My Failed All Fours

the midlife novel I tried to sell

Three of my favorite books of the past five years.

I spent six years writing, revising, submitting, re-revising, and re-submitting a midlife crisis novel.

Here’s the plot gist:

A woman is triggered by the disappearance of a local student and sets out on a cross-country road trip to both look for the girl and find herself.

In the car with her: a much younger man (the lover of the woman who disappeared) to whom our protagonist is unreasonably attracted.

What she leaves behind: her husband and child and house and job.

Sidekicks: a best friend with whom she’s constantly having phone conversations about marriage and midlife.

Physical constraints: the woman is perimenopausal and struggling with brain fog, a mysterious rash, and dizzy spells.

Conversations the woman has with her best friend and the young lover while on the road: how every woman at midlife deserves a rumspringa—a time away from her commitments and attachments during which she can do whatever the fuck she wants.

*

Sound familiar? I loved ALL FOURS. I listened to it while taking walks up and down my road in the early mornings and after dark. I laughed out loud and made little mmm-hmm sounds to myself.

When I got to the rumspringa line in July’s book (I was weeding dahlias in my garden) I laughed harder than I had before. Now I understood. Miranda July and I had been writing versions of the same book for the past six years and she is, well, Miranda July, and I am not.

My version of the story is less…extreme. My sex scenes are quiet and subtle. There is no tampon episode. A different source of grief underpins the journey back to the self. The protagonist is not a successful artist but a failed one. She doesn’t live in a Dwell house in LA but a crumbling farmhouse in Vermont.

*

Reading ALL FOURS I thought about the zeitgeist; how often many of us are writing versions of the same book at the same time, thanks to the collective pressure cooker of the times in which we live. While I was writing my book, and July was writing hers, Claire Vaye Watkins was writing I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS, Makenna Goodman was writing THE SHAME, and Lynn Steger Strong was writing WANT.

There are others, of course. Probably a whole sea of them. But those are the ones that I picked up and thought, oh, we were feeling, and needing to express, similar things.

Female desire. The absurdity of marriage and motherhood as it’s currently defined. The rage that comes with living in a capitalist patriarchy. The hunger and mania and yearning that blossom in middle age as we desperately try to claw our way back to ourselves.

*

My novel went out on submission twice and didn’t sell. There were some close calls, but no cigars. (The two editors who expressed interest soon after switched houses and positions, and that was that.)

I did a lot of grieving and fell into spells of despair during the (long) submission process, but somehow listening to July’s book pulled me out of that. The story I desperately needed to tell got told, via the voices of other women, and other writers. I wasn’t the one to tell it this time and that’s okay. The publishing biz is a crap shot and I know that now. We do what we do because we love it. We try, and see what happens, and then we try again.

*

I’m working on a new novel now. This one feels like a story that only I could imagine, and that only I could tell. It’s less of a zeitgeist novel, which is probably good. It’s less tethered to a particular moment in time. It involves women artists and a lake and a ghost. I’m smitten.

Write the books that only you know how to tell. That’s my current advice to writers of all stripes and kinds and colors. The publishing industry wants their comp titles for their P&L sheets, yes, but they also want books they haven’t seen before. Write that book they haven’t seen before. Make it wild and weird. Make it beautiful. Make it sing. Cross your fingers that some big-named celebrity isn’t writing the very same book at the very same time. Keep writing. Cross your fingers again. Be grateful that you are making art in a sea of art. One small piece, in conversation and relation, to every living thing.