All Fours (2024)

4.5 Stars · Linda’s Rating
Page Count
336 pages
Release Date
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⚠ Full Spoilers Ahead. This page contains complete plot summaries, the ending, and all major reveals. Turn back if you don’t want to be spoiled.
  • Infidelity and non-monogamy

  • Explicit sexual content and sexual fantasies

  • Sexual fetishes and roleplay

  • Traumatic childbirth and medical emergencies

  • Stillbirth and pregnancy complications

  • Suicide and family trauma

  • Perimenopause and aging anxiety

  • Body image issues

  • Menstruation and bodily fluids

  • Inappropriate age gaps and sexual boundaries

  • Substance use and medication misuse

  • Anxiety, panic attacks, and depression

  • Stalking, surveillance, and invasion of privacy

In All Fours by Miranda July, an unnamed 45-year-old artist and writer living in Los Angeles decides to celebrate her birthday by driving alone across the country to New York. She has a stable marriage to Harris, a record producer, and they share a seven-year-old child, Sam. But she feels restless and increasingly disconnected from her life.

Only thirty minutes into her journey, she stops in Monrovia and meets Davey, a handsome younger man who works transporting rental cars. Instantly attracted to him, she abandons her road trip and checks into the Excelsior Motel, where she spends her entire $20,000 windfall renovating Room 321 into a luxurious Parisian-style suite. For two and a half weeks, she secretly meets Davey for daily walks and intimate encounters while pretending to Harris that she’s traveling across America. Davey, however, refuses to have intercourse with her because he’s married to Claire. Eventually, he ends their relationship, leaving her devastated.

Back home, she becomes obsessed with Davey and increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage. When her gynecologist, Dr. Mendoza, diagnoses her with perimenopause, she panics about aging, declining estrogen, and losing her sexual desire. She begins hormone treatment, throws herself into weightlifting, and films an elaborate dance for Davey in Room 321. Harris discovers the video, leading to an explosive confrontation in which she admits how trapped she feels. Rather than divorce, they agree to open their marriage, giving each other one night a week to pursue other relationships.

Her attempt to reconnect with Davey leads her to Audra, an older woman who had initiated Davey into sex when he was eighteen. Audra reveals that Davey and Claire have moved to Sacramento. The two women eventually share an intimate encounter centered on their memories of Davey. Surprisingly, this experience helps the narrator move beyond her fixation on him.

Her relationship with Harris also improves. Through honesty, sexual experimentation, and their shared responsibility for Sam, they develop a genuine friendship that had been missing from their marriage. She begins dating Kris, a younger artist, but another painful breakup sends her into a period of severe depression and weight loss.

A separate storyline finally brings her face-to-face with superstar Arkanda, who has been trying to arrange a meeting with her. The narrator discovers that Arkanda isn’t interested in a professional collaboration. Both women experienced a rare, devastating childbirth complication called Fetal-Maternal Hemorrhage (FMH). Meeting privately at the Excelsior, they share their grief over their traumatic births and find comfort in finally speaking to someone who understands.

Four years later, the narrator is 49 and visiting New York on a book tour. She reconnects with Davey, now performing professionally with his dance partner Dev, and attends his Brooklyn show. Watching him dance initially brings back her jealousy and longing, but those feelings give way to gratitude. The golden stage lighting reminds her of Room 321, the place where her life began changing.

She leaves the performance realizing she no longer needs Davey, the motel room, or anyone else’s permission to experience the excitement and freedom she once believed were slipping away.

All Fours is narrated in the first person by an unnamed 45-year-old artist and writer living in Los Angeles. The story follows her over several months as an impulsive road trip turns into an obsession with a younger man, a crisis over perimenopause, and a major restructuring of her marriage. Her account includes candid internal monologues, conversations with friends, and flashbacks to the traumatic birth of her child. The novel is divided into four parts, with the final section jumping forward four years.

The Road Trip That Ends Thirty Minutes From Home

The narrator lives with her husband, Harris, a calm, practical record producer, and their seven-year-old child, Sam, who is nonbinary. Although their family life is comfortable, she has become increasingly restless.

When a whiskey company unexpectedly pays her $20,000 to license a sentence she wrote years earlier, her sculptor friend Jordi encourages her to spend the money on something beautiful instead of using it responsibly. The narrator decides to celebrate her 45th birthday with a solo road trip from Los Angeles to New York City.

Before leaving, she attends a gathering where Harris explains his theory that people fall into two categories. “Drivers” are grounded individuals who enjoy everyday life, while “Parkers” are anxious people who constantly invent difficult challenges for themselves. Recognizing herself as a Parker, she hopes the cross-country journey will help her become a Driver.

Her life is already filled with strange distractions. Their neighbor Brian, who constantly wears an FBI bulletproof vest, warns that someone in a Subaru has been photographing their home. Harris is working with Caro, a young pop star, while the narrator’s manager, Liza, keeps trying to arrange a meeting with international superstar Arkanda. The meeting has repeatedly been postponed.

Once she finally leaves Los Angeles, the narrator calls her father, an amateur geologist who frequently discusses spiritual ideas and his own debilitating depression, which he calls the “deathfield.”

