paper: “Divorce, just the word, used to feel serrated like a knife, something to wave around dangerously. Now I associated it with taxes, paperwork, bureaucracy. It might make sense, eventually, but what a headache. Marriage, too.”
The last two chapters of the novel take place four years later. The protagonist’s husband is out on a camping trip with their child and his girlfriend, and the protagonist is dating someone new. The book has a happy ending; the protagonist, upon seeing her ex-lover dance onstage in New York, declares: “I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.”
The protagonist’s marriage experiment, her rejection of convention, her flouting of expectation, are all an unqualified success. She gets along swimmingly with her husband’s new girlfriend. Her child remains quirky, winsome, and totally untroubled by the changing family dynamic. The protagonist’s creative career blossoms (again). Her friends express envy for the innovative solution she has found to marriage. Everybody wins, the protagonist most of all. Nothing of value has been lost.
Many women would face unwelcome consequences if they moved into a motel for three weeks, blew twenty thousand dollars on pointless motel-room renovations, conducted a lengthy extramarital affair, obsessively stalked the subject of that affair, and neglected their existing domestic and professional relationships. But consequence does not factor into the plot of All Fours. Instead, the novel breaks with realism to create a world in which the transition out of marriage comes absolutely free of cost.
When a friend asks the protagonist what will happen if her husband leaves her “for good,” she responds, “But don’t you see?… You can not only want what you want, but have it, too.” That is the lesson of this book, but how wide is the circle of women for whom it’s true? A 2018 analysis on divorce data in the National Library of Medicine found that men suffer greater “transient” strain after divorce — feelings of loneliness, dissatisfaction, an increase in hours of housework — but that women’s strain is “chronic”: loss of income, increased poverty risk, and higher odds of single parenting.
All Fours has no interest in the material cost of divorce. This is a plausible omission, if a little tone-deaf, given that the protagonist’s wealth and class shield her from such considerations. It is, however, a little strange that for all her grappling with the institution of marriage, the protagonist never seems to consider what marriage has afforded her: stability; childcare support from her husband and their nanny; a house priced at “1.8 million”; the ability to work uninterruptedly from nine until five on whatever medium of art; and the freedom to blow a “surprise check” of twenty thousand dollars on a birthday trip. Marriage and divorce may be just a “headache” to July’s protagonist, but to many women they represent the difference between security and sudden precarity.
An even stranger omission is the absence of emotional consequence. The protagonist’s marriage, like most marriages, began in earnest, with two people who hoped to spend their lives together. And yet the emotional upheaval of the novel derives almost exclusively from the highs and lows of the protagonist’s love affairs. The loss of intimacy with her husband is felt only glancingly, and resolved before the novel’s end. Guilt makes a rare and forgettable appearance: after an apparently marriage-ending fight with her husband, the protagonist wonders, “Why would I risk my longtime companion, my one true home, for an unnameable energy?” There’s a finger on the scales here; most women in the throes of guilt could come up with a more damning adjective than “unnameable.”
When the protagonist’s husband announces that he’s dating someone new, the husband and wife look at each other “in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings — but not falling.” The transition is phrased in miraculous terms — this isn’t simply a victory, it’s a miracle. And yet, what has actually taken place — adultery, months of lies, years of avoidance, and the long decay of any chemistry or connection between husband and wife — is a likelier recipe for alienation than wholesome reunion.
It’s not merely that the protagonist insists on presenting the new arrangement as a victory. The story itself supports and ratifies this interpretation. No layer of dramatic irony undermines the image of the couple miraculously floating, nor the protagonist’s subsequent epiphany: “We’d done it. We’d broken through.” The scenes that follow confirm the protagonist’s claims: she and her husband cooperate as co-parents, support each other’s dating lives, and even start to enjoy each other’s company again.
If unshackling oneself from the patriarchy were this easy, we might expect more women to do it. The protagonist herself wonders why her friends are reluctant to follow suit: “It was like we had all agreed to sneak into a haunted house together but once inside, giggling and full of nerves, I looked back and discovered I was alone; everyone else had chickened out.” She considers other reasons besides cowardice that her friends might not take her lead: perhaps they’re “more sensible,” or “well attached,” or curious but not curious enough to risk the status quo of their own marriages.
The decision to remain in a traditional marriage is neatly dismissed as a failure, the weak choice of a woman deficient in bravery, curiosity, and spontaneity. July barely nods at the idea that the decision to stay might be an act of love, or of self-preservation.
If I had read All Fours as a married woman contemplating separation — if I had taken the trajectory of this novel as my inspiration and incentive to break free — I would have been blindsided by the walloping emotional, financial, and existential loss that awaited me on the other side of divorce. And reading this novel as a divorcée, I found its offer of feminine solidarity to be in bad faith, conditional on enormous privilege, and hostile to nuance.
