Even in the previous pro-divorce culture, women still felt compelled to give a reason why they were dumping their husbands, something that he had done wrong. This didn’t even have to be especially bad, like an affair. But there had to be some kind of negative behavior or trait of the husband to make a divorce seem socially legitimate. Today, that’s not the case. The explicit message is that it’s ok to divorce your husband for purely selfish reasons.

Miranda July’s novel All Fours has been a sensation among middle aged women. The New York Times wrote about how the book influenced women to rethink marriage and family life:

It’s the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40.

Miranda July’s latest novel, “All Fours,” is about a 45-year-old woman who upends her seemingly settled domestic life by checking into a motel a half-hour from her house for a few weeks, taking up with a younger married man and then experimenting with an open marriage.

On her journey to self-discovery — and sexual awakening — she asks women she knows to share with her their true desires: Are they happy in their marriages? And if they’re not, are they going to do anything about it? What are the other possible arrangements for a life?

The book came out last May and is still huge. I just checked my local library and 127 people have holds on it. (The library has 26 copies).

All Fours is basically about a 45 year old woman who suffers a midlife crisis. In the book, the narrator, married with a child, sets off on a cross country drive from LA to New York, but never even makes it out of Southern California. She ends up checking into a cheap motel, spending $20,000 to redecorate her room, staying there three weeks, and becoming infatuated with the husband of the room’s interior designer. By the end, she and her husband adopt an open marriage, the narrator has affairs with multiple women, and supposedly the book ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. (I only read the first third of it).

This is hardly the first book of its type. In some ways it’s just the new Eat, Pray, Love for a new generation of middle aged women. Obviously there’s a huge market for this.

While the book does not directly tell women to leave their husbands, July has become an explicit advocate for that on her Substack. In a recent post, she wrote:

I do believe (and I tell this to my child) that romantic relationships are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to “lifelong” in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length.

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