But she barely makes it out of town.

After driving just thirty minutes, she stops for gas in Monrovia and meets Davey, an attractive man in his twenties who transports rental cars between Hertz locations owned by his uncle. Their brief encounter produces an immediate attraction that completely derails her plans.

Instead of continuing toward New York, she checks into the shabby Excelsior Motel in Monrovia.

Room 321 and the Obsession With Davey

The narrator quickly becomes fascinated with both Davey and the possibilities of her anonymous motel existence. She meets his young wife, Claire, who works as a receptionist at an interior design company called Palaces, and hires her to redecorate Room 321.

She gives Claire the entire $20,000 to transform the depressing room into a luxurious suite inspired by Le Bristol in Paris. Claire installs elaborate botanical wallpaper, expensive carpeting, chintz curtains, Portuguese tiles, a new bathing area, and two vintage pink velvet chairs.

The result is an extravagant private retreat hidden inside an otherwise ordinary roadside motel.

The motel’s elderly surfer owner, Skip, and housekeeper Helen become familiar figures during her stay. Helen also has a connection to Claire’s extended family.

For the next two and a half weeks, the narrator lies to Harris about her whereabouts. He believes she is driving across the country, while she is actually spending her days in Monrovia, waiting for her daily 4:00 p.m. walks with Davey.

Their relationship becomes increasingly intimate. Davey tells her about his unconventional sexual past, including how his mother, Irene, arranged for her older friend Audra, an antique seller, to introduce him to sex when he was eighteen.

The narrator and Davey eventually begin sneaking into Room 321 through an alley window. Their encounters are intensely charged, but Davey insists on a boundary: he will not have intercourse with her because he does not want to betray Claire.

One afternoon, he performs an extraordinary hip-hop dance inside the renovated room. Watching him move overwhelms the narrator, who cries at the beauty of the performance. His dancing becomes inseparable from her attraction to him.

Although their connection is powerful, Davey refuses to abandon his marriage. He and Claire are saving to buy a house and start a family, and he eventually tells the narrator that their time together must end.

She returns to Los Angeles after two and a half weeks, having never completed her road trip.

Returning Home and Facing Perimenopause

Back home, the narrator struggles to resume her ordinary life. She briefly hides in the basement before rejoining Harris and Sam, but she cannot stop thinking about Davey.

Desperate for another connection, she returns to Monrovia and leaves a chair spray-painted with the words “CALL ME” near the Hertz location. Davey eventually responds by sending her a video of himself dancing outside the motel at midnight. It serves as his farewell.

At the same time, she begins experiencing troubling physical changes, including insomnia, mood swings, and unpredictable surges of sexual desire.

She visits Dr. Mendoza, the obstetrician-gynecologist who delivered Sam seven years earlier. Expecting to learn that she has a cervical polyp, she is instead diagnosed with perimenopause.

Dr. Mendoza explains the hormonal changes associated with approaching menopause and shows her a graph illustrating the dramatic decline in estrogen around midlife. She prescribes estradiol cream and progesterone.

The diagnosis terrifies the narrator. She begins to believe she has only a few months left before her sexual desire disappears. Her fears are intensified by memories of her mother, Elaine, who underwent surgical menopause at 45, and a family history of suicide involving her grandmother Esther and aunt Ruthie, both of whom jumped from the same window.

Determined to make the most of what she imagines is her remaining window of sexual vitality, she hires gym owners Scarlett and Brett to help her transform her body through intensive strength training. She begins lifting heavy kettlebells and preparing an elaborate dance of her own for Davey.

During this period, the family also adopts a rescue dog named Smokey the Bear.

Eventually, she returns to Room 321 to record her dance and posts the video online.

Harris sees it, and the resulting confrontation exposes the dissatisfaction she has been hiding. He questions her revealing clothing and behavior, while she erupts about perimenopause, aging, and the feeling that she is slowly dying inside their house.

Harris is equally furious, accusing her of wasting what should have been the best years of his life.

Their marriage appears to be approaching collapse. Instead of separating, however, they negotiate a new arrangement.

They agree to an open marriage under a system they call “favored nations,” allowing each partner one night a week to pursue relationships outside the marriage.

Experimenting With an Open Marriage

The narrator approaches non-monogamy with a mixture of curiosity, anxiety, and determination. She interviews numerous female friends about their relationships, sexuality, and experiences of aging.

Among them are Cassie, a 53-year-old woman; Nazanin, a 49-year-old married to Kate; Isra, a 51-year-old trans woman; and Shareen, who is married to labor lawyer Ari. She also talks with younger women, including Destiny, Caitlyn, and Talia, gathering different perspectives on desire and unconventional relationships.

Harris begins dating Paige, a 46-year-old redheaded therapist who works with neurodivergent teenagers.

The narrator, however, remains emotionally attached to Davey.

During another Wednesday visit to the Excelsior, she searches for him and unexpectedly encounters Audra at an antiques event. Audra reveals that Davey and Claire bought a house and moved to Sacramento two months earlier.

The news devastates her. Davey has moved forward with his life while she has continued organizing much of hers around the possibility of seeing him again.

