Week 10: All Fours
AUG. 14, 2024 • CAMP TOB WEEK 10
All Fours
second half discussion
This week at Camp ToB, we’re discussing the second half of Miranda July’s All Fours, and once again Activity Leader Charity is here with discussion questions to get everyone started—find those below!
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A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
This has been excerpted from the publisher’s summary and edited for length.
1.
Back in part one, the narrator mentions attachment: “I was like those poorly attached kids who would sit in any mom’s lap at the potluck.” (p. 119) In part two after she’s returned from her time away, we get more insights into her relationship with her parents. Of her father, she says (p. 152):
It was really a shame that I had to keep such a strict boundary with my father. He would never know how successful his grooming had been! How often I still saw the world through his eyes. Which in my youth had ensured a certain intimacy (with him) but now seemed to stand in the way of intimacy a lot of the time.
Now that we’ve learned more about her relationship with her parents—her father’s mental illness, her mother’s desertion and distance—how do you think this has influenced her relationship with Sam and Harris? Is her recognition of the patterns in her relationship with her father helpful or is she using it as an excuse for staying distant from the people she says she loves?
She talks in part two about the challenge of reintegrating into her household after her time away:
And then it was the dead of night again and I understood how truly forsaken I was, having lost my bond to my actual family and formed an alliance with someone who might as well be fictional.
She reflects that “[e]very day Sam and Harris extended their hands and said, Come in from the cold. But I could not come in.” What is preventing her from connecting with Harris and Sam? In what way is her feeling of disconnection from Harris and Sam different after she gets back compared to the feeling of disconnection that led her to stay away and seek out Davey in the first place? She seems to be having lots of insights about herself, but is she being honest with herself?
2.
Menopause is a major theme throughout the novel, hinted at in part one then really delved into in the second section of this book.
First the narrator uses it as an excuse to Harris for how she’s acting after she gets back, then after her gynecologist visit, she realizes it might not actually be just an excuse: “I had brought this on myself by using menopause as my alibi.” (p. 169) After this appointment, she decides to record the dance for Davey and to exercise obsessively to get the figure that she wants to have for the video and to stave off the changes that she sees on the horizon.
While she’s undoubtedly at the right age for perimenopause, and she has the hormone panel to back it up, how much does this hormonal shift explain or justify her actions, and how much is the narrator using it as an excuse for keeping her distance from her family? In what ways does her focus on physical appearance and remaining youthful in looks and actions reinforce the ways that society views women as they age?
3.
Another meeting that has a big impact on the narrator is her meeting with Audra. After she leaves Audra, she walks for hours and has a series of epiphanies, eventually deciding that the lesson she’s learned is that the road at midlife “splits between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising.” (p. 212) After her big argument with Harris about the video, she leans into this lesson even more (p. 218):
Most of us wouldn’t do anything different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime but between generations. If you really wanted to change, you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life.
What do you think about this lesson? Does it ring true to you? Is this a lesson that applies only to mothers/women, or is it something that fathers/men can also learn from? What does “believing that you are both yourself and your baby” mean in the context of her relationship with Sam, the trauma of Sam’s birth, and her difficulty connecting with Sam except in the bathtub? In what ways does what she learns in her meetings with her married friends in Room 321 change or reinforce this lesson?
4.
The third important meeting in this section of the novel is the narrator’s meeting with Arkanda, who she learns also had a traumatic birth experience related to FMH. After this meeting, the narrator has another realization as she recognizes that she’s acting as a guardian to Room 321 but doesn’t own it, despite all of the time and money and energy she’s put into it.
What about her meeting with Arkanda opens up this new way of seeing the room? Do you think that the flashbacks will stop now that she’s been able to connect with someone who’s had a similar experience? What about this meeting and/or this realization led her to the decision to write her story?
(Related question: How do you feel about the “narrator is actually the author of this fictional story” trope that is revealed at the very end of part three? Is it better or worse than the “it was all a dream” trope?)
5.
Let’s talk a little about Jordi and the narrator’s friendship. We know from part one that Jordi is one of the only people the narrator can be herself with (p. 14). Jordi is constantly both her cheerleader and her voice of reason, pointing out when she’s taking things too far or when she’s missing details (like how if she’s lying to Harris, she’s also lying to Sam (p. 184). She keeps the narrator’s secrets even though she doesn’t like lying (p. 76) and is there whenever the narrator needs her.
Why does the narrator feel that she can be herself with Jordi but not with Harris or Sam? Why do you think Jordi is still friends with the narrator? What does Jordi get from this relationship? Would you stay friends with someone like the narrator based on what we see of her friendship with Jordi in this novel?
6.
After the telephotographer roleplay and their big argument, the narrator and Harris reach an unconventional solution for their marriage: to become a “nonconforming family” (p. 278).
Which problems does their arrangement solve? What other problems does it cause? Do you think it’s sustainable? Do you think it’s fair/workable for all parties involved?
(Bonus question: Is the goal of a family for it to be fair/workable for all parties involved, or is there necessarily one or more parties who are always going to be short-changed?)
In the end, it feels like the entire novel has been moving in the direction of this solution. How do you feel about this journey? Did it end where you expected it to?