5/12/2024
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July Review
This Review contains Spoilers
The stories are interesting but they’re confusing. Most of them are about the same sort of character she’s a woman who is somewhat clueless and confused. She has a hard time relating to other people and when she does relate to them she’s unable to understand what they are trying to convey with her.
There’s sometimes some sexual content although it doesn’t drive the story forward. I don’t know if she added the sexual content in there just to keep the reader interested or if it actually has a deeper meaning in line with her actual philosophy. I believe her philosophy is not to take anything too seriously and is rather Zen like. Nothing means anything and nothing conventional happens in these stories. There is not a single story that adheres to the linear progression of storytelling in which there is a beginning, middle, and end or a resolution at the end of the story. Although some of the stories do have a type of resolution, it’s not the resolution that makes one see how the plot fits together.
The character is a woman who is probably bisexual in most of the stories even though she’s not always the same character, the character has certain characteristics. She’s alone and confused and she wants to find people that she can relate to but somehow because she might have an issue like autism or in some cases even schizophrenia. But the Miranda July character never indicates that she’s looking for human connection. She stumbles around in a Zen like trance doing various things without much thought for the overall consequences. She doesn’t plan for her future she just lives every moment as it comes.
In the somewhat shocking story “Making Love in 2003” she claims that she has become the lover of a 24 year old man who’s developmentally disabled based on an imaginary entity that she experienced when she was 15 years old who said he would come back to her in the form of a man named Steve. She found someone named Steve but he was an old man (who was I think the father of one of her friends) and then he died. When she found the next Steve she was working as a teacher for special education. He was the 24 year old.
What bothered me about the story was the setup. The character spent an entire year writing a book. This woman’s (who is Madeleine L’Engle wrote “A Wrinkle in Time”) husband had told her that when she had finished this book maybe he would help her publish it because he thought that her writing showed promise. When she finishes the book, she puts all her stuff in the car thinking that she’s going to move in with this man. Miranda July doesn’t want to leave Madeleine L’Engle’s house but the husband has not come home. She fantasizes that she will live with the couple maybe as a nanny or as part of a romantic threesome. She gaves up her apartment and it isn’t clear if she became homeless after that.
Making Love in 2003″ then segues into this other story about her being a teacher which I’m not sure if that came later on before or after she decided not to become a writer. Unfortunately, she finds the man in his car having an affair with a mistress who she happens to know because they took a course together in Early Chinese Philosophy in college. Therefore, it seems like he’s not going to publish her book but she never even asked him about it.
None of it makes any sense because she should be upset but instead, she just becomes strangely philosophical while she’s driving around homeless with all her stuff in the car. At this point the character seems to have been brought into the edge of a precipice. We ask ourselves what is she going to do now? The answer is Miranda July seems to have painted herself in a corner so she just goes into another story it’s almost like these are two different stories that were stitched together and could have been separated into two different stories.
It was really frustrating listening to the rest of the story because I was holding in the back of my mind what was the main point of the story. I had a feeling that she was just never going to get back to the original dilemma. I was right, the story ended with nothing more about the situation of her spending a year writing a book. Which is probably why she had to leave her apartment.
“Making Love in 2003” has a disclaimer that character is not really Madeleine L’Engle. It’s obvious the special education student isn’t going to support the Miranda July Character and she really needs money. But all this is unmentioned and doesn’t even seem to be an issue. She never says the obvious words, “I spent a whole year writing a book which he didn’t like because he wasn’t even home to see it and now I’m homeless.” On the other hand if she was practical enough to say to herself “I’ve just been tricked out of a whole year”, she might have been practical enough to do something proactive to save herself. Part of this may be her noting that men are not able to save her from poverty. The Miranda July Character is a Feminist.
Michael Pollan wrote the book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence”. In the book he includes the hallucinations of a number of test subjects who ingested psychedelic substances. In the story “This Person” the main character has a similar experience to the people taking the psychedelic drugs without mentioning that she’s on drugs. She goes to a party and all her friends are there. In fact people she doesn’t even know that well are all there welcoming her and wanting to be friends with her and there’s banners and streamers. This is Heaven and everyone you know is here. Some of the people who she had known would have not been dead at that point, so it can’t actually be Heaven. Perhaps it’s a surprise birthday party has been thrown for her after she took LSD? She mentions that some of the characters look ideal. Everybody’s their youthful, most attractive and most intelligent self, so it can’t be something that exists in the physical world.