She visits Audra’s home, where the older woman explains how her relationship with eighteen-year-old Davey began. Later, they return to Room 321. Audra brings the black leather belt Davey previously described, and the two women share an intimate sexual encounter in which Audra recounts her experiences with him.

The narrator leaves the motel and walks through the night, feeling unexpectedly renewed. Her encounter with Audra has opened up possibilities she had not imagined when she first became obsessed with Davey.

A New Relationship With Harris

As the narrator explores relationships outside her marriage, something unexpected happens at home: she and Harris begin becoming genuine friends.

They experiment with sexual roleplay, including a scenario in which Harris pretends to be a photographer spying on her. Their relationship becomes more candid and playful than it has been in years.

An especially revealing moment occurs during a thoroughly unglamorous household emergency. Their dog, Smokey the Bear, has feces tangled in the fur around his rear end, and the couple works together to cut away the mess.

The situation reminds them that they function remarkably well as a team, especially when something practical needs to be handled.

Later, Harris asks whether she saw someone on the night she recorded her dance in Room 321. Instead of concealing the encounter, she admits that she was with a woman.

This honesty marks a change in their relationship. They no longer need to maintain the same polite distance that characterized much of their marriage.

They remain committed to raising Sam together, even as their romantic and sexual lives develop separately.

Kris and Another Devastating Breakup

The narrator eventually begins dating Kris, a tall, shaggy-haired artist in their thirties who previously served as a muse to renowned sculptor Lore Estes.

Their relationship becomes an important part of her new life. They spend weekends together in Room 321 and at Kris’s cottage in Oakland. The narrator begins investing deeply in this connection, finding a new source of companionship and attraction beyond Davey.

But the relationship proves unstable.

Kris reveals having gone on a date with Elsa Penbrook-Gibbard, a wealthy art collector in her sixties. Soon afterward, Kris abruptly ends the relationship, telling the narrator that they are not compatible.

The rejection sends her into another severe emotional collapse.

She loses weight until she reaches 102 pounds and falls into the same kind of despair her father calls the deathfield. Although she has changed her marriage and begun exploring new relationships, she is once again overwhelmed by the loss of someone she desperately wanted.

The Meeting With Arkanda and the Birth Trauma

A separate thread that has been developing throughout the novel finally reaches its conclusion when Liza encounters Tara, a former assistant to superstar Arkanda, at a potluck.

For months, the narrator has assumed that Arkanda’s repeatedly postponed meeting concerns a potential creative collaboration.

Tara reveals that this assumption is wrong.

Arkanda actually wants to meet her because they share a devastating personal experience.

Years earlier, the narrator nearly lost Sam during childbirth because of Fetal-Maternal Hemorrhage (FMH), a rare complication in which blood passes from the fetus into the mother’s circulation. The emergency left her with lasting memories of fear and trauma.

Arkanda experienced the same complication during the birth of her son, Smith. She learned about the narrator’s experience through Jess, Sam’s former nanny, and has been trying to contact her ever since.

The two women finally meet in Room 322 at the Excelsior Motel.

Initially wary, they perform a mutual body pat-down before settling onto the floor together. Their meeting quickly becomes intensely emotional as they discuss what happened during their children’s births.

They hold hands, cry, and repeatedly express their disbelief that they experienced something so terrifying.

For the narrator, who has carried memories of Sam’s emergency birth for seven years, the encounter provides an opportunity to speak openly with someone who knows exactly what happened.

Arkanda also offers her a piece of advice: “Don’t keep staring down the well when the well’s run dry.”

Their meeting brings the narrator’s traumatic past into the same motel where her midlife upheaval began.

Four Years Later: Davey’s Performance in New York

The final part of the novel jumps ahead four years.

The narrator is now 49 and traveling to New York City for a book tour. This time, she actually makes the journey that she abandoned at the beginning of the story.

During the flight, she sends Davey a text message. He responds warmly, marking her message with a heart and inviting her to attend a dance performance in Brooklyn with his partner Dev.

After arriving in New York, she experiences a frightening bout of vertigo in her hotel room. The episode is attributed to displaced crystals in her inner ear associated with hormonal fluctuations.

While talking on the phone with Jordi, she performs the Epley maneuver on her bed to relieve the dizziness.

Despite the episode, she attends Davey’s performance.

Seeing him dance bare-chested onstage brings back the intensity of their earlier connection. At first, she feels jealous as the audience applauds him, remembering when his dancing seemed like something uniquely shared between them.

Then the stage lighting shifts into a warm golden glow, reminding her of the peony-and-dahlia-colored light in Room 321.

Instead of feeling deprived of something she once possessed, she experiences an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

She recognizes that the freedom, beauty, and excitement she associated with Davey and their secret motel room are no longer confined to that place or that relationship.

The narrator leaves the performance and steps into the New York sunset. Four years after abandoning her cross-country trip for a stranger in Monrovia, she is finally in New York, no longer waiting for Davey to give her access to the life she wants.

The novel ends with her feeling free, complete, and unashamed, carrying the possibility of Room 321 with her wherever she goes.

