Navigating Midlife Transitions in 'All Fours'

Some time in her forties, something shifted in Miranda July. She started having “this new, grim feeling about the future, which was weird, because I’m, like, a very excited, hopeful person,” she tells New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz, who recently profiled July for the magazine. July attributes some of that “feeling” to the disparity between all the information there was about her reproductive years, and how little there was about middle age and perimenopause. “If it’s stories that we need, you know, dibs. Dibs on menopause,” she tells Schwartz. July’s explorations and conversations with other women made their way into her new novel, “All Fours,” about a woman who upends her life and her marriage, and her sense of who she is and who she’ll be in the second half of her life. Miranda July is fifty now, and she is taking some pages from her own book.