There can be no honest account of the end of marriage without a nod to where it began. The distance between the two states — between making vows and breaking them — is the distance between hope and reality, intention and outcome, theory and practice. That distance is what makes divorce a fascinating subject: how could a loving couple get from there to here?
The protagonist of All Fours not only abdicates responsibility for the current state of her marriage — she denies that there was ever any other state. After the protagonist and her husband deconstruct their marriage, she editorializes: “The exhausting formality that had been there since day two had simply lifted like a depression, a cloud of steam.” That little timeline sleight of hand, “since day two,” is doing a lot of work here. Nothing broke because there was nothing to break. Whatever prior understanding or goodwill existed between these two characters has long since evaporated — on days two through ten thousand, the marriage has been an ongoing slog.
How simple! How wishful. Of course it’s easier to believe, in the painful aftermath of divorce, that the marriage was little more than a collection of old habits anyway.
This narrative of divorce serves only the person telling it. Most of us, with the distance of time and hard-won perspective, can acknowledge the full history of a marriage, the good included with the bad. But All Fours lacks such wisdom; it is raw and compromised by its own agenda, incapable of complexity. The protagonist’s husband is a nonentity, so devoid of character that it is impossible to sympathize with or even know him. The protagonist is a brilliant artist, a terrific mother, skinny, attractive, and beloved by her cadre of quirky friends. The needs of the author warp the needs of the story; the promised reckoning with marriage — what every novel of this genre implicitly contains — is merely an elaborate and high-octane rationalization.
When July’s protagonist first decides to drop anchor in a nearby motel rather than continue with her road trip, she experiences a “ripple of self-doubt”: “What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby?” — and then immediately douses it — “But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness.” I had high hopes that the novel would try to answer that question—what kind of monster?—because I have asked such questions about myself. But in this passage and elsewhere, All Fours dodges self-scrutiny via truisms about the patriarchy.
Resisting the patriarchy is not a substitute for honest reflection — ideally, the two go hand in hand. To suggest that thinking too hard about one’s own behavior is a concession to patriarchal forces is self-serving at best.
Miranda July offers an efficient heuristic to justify the protagonist’s choices: “Start the revolution here, now… Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped?” Who wants to raise their hand in defense of the electric toothbrush? The reader is impelled to join the movement, complications and anxieties and heartbreaks and financial strains be damned. What should feel like a conversation between author and reader reads like the rallying cry of a leader rounding up followers.
All Fours is narcissistic, reckless, and out of touch with the realities of marriage and divorce. It is also a phenomenal success.
This reception is troubling, but not entirely surprising. So few novels center perimenopause and the female midlife crisis that All Fours distinguishes itself just by existing. It speaks to a population that is used to being belittled and ignored. It elevates incredibly widespread concerns about aging and the disappointments of marriage. It waves the flag of feminism at every opportunity, and voices an evergreen exasperation with men. On top of these ideological flourishes, the novel offers a witty, irreverent, and unabashed narrator whose escapades are undeniably fun to read about.
But the overwhelming reason that All Fours has struck such a lucrative nerve is a lucky coincidence: the lies that Miranda July tells herself through the vehicle of this novel just so happen to be lies that we all want to believe.
The novel insists that we are not responsible for others; that our growth and self-discovery always confer a net good on the people we love; that truth is flexible; that commitment is only worthwhile if it is easy; that we are entitled to the lives we want; that the ends of personal happiness justify all possible means; and that a good life is one without compromise.
This is a vision of a world without hard tradeoffs—without guilt, accountability, and resignation. To women in flawed marriages who perform unrecognized labor to keep their households running, this fantasy must seem like a lifeline.
But this is not the world we live in. Unlike the protagonist of All Fours, who lives in a universe structured in such a way that she can never be at fault, real women face all the endemic pressures and pitfalls of an unjust, imperfect, human society. Declaring gleeful indifference to the patriarchy only goes so far when you live in one. And even if, by some miracle, we did dismantle the patriarchy, the women in such a universe who structured their lives according to July’s model would find that unchecked self-indulgence, lies, and manipulation lead to loneliness, not to love and acclaim.
When I was at my lowest, in the immediate aftermath of my divorce, convinced that I was indeed some kind of monster, the last thing I wanted was to be told that I was in fact a blameless beacon of feminism. I wanted someone to look squarely at me and my pain and my mistakes and say: Don’t worry, I’m a monster too—but that’s not all I am, it’s not all you are, and there is a future beyond this mess where you’ll start to feel like a person again.