How All Fours Ends

Four years after the narrator’s life-changing stay in Room 321, she is now 49 years old and flying to New York for the first stop on her book tour. She sends Davey a photo of the completed star-tile pattern behind the toilet in Room 321, and he tells her that he happens to be in New York too, performing with his dance partner, Dev. He invites her to their show in Brooklyn.

Before she can see him, however, the narrator is hit with a brutal episode of vertigo. Flight pressure and fluctuating estrogen have displaced a tiny crystal in her inner ear, leaving her barely able to move without the room spinning. Guided by Jordi over the phone, she spends hours performing the Epley maneuver, repeatedly turning, falling, waiting, and beginning again.

During this exhausting night, she thinks of her grandmother Esther and aunt Ruthie, both of whom died by suicide. Their imagined presence gives the ordeal a larger meaning. The narrator realizes that survival is often physical and repetitive: you perform the movement, endure the collapse, get back up, and do it again. Prayer, dance, therapy, and even the Epley maneuver become variations of the same act—practicing how to survive being thrown off balance.

By morning, the vertigo is gone.

The following afternoon, she goes to Brooklyn to watch Davey and Dev perform. Davey is now in his mid-thirties and has become a successful artist in his own right. Watching the audience become captivated by him initially brings out an ugly flash of possessiveness in her. She wants something to go wrong—some mistake or accusation that would diminish him and somehow make him hers again.

But then the performance changes.

The stage fills with the same golden-orange light that once filtered through the peony-and-dahlia curtains of Room 321. She smells tonka bean. Suddenly, she understands that Room 321 was never really about Room 321.

The theater is Room 321. New York is Room 321. The world is Room 321.

What she discovered there—sexual freedom, creativity, honesty, solitude, desire, and ownership of herself—was never dependent on a motel room or on Davey. She no longer needs to escape her ordinary life to become that woman because that woman is now who she is.

As Davey leaps into the air and begins falling back toward the stage, she finally releases her desire to possess him. She does not need to reclaim him or restart their affair. Instead, she feels gratitude for what he gave her and for what their relationship awakened in her.

She leaves the theater and walks into the golden New York sunset feeling whole. Every day is Wednesday now. Her “new, big soul” belongs to her, and she can carry it anywhere.

What the Ending Means

The ending completes the narrator’s journey by revealing that her midlife crisis was never really about choosing between Harris and Davey, marriage and divorce, domesticity and freedom, or youth and aging. Those conflicts forced her to confront a deeper question: Can she belong completely to herself while still loving other people?

By the end, her answer is yes.

Room 321

Room 321 is the novel’s central symbol. At first, it is literally an escape hatch from the narrator’s domestic life—a private place where she can explore desire, art, fantasy, and a version of herself that exists outside motherhood and marriage.

But the final appearance of its distinctive golden light transforms its meaning. Room 321 has become internal.

She spent much of the novel believing freedom required a separate place and a separate life. The ending suggests that true liberation comes when she no longer has to physically escape in order to access herself.

That is why seeing Room 321’s light surrounding Davey is so powerful: she realizes that Davey did not contain the magic either. He helped reveal something already inside her.

Davey’s Leap and Fall

Davey’s leap crystallizes the novel’s obsession with aging.

The narrator has spent years terrified of reaching the supposed biological “apex” of womanhood and beginning the inevitable descent into menopause, aging, invisibility, and eventually death. Davey’s body literally rises and then falls.

But she no longer experiences the fall as catastrophe.

The point is not to remain suspended forever at the top. Falling is part of the movement. Aging is not evidence that life has failed; it is simply what comes after ascent.

Her ability to watch Davey fall with gratitude rather than terror signals that she has finally accepted her own trajectory.

The Vertigo and the Epley Maneuver

The vertigo immediately before the final encounter is especially fitting because it literalizes what the entire novel has done to the narrator: her world has been knocked out of alignment.

And she cannot think herself back into balance.

She has to move her body through the disorientation repeatedly—turn, collapse, endure, rise, repeat—until the crystal settles into a new position.

That becomes a miniature version of her entire midlife transformation. She does not return to her old equilibrium. She finds a new one.

The presence of Esther and Ruthie also gives the scene generational weight. Their suicides represent lives in which unbearable pain ultimately could not be survived. The narrator chooses repetition, movement, and endurance. She keeps going.

Why She Lets Davey Go

One of the narrator’s final changes is learning the difference between loving something and possessing it.

Earlier, Davey becomes entangled with her terror of aging. His youth, beauty, sexuality, and attention seem capable of proving that she is still desirable. Losing him therefore feels like losing a particular version of herself.

At his performance, she briefly falls back into that mindset when she wants his success diminished.

Then she releases it.

She can recognize what Davey meant to her without requiring him to remain hers. Their relationship mattered precisely because it changed her. Its value does not depend upon its permanence.

“Every Day Is Wednesday”

Wednesday begins as negotiated freedom: one officially sanctioned night when the narrator can step outside her ordinary domestic identity.

By the ending, she no longer needs permission or a designated day.

“Every day is Wednesday” means that the self she discovered during those escapes has been integrated into everyday life. Desire, creativity, privacy, pleasure, and autonomy are no longer things she must temporarily borrow.

