Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one
Speaker 1: of our favorite episodes from our sister podcast.
Speaker 2: Read This.
Speaker 1: The show features interviews with some of the best and
Speaker 1: most but loved writers from Australia and around the world. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from Miranda July. Miranda is not
Speaker 1: only a writer, but a well known filmmaker and performance artist.
Speaker 1: Her debut book of short stories, No One Belongs Here
Speaker 1: More Than You, was a publishing sensation, and her films,
Speaker 1: including Me and You and Everyone We Know and Kajillianaire
Speaker 1: have become cult classics. She has a devoted, even rabid
Speaker 1: following through her writing, her work on the screen, and
Speaker 1: her collaborative art projects. Her latest book, All Fours explores desire, intimacy,
Speaker 1: and an often overlooked part of the aging process, perimenopause.
Speaker 1: Michael Williams is the host of Read This and his
Speaker 1: with Me Now, Hi Michael.
Speaker 3: Hi, their sister podcaster.
Speaker 2: How are You?
Speaker 3: I am very well. How are things with you?
Speaker 1: Excellent? I am excited about this episode. All Fours has
Speaker 1: been on my to read list since it came out
Speaker 1: earlier this year. For those people who aren't as familiar
Speaker 1: with Miranda's work. Can you tell us a bit more
Speaker 1: about her career so far and why she has such
Speaker 1: devoted fans?
Speaker 3: For many people, Miranda July was unmissible for a few
Speaker 3: years there. She brought out, as you said, her debut
Speaker 3: book of short stories. She brought out a film that
Speaker 3: did the festival circuit and was very popular. But she
Speaker 3: was kind of synonymous with these high concept art projects,
Speaker 3: and so she kind of, for some people, is a
Speaker 3: bit off putting. Some people find the Miranda July experience
Speaker 3: maybe a bit tweet, maybe a bit contrived, and so
Speaker 3: they might have come to this book a little cautiously.
Speaker 3: And part of what's so exciting is the book is
Speaker 3: an absolute ripper and people are responding to it in kind.
Speaker 1: As you say, all fours, it's a huge success. So
Speaker 1: what is it about this book that made you so
Speaker 1: excited to have Miranda on the show?
Speaker 3: I saw a couple of reviews that took issue with
Speaker 3: Miranda talking about the ways in which the book deals
Speaker 3: with the aging process, suggesting that she's somehow too young
Speaker 3: to have that conversation. But that's kind of the point here.
Speaker 3: The point is that the great unspoken hinterland of lived experience,
Speaker 3: and particularly women's lived experience, is perimenopause, and it's widely
Speaker 3: experienced obviously, but rarely foregrounded in our literature, rarely foregrounded
Speaker 3: in our culture. And Miranda July is utterly fearless in
Speaker 3: the way she does it. The book is entirely fiction,
Speaker 3: it's not about her own life, but you can't help
Speaker 3: but feel like this is an incredibly bare, very generous
Speaker 3: depiction about desire, about loss, about fear, and about the
Speaker 3: ways in which we approach these major milestones.
Speaker 4: In our lives.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. Miranda July wrote the
Speaker 1: book she couldn't find.
Speaker 3: I might kick things off at the very beginning, based
Speaker 3: on an Instagram post you had not that long ago,
Speaker 3: where you said that the very first sentence of the
Speaker 3: book experienced some rewrites over a single word, the choice
Speaker 3: of the word trouble.
Speaker 5: Yeah, originally it was sorry to bother you, and then
Speaker 5: you know, actually, full disclosure, I think it was that
Speaker 5: the movie there's a movie called Sorry to Bother You.
Speaker 5: It came out, and it's like, this isn't really an issue,
Speaker 5: because that's a phrase in the world much more than
Speaker 5: it is just a movie. But it did make me
Speaker 5: think like, well, you know, I often try and take
Speaker 5: those things as like, is it an opportunity to actually
Speaker 5: look at this sentence you haven't looked at? And I
Speaker 5: was like, is there another thing people say?