If something like this happened to me I would want to prolong the moment and talk to all my friends and share in the happiness, but because the character represented by Miranda July seems to have extreme social anxiety. Her anxious mind thinks of something else that she’d rather do. She decides she needs to drive and check her PO Box to see if there’s any mail. So she excuses herself from her very own party to do this. There is no mail in the mailbox, so she goes home and checks her e-mail. There is no e-mail, but instead of going back to the party she just stays home and worries about how she is letting everybody down. She takes a long bath and then go to bed like a normal evening at home.
In this story “The Shared Patio” Miranda July develops a crush on a man named Vincent who sometimes comes to the shared patio. Unfortunately for her he’s married and his girlfriend is a medical professional. When the man passes out or has a seizure she doesn’t help him because she is involved in a daydreaming fantasy. The wife shows up and attempts to administer resuscitation. The wife asks her to get a piece of medical equipment from their apartment. Once she gets into the apartment the medication is on top of the refrigerator. She’s not able to get it because she goes into another Immersive Daydream as she looks at the photos on the refrigerator. There is a lot of dramatic tension with us wondering what’s going to happen and why she’s behaving like this? She imagines that she would become this man’s long term mistress and he would be her true love even though he says he’s still going to remain married to his wife. Eventually the wife comes in and gets the medicine herself and administers it. When I analyzed what was wrong with the Miranda July character I decided that she must have some kind of extreme ADD because she’s not able to hold a thought in her mind long enough to act on that thought. To the point where it could become dangerous and deadly. There is hints in the story that the character has HIV because she likes to hear the words “Its not your fault”. When she says she tried to make the shared patio more her own by leaving an Easter Flag there. Easter is the symbol of resurrection. It was an usual thing to leave somewhere. She also works for a company that prints an HIV Positive Newsletter. The Newsletter’s purpose make people with HIV feel more positive. This is a play on the words HIV +.
The story “Metal Bowl” is not in the book, but you can find it on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast.
A young woman does a porn shoot because she needs money and she doesn’t want to ask her parents. The shoot is somehow released and placed on the Internet. She actually enjoys having it be online. Time passes and she’s too old to do porn any longer. When she finds out that the clip has now been deleted from the Internet one would think that she’d relieved. But she’s upset and she feels like she’s been erased. Her reaction is exactly the opposite of what you would expect a normal person to feel. She should feel relieved that this embarrassing video is forever deleted from the Internet.
I may update this blog post if any of the other Miranda July stories strike me as worth writing about. It’s taking me a long time to get through these stories because they’re so disoriented that if I listen to too many of them at once I don’t have any retention of them. But I really like her writing style. I like her voice when she reads and I definitely feel these stories are meaningful. The emotions felt are real and ring true but the circumstances of the stories are completely fantastic. Some of these stories are so unrealistic they might as well be happening on another planet.
Miranda July is also a performance artist and a visual artist. The New Yorker says “Stories will come to her fully formed, like a gift from the gods; all she has to do is unwrap them.”
Updated: I read her novel just recently “The First Bad Man”, but I was so disappointed with the ending, that I don’t want to read her newest book. One issue is that I would have to spend money, its not at the library and if the ending is disappointing I can’t just return the book and forget about it. If the library gets it I will read/listen to it and if I liked it a lot I would buy it. The ending was so bad, I felt traumatized. But I don’t want to spoil the ending for people on this blog. I don’t even mean the last chapter and mean the whole second half of the book took a wrong turn after Clee moved out. The last chapter was terrible and so was the chapter before about her ex lover.
Updated: I read all the reviews of her newest novel “All Fours” and I am not going to buy it or read it. There are too many sex scenes. If she does not want to become a parody like John Norman she needs to write more metafiction. Even the name of this book is a sex position. I don’t read or like erotic literature. I found out she went on Tour in May but I missed the tour because I did not know about it. I guess she was reading from the book. I don’t follow new books, so I miss out on many things. I am very picky about what I read and I don’t like most of what is being published. One review mentioned that it read like a liberation from the male domination of her husband self help guide.
Macy Makes Magic 