They belong to her.

The Marriage

The ending also refuses the conventional resolution in which self-discovery automatically requires abandoning marriage.

Instead, the narrator and Harris fundamentally renegotiate what their relationship means. Their “favored nations” arrangement allows them to acknowledge desire outside the marriage rather than maintaining stability through repression and dishonesty.

The novel therefore does not present marriage itself as the cage. The cage was the rigid version of marriage—and womanhood—that the narrator believed she was required to perform.

Their future together remains unconventional and evolving, but that uncertainty is part of the point.

The Final Meaning

The ending reframes the narrator’s apparent midlife breakdown as a rebirth.

At 45, she fears that declining estrogen means she is approaching the end of everything that made her sexually and culturally valuable. Four years later, she understands aging differently. The violent upheaval of perimenopause has stripped away assumptions about who she is supposed to be and forced her to construct a life that actually fits her.

That is why the ending feels so serene compared with the frantic energy of the beginning.

She has not solved aging. She has not defeated death. She has not secured Davey forever or restored her marriage to its old form.

She has simply stopped demanding permanence.

Room 321 can disappear. Davey can belong to himself. Her body can change. Her marriage can evolve. Her child can grow up. She can age.

And she can remain herself through all of it.

The “new, big soul” she carries into the sunset is therefore the real destination of the novel. She began the story believing freedom was somewhere she needed to go. She ends it realizing freedom is something she can carry with her.

🔶 Main Characters

The Narrator
The Narrator — Protagonist and Storyteller
Role: An unnamed 45-year-old artist, writer, wife, and mother living in Los Angeles.
Personality: Introspective, impulsive, imaginative, anxious, candid, sexually adventurous.
Significance: Embarks on a fake cross-country road trip, secretly renovates a motel room, becomes obsessed with a younger man, and confronts perimenopause and her changing desires.
Harris
Harris — Husband
Role: The narrator's husband, a successful record producer and father of Sam.
Personality: Grounded, orderly, traditional, reserved, loyal.
Significance: His "Drivers vs. Parkers" theory sparks the narrator's midlife crisis, and their deteriorating intimacy forces them to reconsider monogamy.
Davey Boutros
Davey Boutros — Dancer and Love Interest
Role: A 31-year-old Hertz car mover, aspiring dancer, and Claire's husband.
Personality: Charming, athletic, earnest, disciplined, conflicted.
Significance: Becomes the narrator's intense romantic obsession after meeting her in Monrovia, inspiring her sexual and artistic awakening.
Claire
Claire — Interior Designer and Davey's Wife
Role: Davey's wife and an aspiring interior designer who previously worked as a receptionist at Palaces.
Personality: Stylish, ambitious, entrepreneurial, assertive.
Significance: Transforms Room 321 into a luxurious Parisian-inspired suite, unknowingly facilitating her husband's emotional affair with the narrator.
Audra
Audra — Antique Seller and Davey's Former Lover
Role: An older Monrovia antique dealer, Irene's best friend, and Davey's former sexual mentor.
Personality: Uninhibited, theatrical, experienced, candid, unapologetic.
Significance: Reveals her intimate history with Davey, having initiated a sexual relationship with him when he was 18, and challenges the narrator's understanding of desire.
Arkanda
Arkanda — International Pop Star
Role: A globally famous musician who secretly seeks a meeting with the narrator.
Personality: Intense, private, compassionate, protective, emotionally vulnerable.
Significance: Initially appears to be a potential musical collaborator but actually wants to connect over their shared experiences of life-threatening fetal-maternal hemorrhage during childbirth.
Sam
Sam — The Narrator's Child
Role: The seven-year-old nonbinary child of the narrator and Harris.
Personality: Sweet, observant, imaginative, candid, adaptable.
Significance: Survived a life-threatening childbirth emergency and remains the emotional center of the narrator's family life.
Jordi
Jordi — Best Friend and Sculptor
Role: The narrator's closest confidante, a sculptor married to Mel.
Personality: Intelligent, eccentric, supportive, principled, relaxed.
Significance: Encourages the narrator to spend her unexpected $20,000 on beauty and supports her through her romantic obsession, marital upheaval, and hormonal struggles.