Speaker 2: Well, sorry to.
Speaker 5: Trouble you, and ah, yeah, And then the word trouble
Speaker 5: is such a great word to have in a first
Speaker 5: sentence of a book. That's how about kind of transition
Speaker 5: and crisis and upending. And you know that the waters
Speaker 5: are troubled, you know, throughout.
Speaker 3: The waters are troubled, and your protagonist is willfully troubled.
Speaker 3: You know, actually choosing to trouble things is one way
Speaker 3: of kind of seeing her journey.
Speaker 5: I think right right to resist a kind of peace
Speaker 5: that has become dishonest?
Speaker 3: How often I mean, as a fan of your work
Speaker 3: in different media, how often is that impetus the desire
Speaker 3: not to settle, not to have an idea settled, the
Speaker 3: character settled, to find a way to trouble it. How
Speaker 3: often is that an engine for art? For you?
Speaker 5: It is true that there's a kind of unrest that
Speaker 5: you begin to realize is very valuable despite the discomfort
Speaker 5: of it. And it certainly you know there are major
Speaker 5: characters in this book that didn't start out that way,
Speaker 5: and I often would be like, well, why is this
Speaker 5: woman selling this quilt? Why is she still in here?
Speaker 5: Why is that scene even here? You know, and to
Speaker 5: live with that sort of unanswered question until she's either
Speaker 5: cut or in this case no, she becomes important. And
Speaker 5: then with myself, I mean, you know, with this book,
Speaker 5: I resisted the poll of having a good idea. You know,
Speaker 5: usually I'm just down on my knees looking up at
Speaker 5: the sky, being like, whenever you're ready, I'll take the
Speaker 5: lightning bolt of my next movie or book.
Speaker 2: And it comes. It actually does.
Speaker 5: I think it's through a long process of sort of
Speaker 5: openness and soul searching and research, but eventually there is
Speaker 5: this kind of moment where the story rushes in. And
Speaker 5: with all fours, I had the sense that if I
Speaker 5: just put notes on what I was interested in into
Speaker 5: a file for as long as possible, and each time
Speaker 5: a story idea came knocking, that could hold all these notes.
Speaker 5: And these notes were about gender, aging, femininity, marriage, sex, desire.
Speaker 5: You know, each time a story came knocking, I'd be like,
Speaker 5: too soon, too soon, this has this territory has to
Speaker 5: grow it has to deepen, and I think the book
Speaker 5: reflects that. Like to me, I'm like, oh yeah, this
Speaker 5: book is wider and deeper and encompasses more voices and
Speaker 5: more other women than I could have done if I'd
Speaker 5: just happily gone into a story from the get go.
Speaker 5: So it is living with that sort of troubled, unsafe feeling.
Speaker 3: When does voice come in? When do you find your
Speaker 3: character as a discreet human being with their eyes, voice
Speaker 3: and their own who is capable of surprising you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that can be a hard part.
Speaker 5: And I actually had sort of a cheat with this
Speaker 5: one because I wrote a story called The Metal Bowl
Speaker 5: that was in The New Yorker a little while before,
Speaker 5: and that was the difficult work of discovering a new voice.
Speaker 5: And it was a voice that was sort of embarrassingly
Speaker 5: normal in some ways, in the sense that like, she
Speaker 5: could be someone just like me. I could play her,
Speaker 5: you know, less distance between me and her than with
Speaker 5: my other characters. And this felt very like, I don't know,
Speaker 5: sort of short story ish in a normal way that
Speaker 5: I wasn't used to. But the effect that it had,
Speaker 5: you know, the conversations that I had after it with
Speaker 5: my women peers was so raw and interesting that I
Speaker 5: was like, oh, well, who cares? This is a great voice,
Speaker 5: and if I could just keep going? So I had,
Speaker 5: you know, more or less, she's a little bit different
Speaker 5: than that character, but.
Speaker 2: It's quite fine. Just talking about it now, I'm like,
Speaker 2: I want to keep going. I have.
