Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this!
The very first lines of Miranda July’s second novel All Fours quickly got under my skin. It was early February of 2025 and while I was in a bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, I was carefully reading the first pages all books that made the finals of my pre-selection process. All Fours’s beginning most intensely left me wanting more.
Yes, trouble me too! I thought, whoever says that, whatever the note is about. We all want for exciting things to happen in our lives, for our routines to be disrupted – I need this even, in order to convince myself on a monthly basis that I am totally not living in a VR-simulated game.
Even though superficially, nothing about the book’s protagonist seemed relatable to me, I felt incredibly drawn to her. Unnamed, July’s female narrator is an American artist, rather famous, but not the level of fame that people stop you on the streets for. Rather, she possesses the Carrie-Bradshow-esque pretentious semi-fame, which grants access to trendy parties, social functions, highbrow art, and merits many – albeit often performative – compliments for her artistry. And yes, I am bringing up SATC again, sue me! On top of that, she is a rich 45-years-old queer woman, who after having almost exclusively dated women, is now married to a man, Harris, whom she loves, and who is the father of their non-binary kid – Sam. Yet, their relationship is described as that of “two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink”:
The evenings with Sam and Harris being the most treacherous as I mimed my way through interactions that should have been second nature, a perpetual houseguest nervously trying to demonstrate how at ease she felt. And then it was the dead of night and I understood how truly forsaken I was, having lost my bond to my actual family and formed an alliance with someone who might as well be fictional.
(Not exactly the feeling Taylor Swift writes songs about, nor what Roland Barthes based A Lover’s Discourse on, but who am I to judge – I rarely get past the honeymoon phase.)
A few days after receiving the “Sorry to trouble you” note, the heroine’s husband Harris casually yet eloquently exposes his take on why some people seem unsatisfied in their lives, while others are happy and content. Little did he know his words would push his wife into wanting to spend weeks on her own, driving cross-country from Los Angeles to New York, experiencing her epitome of freedom and self-discovery!
A person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allowed for it.
In life, there are two types of people, he says – Parkers and Drivers. In his metaphor the driver is a calmer and more stable person, whereas the parker is a sensation-seeker who needs lots of validation as well as some subtle troubles in order to feel alive:
Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don’t need applause for every little thing – they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough. This kind of person can do cross-country drives.
Parkers, on the other hand” – and he looked at me – ‘need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause. ‘Bravo,’ someone might say after they fit the car into an especially tight spot. ‘Amazing.’ The rest of the time they’re bored and fundamentally kind of… “he looked at the ceiling, trying to think of the right word, “disappointed. A Parker can’t drive across the country. But Parkers are good in emergencies,” he added. “They like to save the day.
Formulated in this way, it is difficult not to play favorites – difficult for that distinction not to be condescending and patronizing towards the parkers. At least I have always found myself romanticising the “drivers” of the world – people who can just live their lives without much drama.
Some weirdos out there just seem to effortlessly embody wide-spread wisdoms such as being grateful for the small things and not worrying for things that are outside your control. And about a year ago, just as I was reading All Fours, I happened to be dating one of them.
Even though (as I confirmed with my therapist) this metaphor is just a metaphor and not a seriously researched temperament distinction, I gotta say, it hit the spot! My guy in question was genuinely content to play video games all day, go to the gym and repeat. He wasn’t 100% foreign to the concept of anxiety, but I’d say mostly a foreigner in that realm. He moved through life with a certainty that things will be okay and that if he wanted to do something, he simply could, so why worry or ruminate? Next to him I often found myself inspired to be more philosophically laid back, but also, ironically, I would get existential anxiety attacks (or krises, for short), persuaded that if I am not innately zen like this dude, I am doomed to live my entire life perpetually unhappy.
That being so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Do some of us actually need some discrete tasks that seem impossible, in order to move through life? And do they keep us both discretely troubled enough to be reassured in the reality of things yet endlessly a little disappointed?
The terror of being qualified as a Parker is what pushed Miranda July’s heroine to drive across the United States in an attempt to rediscover herself as an easy-going, never-anxious Driver who totally can be by themselves weeks at a time and just be at peace with their own thoughts… Reminds me of when I was trying to rediscover myself, believing that: 1. listening to the Grateful Dead + 2. reading philosophy + 3. cutting all ties with messaging apps = Cool Girl Who Doesn’t Need Anybody To Be Happy.
Embarrassing, I know. But in a way, what I identify most is not the label of a Parker but with her frantic determination to transition to the side of chill happy-go-lucky folk, implying that there is a winning personality out of the two.
Does the girlboss artist succeed? Hell no! But throughout her month-long trip (which spoiler alert: does not get her across the country but little outside of LA) she confronts the strangeness of aging, as well as a totally new type of intimacy with somebody she meets on the way – “a narcotic high; sexual without sex”:
I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.
All Fours is a quirky yet pertinant portrayal of aging, but also an erotic surrealist masterpiece, which addresses the strangeness of how intimacy changes over time.
Throughout the novel, the narrator goes on to display some pretty unhinged (borderline deranged) behavior as she starts dealing with what is related to (but not reduced to) perimenopause symptoms. So, crazy though she may be at times, there is just something about her! She is brutally honest about her insecurities, disappointments, sexual fantasies and yearnings. With near-zero grace she oscillates between desperation and elation – and albeit not 45 years of age, and not a semi-famous LA artist in a midlife crisis, I often found reading her beautiful chaos to be somewhat liberating, as her reflexions on her particular stage in her life gave her a “weird elation”:
I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.
July’s writing is rich with moments where you feel the ground shift just a little under your feet, even when nothing much is happening on the surface. Like simply a woman putting on concealer in the restroom:
Our eyes met in the mirror and I could tell she was hoping something good would happen to her tonight, but it probably wouldn’t. Not that she wasn’t cute and there wasn’t someone for everyone, but what were the odds? Mostly you put concealer on and then later take it off and nothing life-changing happens in between.
Maybe life really does arrange itself into these small, self-contained episodes - each one beginning with putting concealer under my eyes, and ending with washing it off before bed. The middle is where things are supposed to happen, but mostly they don’t. Mostly, you move through the day carrying the faint hope that something might shift, and then it doesn’t. And no one notices the concealer anyway!
All Fours was great in all kinds of ways, but I admit it’s this Parker/Driver metaphor that has stuck with me the most, like a little burn in the fabric of my mind. Not because it’s neat or definitive – quite the opposite. Because it reminds me how often we try to “graduate” from who we are, to get promoted from Parker to Driver, from anxious to serene, from needy to self-sufficient. And how maybe the point isn’t to win at being a Driver (or a detached Grateful Dead loner) at all, but to stop seeing the Parker parts of ourselves as something broken to be fixed.
Maybe needing to be troubled, needing to squeeze into impossible parking spaces just for the sheer absurd triumph of it, needing a little bit of chaos to feel real. Something worth putting concealer on for, even if most days it comes off again at night, unchanged, unnoticed.
The book is never really about self-improvement. It’s about witnessing yourself mid-transition, mid-delusion, mid-glory, and allowing all of it to exist.
If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls– but the apex, the peak, is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.