🔷 Supporting Characters

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The Narrator's Father — Amateur Geologist
Role: The narrator's eccentric father, who struggles with depression and anxiety.
Personality: Neurotic, talkative, obsessive, philosophical.
Significance: Introduces the concepts of "walk-in souls" and the "deathfield," influencing his daughter's understanding of psychological distress.
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Elaine — The Narrator's Mother
Role: The narrator's mother, who underwent surgical menopause at 45 without informed consent.
Personality: Forgetful, erratic, affectionate, anxious.
Significance: Her traumatic experience with menopause influences the narrator's fears about aging and hormonal changes.
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Grandma Esther and Aunt Ruthie — Deceased Relatives
Role: The narrator's grandmother and aunt, both of whom died by suicide.
Personality: Tormented, insecure, appearance-conscious, troubled.
Significance: Their deaths shape the narrator's fears about aging, depression, and the psychological vulnerabilities of women in her family.
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Brian — FBI Neighbor
Role: The narrator's former next-door neighbor in Los Angeles.
Personality: Serious, awkward, vigilant.
Significance: Warns the narrator about a suspicious man photographing her home, triggering fears about surveillance.
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Sonja and Her Husband — Friends
Role: An Auckland-born friend and her husband who socialize with the narrator and Harris.
Personality: Charming, outgoing, vivacious.
Significance: Their conversation with Harris inspires his "Drivers vs. Parkers" theory, motivating the narrator's supposed cross-country journey.
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Caro (Caroline) — Pop Star Protégée
Role: A 28-year-old musician whose album Harris produces.
Personality: Eccentric, detached, talented, unconventional.
Significance: Her close professional relationship with Harris creates jealousy and insecurity for the narrator.
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Skip — Excelsior Motel Manager
Role: The laid-back owner and manager of the Excelsior Motel in Monrovia.
Personality: Easygoing, practical, accommodating, entrepreneurial.
Significance: Permits the narrator and Claire to renovate Room 321 into a luxurious private retreat.
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Helen — Motel Housekeeper
Role: A housekeeper at the Excelsior Motel and the former wife of Claire's uncle.
Personality: Blunt, practical, unapologetic.
Significance: Discusses her past infidelity with the narrator, challenging conventional expectations about marriage.
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Liza — Manager
Role: The narrator's longtime professional manager and former high school classmate.
Personality: Sociable, dependable, supportive, resilient.
Significance: Handles the narrator's professional commitments and repeatedly reschedules her mysterious meeting with Arkanda.
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Mary — New York Friend
Role: An older friend who offers emotional support during the narrator's crisis.
Personality: Talkative, sympathetic, candid.
Significance: Discusses menopause with the narrator and offers to provide alibis during her secret motel stay.
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Dara — Friend
Role: A friend known for pursuing relationships with younger men.
Personality: Flirtatious, confident, unapologetic.
Significance: Provides a comparison for the narrator as she wrestles with her attraction to the much younger Davey.
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Irene — Davey's Mother
Role: Davey's mother, a Kundalini yoga practitioner and sister of the Hertz business owner.
Personality: Overbearing, intrusive, unconventional, outspoken.
Significance: Arranged for Audra to introduce Davey to sex at 18 and later confronts the narrator about his romantic history.
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Dr. Mendoza — Obstetrician-Gynecologist
Role: The narrator's naturopathic ob-gyn who delivered Sam.
Personality: Direct, clinical, knowledgeable, holistic.
Significance: Diagnoses the narrator's perimenopause and prescribes estradiol and progesterone to address her hormonal symptoms.
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Scarlett and Brett — Gym Owners
Role: A married couple who operate the narrator's neighborhood weightlifting gym.
Personality: Disciplined, motivating, practical, energetic.
Significance: Train the narrator in heavy lifting as she prepares for her provocative dance video and attempts to reclaim her physical confidence.
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Smokey the Bear — Family Dog
Role: A shaggy rescue dog adopted by the narrator, Harris, and Sam.
Personality: Anxious, messy, affectionate, accident-prone.
Significance: His broken leg and severe grooming-related medical emergency force the estranged couple to cooperate and reconnect emotionally.
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Cassie, Nazanin, Kate, Isra, Shareen, Ari, Destiny, Caitlyn, Sophie, and Talia — Relationship Survey Group
Role: Friends and acquaintances whose experiences inform the narrator's investigation into marriage and non-monogamy.
Personality: Diverse, candid, experimental, opinionated.
Significance: Share contrasting perspectives on sexual freedom, traditional marriage, queer relationships, and unconventional partnerships.
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Paige — Harris's Girlfriend
Role: A 46-year-old redheaded therapist specializing in neurodivergent teenagers.
Personality: Refined, empathetic, intelligent, sophisticated.
Significance: Becomes Harris's principal romantic partner after he and the narrator agree to open their marriage.
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Kris — The Narrator's Former Partner
Role: A tall, shaggy-haired artist and former romantic partner of sculptor Lore Estes.
Personality: Stylish, androgynous, elusive, independent.
Significance: Dates the narrator during her open marriage, introducing her to a new romantic relationship with a woman.
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Lore Estes — Celebrated Sculptor
Role: An internationally recognized sculptor and Kris's former partner.
Personality: Artistic, commanding, enigmatic.
Significance: Represents a powerful model of masculine-presenting female identity and influences the narrator's perceptions of Kris.
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Elsa Penbrook-Gibbard — Wealthy Art Collector
Role: An affluent art collector in her sixties who becomes romantically involved with Kris.
Personality: Confident, assertive, extravagant, possessive.
Significance: Purchases Kris's artwork and develops a relationship with Kris, contributing to the narrator's romantic disappointment.
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Tara — Arkanda's Former Assistant
Role: A former personal assistant to international pop star Arkanda.
Personality: Friendly, resourceful, informative.
Significance: Reveals that Arkanda sought the narrator because they both experienced fetal-maternal hemorrhage during childbirth.
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Jess — Sam's Former Nanny
Role: Sam's former nanny and a talented macrobiotic cook.
Personality: Spiritual, nurturing, resourceful, meditative.
Significance: Tells Arkanda about the narrator's traumatic childbirth experience, indirectly arranging their emotional meeting.
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Dev — Davey's Dance Partner
Role: Davey's professional dance collaborator and performance partner.
Personality: Athletic, focused, disciplined, talented.
Significance: Supports Davey's artistic ambitions and helps establish his professional dancing career.
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Tim Yoon — Retired Detective
Role: A former police detective hired by the narrator to investigate suspicious activity.
Personality: Professional, terse, efficient, observant.
Significance: Discovers that Brian died from kidney disease and that the supposedly suspicious photographer was actually photographing houses for real estate advertising.
The Time-Zone Problem