Speaker 5: Actually I was writing something the other day and I
Speaker 5: was like, is this just like all fours?
Speaker 2: Two? Is this all fives?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: When is this? Do you need to get out of
Speaker 2: this voice? But it's hard to kick her.
Speaker 3: Now you've got the name of all fives. You really
Speaker 3: can't resist at either.
Speaker 2: It's literally the worst name.
Speaker 3: That is your girl band version of the Fabulous. It's
Speaker 3: a kind of ludicrously fun. The Metal Bowl is an
Speaker 3: amazing story, and there's a great line in it when
Speaker 3: the main character is reflecting on the piece of amateur
Speaker 3: pornography that she's shot, and she reflects that her payment
Speaker 3: is not for her beauty, it's not for any personal
Speaker 3: talents of any sort. It's for her naivety. And that's
Speaker 3: what they're buying from her, is that innocence that she
Speaker 3: can sell one. And that relationship between kind of naivety
Speaker 3: and reflection after the event seems to me to run
Speaker 3: powerfully through.
Speaker 5: All thoughts, right, I really I am glad you use
Speaker 5: that word naive, because I do often say that the
Speaker 5: character is a bit.
Speaker 2: More naive than me.
Speaker 5: And that was because I mean, you have to have
Speaker 5: seen around the corner of a feeling to write about.
Speaker 2: It, you know. And I changed over the course of
Speaker 2: writing the book.
Speaker 5: You know. I started when I was forty five. I'm
Speaker 5: fifty now, and there were things I really outgrew. But
Speaker 5: I thought, oh, it's so valuable. It's so valuable, like
Speaker 5: her kind of borderline misogyny, you know, in moment, like
Speaker 5: it's awful, and I you know, I worry sometimes, you know,
Speaker 5: people quote books a lot these days online and it's
Speaker 5: just some horrible thing that the narrator thought, and then
Speaker 5: it just says Miranda July. I was like, you know,
Speaker 5: don't think about that, obviously, you know, good writer would,
Speaker 5: But to let her be wrong, you know, because I
Speaker 5: think having like a woman talk about her real honest
Speaker 5: feelings about aging and desire and her own body and
Speaker 5: all these things like, well, if you're not going to
Speaker 5: be honest, like what are you doing? What is the
Speaker 5: new ground that you're breaking here? And that was the
Speaker 5: project was to like write the book I couldn't find
Speaker 5: that I wanted, and to have real kinship. I don't
Speaker 5: want to be shamed.
Speaker 2: I don't want to.
Speaker 5: Feel more vain than the writer, you know. I also
Speaker 5: want to feel like the writer grows, you know, and
Speaker 5: that there is more for me beyond anxiety.
Speaker 3: You know. You talk about honesty. I think that's where
Speaker 3: the power of the book lies is that. I think
Speaker 3: all your characters, I think have this capacity for extraordinary
Speaker 3: honesty of the soul that you don't read very often.
Speaker 3: But it's not necessarily honesty with self knowledge. They're reflecting
Speaker 3: something You're one step ahead of them at all points,
Speaker 3: but they're kind of opening up to us, and I
Speaker 3: think that's that's an incredible trick.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it feels really good at the time too, you know,
Speaker 5: to be writing and just to be unknowing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: It's a kind of openness to not try and be
Speaker 5: smart about everything, because that's not really how things are alive.
Speaker 5: Like people are trying, you know, trying to figure stuff out.
Speaker 5: It's not like she's not trying, but kind of like
Speaker 5: the dumbness of us, you know, the dumb ways we
Speaker 5: try to connect or transform or those are interesting, right,
Speaker 5: like that that's very human.
Speaker 3: I think that's right, and I think getting that relationship
Speaker 3: right between allowing for uncertainty while at the same time
Speaker 3: not letting it be coupled with shame, like that that
Speaker 3: idea of getting past shame, or that sometimes the business
Speaker 3: of living or making choices or taking risks requires you
Speaker 3: not to be kind of motivated by shame, And that
Speaker 3: seems again one of those things that's really important in
Speaker 3: this book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I started out writing it frankly just
Speaker 5: kind of embarrassed to even have to show how old.