While secretly staying in Monrovia, California, the narrator pretends she is already traveling toward New York. At one point, she texts Harris at 2:00 a.m. California time and thinks that 2:00 a.m. is late but plausible for her to be awake in New York. But it would actually be 5:00 a.m. in New York. Over more than two weeks, maintaining the lie would require her to account constantly for the three-hour difference in calls, texts, sleep schedules, and daylight. It seems unlikely that Harris, an experienced traveler, would never notice a discrepancy.

The Room 321 Renovation

The narrator essentially transforms an ordinary motel room into a luxury suite, with new carpeting, wallpaper, tile, plumbing, and a remodeled shower. Skip initially considers the work destruction of property but ultimately embraces it and begins charging much more for the room. His willingness to allow a guest to make major alterations without contracts, permits, inspections, or apparent concern about insurance and liability is difficult to reconcile with operating a real motel. The novel treats the renovation more like an artistic transformation than a realistic commercial construction project.

The Mysterious Photographer Explanation

Early in the novel, Brian reports a suspicious man in a black Subaru photographing the narrator's house with a telephoto lens, creating the impression that she may be under surveillance. The eventual explanation is much more mundane: the photograph was connected to a real-estate marketing mailer. That can explain why someone was photographing houses in the neighborhood, but it doesn't fully explain the suspicious behavior described earlier or why the resulting promotional image includes the narrator visibly standing inside her home. The resolution feels less like a true plot hole than a deliberately ominous setup whose mundane explanation doesn't completely match the details used to make it frightening.

Q : Why do you think the narrator stops in Monrovia instead of completing her planned cross-country drive? What does staying so close to home allow her to experience that a real trip to New York might not?
A : Room 321 gives the narrator a way to escape her everyday identity without truly leaving her life behind. She can temporarily stop being a wife and mother and create a private world entirely on her own terms. Renovating the room also gives her something tangible to focus on while she works through desires and questions about herself that she has largely ignored at home.
Q : Harris divides people into “Drivers,” who are content with ordinary life, and “Parkers,” who constantly need projects, goals, or recognition. Do you think his theory actually explains the narrator, or does it unfairly turn parts of her personality into flaws?
A : The narrator initially takes Harris’s theory as evidence that something is wrong with her. She tries to become more like the grounded “Drivers” he admires, but eventually realizes that her intensity, ambition, and need to create are fundamental parts of who she is. The novel suggests that the problem may not be being a “Parker,” but believing that one way of living is healthier or more legitimate than another.
Q : The narrator reacts strongly when she learns she is entering perimenopause. Why does this information feel so threatening to her, and how does her attitude toward aging change over the course of the novel?
A : At first, she sees declining estrogen almost as a countdown clock on her sexuality, attractiveness, creativity, and vitality. Her fear reflects larger cultural messages suggesting that women become less desirable or relevant as they age. Through exercise, conversations with other women, hormone treatment, and her own experiences, she gradually begins to see midlife less as an ending and more as a chance to redefine herself without worrying as much about pleasing others.
Q : Davey refuses to have intercourse with the narrator because he considers that the line he cannot cross in his marriage. Do you think that boundary actually makes their relationship less of an affair, or does their emotional and physical intimacy make the distinction meaningless?
A : Davey seems to believe that avoiding intercourse allows him to remain faithful in some technical sense, but their relationship becomes deeply intimate in many other ways. Dancing, touching, sharing vulnerable moments, and creating their private rituals may be more emotionally significant than intercourse would have been. His rule raises an interesting question about whether infidelity is defined by a particular physical act or by secrecy, emotional attachment, and intention.
Q : The narrator carries lasting trauma from the rare medical emergency surrounding Sam’s birth. Why is meeting Arkanda, another mother who experienced the same thing, so powerful for her?
A : The narrator has spent years carrying an experience that very few people can fully understand. Meeting Arkanda gives her something she has never really had: another person who immediately recognizes the fear and grief without needing an explanation. Their shared acknowledgment of what happened allows the narrator to release emotions she has been carrying largely alone and shows how healing can come simply from being understood.
Q : When Harris and the narrator decide to open their marriage and give each other designated nights of freedom, their relationship becomes more honest in some ways. Do you think this arrangement strengthens their marriage, or does it reveal that their marriage has fundamentally changed?
A : The arrangement could be seen as both. Their traditional marriage has clearly changed, but greater honesty seems to remove some of the careful distance that had developed between them. Instead of pretending they can fulfill every need for one another, they begin speaking more openly about desire, independence, and dissatisfaction. Whether that represents a stronger marriage or simply a different kind of partnership is something readers may interpret very differently.
Q : What do you think the phrase “Every day is Tuesday” comes to mean for the narrator? Why does such a strange, simple phrase become important to her?
A : At first, the phrase represents freedom from ordinary schedules and expectations—the idea that life does not have to follow the structure everyone else accepts. Eventually, it becomes something broader for the narrator: permission to experience freedom and possibility whenever she chooses. She no longer needs a secret motel room or a designated night away from her family to feel that her life belongs to her.
Q : The narrator’s grandmother Esther and aunt Ruthie both died by suicide in midlife, and their deaths remain present in her mind as she ages. How does this family history affect the way she experiences her own midlife crisis, especially during the vertigo episode near the end?
A : Their deaths make midlife feel dangerous to the narrator, almost as though despair might be something she has inherited. During the vertigo episode, she repeatedly falls backward and forces herself upright while performing the Epley maneuver. That physical struggle can be read symbolically: when her world literally begins spinning, she keeps getting up. In doing so, she chooses endurance rather than repeating the tragic pattern that came before her.
Q : The narrator spends her unexpected $20,000 check renovating a motel room that she does not even own. Did you see this as reckless self-indulgence, meaningful artistic expression, or something in between?
A : It is certainly extravagant, especially because the narrator has the financial freedom to spend a large amount of money on something with no obvious practical purpose. At the same time, Room 321 becomes a creative project that changes several lives. Claire gains professional experience and money, the motel eventually benefits from the upgraded room, and the narrator creates a physical expression of the transformation she is experiencing. The project can therefore feel both privileged and genuinely meaningful.
Q : Why is the narrator’s encounter with Audra important to her understanding of sexuality and aging? What does Audra offer that Davey cannot?
A : Davey is closely connected to the narrator’s fear of losing youth and desirability, while Audra represents a very different possibility: an older woman who continues to inhabit her body and sexuality without apology. The encounter challenges the narrator’s assumption that erotic life depends on youth or male attention. It helps broaden her understanding of desire from wanting to be desired into recognizing her own ability to desire and choose.
Q : At the end, the narrator watches Davey dance but chooses not to restart their relationship. Why do you think she can finally let him go, and what does that decision suggest about what Room 321 really meant to her?
A : By the end, the narrator understands that Davey was important partly because of what he awakened in her, not because he was necessarily meant to remain in her life. Room 321 gave her permission to explore desire, creativity, aging, and independence, but she no longer needs Davey—or the room itself—to access those parts of herself. Letting him go shows that she has stopped treating him as the source of her transformation and recognizes that the change ultimately belongs to her.
4.5 / 5 Stars · Linda’s Rating