Speaker 5: I was, like, talk about shame. I really like, you
Speaker 5: just start where you start. And in the first few
Speaker 5: months I was like, is this really a good idea?
Speaker 5: Because then I can't sort of fudge my age for
Speaker 5: a long time as people do come. And then I
Speaker 5: was like, well, but really that's such a small reward,
Speaker 5: And what writing the book offers is a much richer
Speaker 5: life than this kind of I mean, it is really
Speaker 5: what's offered to women and past a certain age is
Speaker 5: really so little that risk taking it starts to feel
Speaker 5: less risky.
Speaker 2: It's like, what am I losing?
Speaker 5: You know, I'm going to be ignored less meanly if
Speaker 5: I don't do this, I mean now in retrospect, I'm like,
Speaker 5: I kind of I think almost in every interview I
Speaker 5: sort of state my age, just because I'm trying to
Speaker 5: help people kind of orient themselves. And I also, you know,
Speaker 5: there's also quite a lot of young women reading this book,
Speaker 5: and that's part of the project too, is to allow
Speaker 5: young women to have something to connect the dots to
Speaker 5: in the future.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a cliff on the cover of the
Speaker 2: book that's.
Speaker 5: Sort of quite resonant, and I think part of the
Speaker 5: reason that this time of life feels like a sudden cliff,
Speaker 5: like you've suddenly entered a mapless place, is because it's
Speaker 5: so underdescribed, you know, because it's I guess implicitly humiliating
Speaker 5: or something that you have nothing to connect the dots
Speaker 5: too from younger ages, so you just come upon it
Speaker 5: very suddenly and you're like, I don't know what I
Speaker 5: was assuming. I guess just more like more of this,
Speaker 5: more of my young self. But I just somehow it
Speaker 5: was all going to work out. And so that that emptiness,
Speaker 5: you know, just lack of kind of imagery and even
Speaker 5: basic information about your body. You know your hormones and stuff,
Speaker 5: which literally just a few years ago, there was like
Speaker 5: endless information about your reproductive system, like everyone wanted to
Speaker 5: be involved. So it's it's actually quite useful to kind
Speaker 5: of peg these ages just to allow young women to
Speaker 5: have something to move towards.
Speaker 3: In preparation for writing this book or and they laid
Speaker 3: up to it, you spoke to a whole lot of gynecologists.
Speaker 3: You wound up doing a kind of maniplese Deep dive. Yeah,
Speaker 3: tell me a bit about that process and its relationship
Speaker 3: to the writing of the.
Speaker 2: At the time.
Speaker 5: You know, in the time that I've written the book,
Speaker 5: things began to change. So, for example, near the end
Speaker 5: of writing the book, there was a New York Times
Speaker 5: magazine cover article called Women have Been Misled about Menopause.
Speaker 2: Huge article, you.
Speaker 5: Know, very important, a lot of the information in that
Speaker 5: I knew not to not to toot my own horn,
Speaker 5: but I had also come to the same conclusion. But
Speaker 5: that article hadn't come out yet. So I did for
Speaker 5: a long time think that I needed to be the
Speaker 5: one to explain that women had been misled about menopause,
Speaker 5: And so I had the task of writing this very
Speaker 5: informational educating book that was really hard. Let me tell
Speaker 5: you then, Actually what happened was a book called what
Speaker 5: Fresh hell is this? A book about perimenopause, came out
Speaker 5: like during the pandemic. And it's a great book. It's relatable.
Speaker 5: It's the book I would want.
Speaker 2: I would not want Miranda July poorly educating me about it.
Speaker 5: And so and I actually hunted down that writer and
Speaker 5: I talked to her and she was she was like,
Speaker 5: how great that it's a novel. You know, you're free
Speaker 5: and I from that point on I took out an
Speaker 5: incredible amount of pages. And then I realized, like, oh,
Speaker 5: all these things that happen to our body are so
Speaker 5: shape shifty, you know. I mean, the reason we get
Speaker 5: influenced by googling something online and whatever ailment is because
Speaker 5: like we really have no idea. It's just filtered through
Speaker 5: all our own needs and plans and is we can't
Speaker 5: see inside ourselves. We don't even really know where our
Speaker 5: organs are.
Speaker 2: I mean I don't.
Speaker 5: And so I let periamenopause be like that, and the
Speaker 5: information to be this kind of fun house mirror.
Speaker 2: For the near. Like things loom huge.
Speaker 5: At certain points and then they get smaller and shrink
Speaker 5: when you know she's shifted through a certain phase, and
Speaker 5: that has its own strange accuracy.
Speaker 4: We'll be back in a minute.
Speaker 3: The kind of other parallel thing for your character and
Speaker 3: all fours. That's I think really important to the way
Speaker 3: she's experiencing perimenopause and and aging more generally, is she
Speaker 3: has experienced a difficult birth of her son years earlier,
Speaker 3: and the nature of that means her relationship to her
Speaker 3: own body and her relationship to mortality I think is
Speaker 3: defined in very different terms. Was that always there in
Speaker 3: the story?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I did have in those early novel two notes stuff
Speaker 5: about how trauma stays in the body. First of all,
Speaker 5: Like if this is a book about this woman's body
Speaker 5: and desire and dance and all these things, it also
Speaker 5: it also holds this. It also holds this not just trauma,
Speaker 5: but like sense of mortality, where it's like death has
Speaker 5: entered your life at a certain point and it's not leaving.
Speaker 5: You have to form a relationship with it. And maybe
Speaker 5: that's okay, you know, maybe that is leading you as
Speaker 5: much as lust to different relationships. It's tricky, you know,
Speaker 5: And a book about aging is going to have mortality
Speaker 5: in different ways, but I didn't. I'm not ready to
Speaker 5: face you know, I don't.
Speaker 2: I'm not thinking.
Speaker 5: About my own mortality enough. And yet I think by
Speaker 5: this age, you've usually been through something where you kind
Speaker 5: of get it. You get you you have a basic
Speaker 5: empathy for anyone who's been through a tragedy, like you've
Speaker 5: touched it, or you've come close, or you're whatever, spent
Speaker 5: some time in hospitals, and so that seems so important
Speaker 5: because it's part of what's meaningful about getting older too,
Speaker 5: is that you have that to connect with, even connecting
Speaker 5: with someone you know very unrelatable otherwise, you know, if
Speaker 5: you had that in common, that would be like a
Speaker 5: very spiritual joining.
Speaker 3: One of the ways it functions for your character, partly
Speaker 3: because it's tied with parenting, is the ways in which
Speaker 3: it locks her into a sense of responsibility as well.
Speaker 3: You know, when you know the fragility of the people
Speaker 3: that you love, you feel the impossibility of letting them
Speaker 3: down or being away from them. And I think particularly,
Speaker 3: I think you make the case in the novel in
Speaker 3: myriad ways, but particularly for women, that limiting of possibilities
Speaker 3: after a certain point because of the ways in which
Speaker 3: life a cruise, a sense of responsibility to others. Is
Speaker 3: it makes for a beautiful dramatic tension in the book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, it's sort of a constant crisis to be
Speaker 5: holding all of that.
Speaker 2: And and I guess I.
Speaker 5: Felt like maybe you could root for her to have
Speaker 5: some relief or some spaciousness and freedom, knowing that she
Speaker 5: was like holding death in one hand and like this
Speaker 5: precarious living child, you know, as all children are precarious.
Speaker 2: Like in the other and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that I didn't want to just kind of
Speaker 5: rehash the never boring to me the plate of the
Speaker 5: modern working woman mother. But I guess, you know, you
Speaker 5: try and do it in your own way, and it's piercing.
Speaker 5: It's it's like not a there's nothing mundane about it
Speaker 5: for her.