I genuinely don't know how to explain All Fours by Miranda July, and somehow that feels like the most appropriate reaction to this book. It's easily one of the weirdest, most unconventional novels I've ever read, and I absolutely loved it. Mostly.

What makes this book special isn't the plot, which is bizarre and often completely illogical. It's July's writing. She's funny, brutally honest, uncomfortable, and strangely beautiful all at once. As a woman experiencing perimenopause myself, I found the exploration of aging, desire, identity, and the fear of becoming invisible surprisingly relatable.

There's a LOT of sexual content, including plenty of masturbation, which would normally make me uncomfortable. Yet somehow, July made even those moments feel meaningful, hilarious, and deeply human.

I couldn't always understand the protagonist's decisions, and some of her behavior drove me crazy. But I also appreciated how unapologetically messy she was.

I knocked off half a star because my relationship with this book was occasionally more bewilderment than enjoyment. Still, it's one of the most memorable books I've read in a long time. Definitely not for everyone, but absolutely worth experiencing if you appreciate unconventional fiction.

4.5 out of 5 stars -- Midlife crisis, maximum chaos, zero apologies.

Television Adaptation

Miranda July’s bestselling 2024 novel All Fours is being developed into a television series for Starz. The adaptation was announced in February 2025, following the novel’s commercial and critical success, including its selection as a finalist for the National Book Award.

Adaptation Details:

  • Title: All Fours
  • Based On: All Fours (2024) by Miranda July
  • Format: Television series
  • Network: Starz
  • Production Company: Not publicly confirmed
  • Announcement Year: 2025
  • Release Date: Not announced
  • Cast: Not announced
  • Status: In development

What Will the Adaptation Cover?

The series is expected to follow the novel’s unnamed 45-year-old artist and writer, who impulsively abandons a planned cross-country road trip and secretly checks into a motel near her Los Angeles home.

What begins as an unconventional escape from marriage and motherhood develops into an exploration of female desire, perimenopause, aging, identity, and personal freedom.

The novel’s distinctive combination of dark humor, intimate psychological exploration, and unconventional relationships provides the foundation for the television adaptation.

Current Status

As of October 2026, no premiere date, confirmed cast, or production schedule has been publicly established. The project remains in development at Starz.

Sources: Variety | Deadline

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📖 Reporting for: All Fours (2024)