Speaker 3: But there is also the flip side of it is
Speaker 3: there is also this incredible joy to release, to risk,
Speaker 3: to weirdness, to breaking frame that becomes this absolutely kind
Speaker 3: of joyous thing.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think any parent, certainly any mom, knows
Speaker 5: that the sort of almost psychedelic feeling of like a
Speaker 5: childless you know, night or chapter. But the question is
Speaker 5: like how much do you trust that, Like if it
Speaker 5: contains some important part of you, you know, some part
Speaker 5: that you perhaps need to learn how to incorporate into
Speaker 5: your life. You know, this essentially like drug trip feeling well,
Speaker 5: how is that done? You know? And how is done responsibly?
Speaker 5: And is that allowed? You know what?
Speaker 2: What are the examples of how you do that?
Speaker 5: How you you bring that free sense of yourself into
Speaker 5: this family structure?
Speaker 2: Does the structure have to change?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, not just letting go of shame,
Speaker 3: but letting go of guilt, trying to work out the
Speaker 3: role for selfishness in a family unit as well the
Speaker 3: ways in which, as you say, that structure might need
Speaker 3: to change to accommodate the various ways in which people
Speaker 3: grow and change.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, it does to me still always seem staggering
Speaker 5: that we're doing marriage in the same the same way
Speaker 5: since it was invented. I mean, not going to cite
Speaker 5: a date there.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that's fact.
Speaker 3: We can put it in a post.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in eighteen sixty two, that's definitely wrong. But when
Speaker 5: you think about how different our lives look, especially as women,
Speaker 5: you think this is a funny thing to commit, Like
Speaker 5: we're going to sleep in this bed together in the
Speaker 5: same house for the rest of our lives, because that
Speaker 5: is a core tenant of the marriage, you know. And
Speaker 5: it's like if you pull it one thing, if you're like,
Speaker 5: well are we like is that best?
Speaker 2: Is that what everyone really wants? You know? Then it's
Speaker 2: sort of like, well, the whole thing is up for grabs,
Speaker 2: like why are we doing this?
Speaker 5: What do we really like about it? And what is
Speaker 5: just stuff we felt we had to do? And I
Speaker 5: mean the honesty though, that's that's required for that.
Speaker 2: It's not that my.
Speaker 5: Narrator and her husband are particularly up for the task,
Speaker 5: you know. That's the other thing. It's I love fiction
Speaker 5: compared to real life. Yeah, especially when it comes to
Speaker 5: these things like to not have to a single scene
Speaker 5: that took place in like couple's therapy, but to get
Speaker 5: across nonetheless some of the some feelings, some truths from
Speaker 5: a changing marriage in a way that can could only
Speaker 5: happen through fiction that could only happen in a scene
Speaker 5: that wasn't what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Can I ask you about dance and the ways
Speaker 3: in which dance is important to you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's kind of crept up on me.
Speaker 5: I'm often surprised to see like a really early work
Speaker 5: and realize like, oh I'm dancing, or there something very
Speaker 5: physical happening or wrestling, or it's odd because I think
Speaker 5: of myself so in my head just like these two
Speaker 5: eyes peering out of a brain, and this is just
Speaker 5: the thing I carry it around in. But I guess
Speaker 5: increasingly like the feeling of kind of having a brain
Speaker 5: all all over your body, and that that the different
Speaker 5: parts of you might have different things to say and
Speaker 5: might be able to speak better. Yeah, And and in
Speaker 5: writing the book, I often just stood up and danced,
Speaker 5: and it was it was like a very good way
Speaker 5: to give up. It was like saying, like I don't
Speaker 5: give up on myself or my ability to feel joy,
Speaker 5: which often you feel when you get up from your
Speaker 5: desk or create joy or make meaning. I just don't
Speaker 5: know anymore with language. And I think I've had times
Speaker 5: in my life when dancing with other people has felt
Speaker 5: just exquisite, you know, like something kind of alien almost,
Speaker 5: you know, at least to my kind of brain, where
Speaker 5: I'm like, what is what is this? What are we doing?
Speaker 5: It's not sex, it's maybe not even romantic, and yet
Speaker 5: it's beyond that. It's is that and then I think
Speaker 5: I also used dance in this book as a kind
Speaker 5: of stand in for all art, including writing, in the
Speaker 5: sense that part of maybe coming to midlife for me
Speaker 5: Miranda July is realizing, like, oh, I've dedicated my whole
Speaker 5: life to this, like to making things and to taking
Speaker 5: in the things other people have made, and what is
Speaker 5: it like? And can I now, at this age, have
Speaker 5: I earned the right to speak about it, to describe
Speaker 5: what it is for me and what it is that
Speaker 5: happens when we're together watching something and I in moments
Speaker 5: it is specifically about dance, and at moments you could
Speaker 5: swap out music or art or you know, like it's
Speaker 5: those moments are probably the least fiction y. You know,
Speaker 5: if people want to accuse me of writing for myself,
Speaker 5: I think it's really those moments more than anything about
Speaker 5: like marriage or anything. It's that I just decided that
Speaker 5: was interesting enough.
Speaker 3: You know. The other thing that strikes me about dance
Speaker 3: is about that idea of release. Like professional dances, skilled dances,
Speaker 3: obviously there's incredible control, there's incredible kind of but dance
Speaker 3: as a space that goes beyond the eyes in the
Speaker 3: front of the brain is just about letting go and
Speaker 3: not being controlled seems very singular to me, I know.
Speaker 5: Right, and I do feel like like so for me anyways,
Speaker 5: the way I dance, it's always improv right, I mean
Speaker 5: I probably couldn't do the same thing twice if I
Speaker 5: had to, which no one's asking me to. And for me,
Speaker 5: the best of writing is that too. Like when people
Speaker 5: comment on like the humor or something, I always want
Speaker 5: to try and explain like, well, it's improv right, I mean,
Speaker 5: it's only funny because it came to me in the
Speaker 5: moment it was improv and then it whatever, you rewrite
Speaker 5: it and whatever, but it still remains keeps the energy
Speaker 5: of the sort of live thing that is funny, And
Speaker 5: dance is always like that, you know, maybe not funny,
Speaker 5: but it's always new, like this, kind of like carving
Speaker 5: and endlessly.
Speaker 3: You've been creative in the public sphere for a long
Speaker 3: time now, and so when thinking about questions of aging
Speaker 3: when writing this book, how do you feel about having
Speaker 3: creatively aged? Do you engage with your earlier work? Do
Speaker 3: you look at it and think I would never write
Speaker 3: that the same way now, or do you look at
Speaker 3: it with a sense of kind of wonder at who
Speaker 3: you were when you produce.
Speaker 4: That earlier work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a nice question.
Speaker 5: I don't look back much, to be honest, but if
Speaker 5: there's an occasion that, like, you know, one of my
Speaker 5: early short stories, I need to look at it. I think,
Speaker 5: for one thing, with those stories in particular, I kind
Speaker 5: of marvel that I just wrote them. They were the
Speaker 5: kind of easy, like I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 5: I didn't know that it could be hard. I did
Speaker 5: them pretty quickly, you know, not to say I wasn't
Speaker 5: rewriting and stuff like that, but the initial first drafts,
Speaker 5: and that'll always be kind of special to me to
Speaker 5: know that, like, well, only could happen like that for
Speaker 5: a little while, but you got it, and it's here
Speaker 5: in a book. And I've never made a perfect thing,
Speaker 5: so I'm always very aware of the like sort of
Speaker 5: percentage of what's right to wrong. I don't really watch
Speaker 5: my movies ever again after they've premiered, because who can
Speaker 5: bear it. But I'm just so happy that I've gotten
Speaker 5: to keep doing it.
Speaker 2: I mean, that was all I wanted.
Speaker 5: So I think looking back is often just a feeling
Speaker 5: of that I'm like, ah, like some road behind you
Speaker 5: indicates like you got what you want it, Yeah, to
Speaker 5: keep going.
Speaker 3: Miranda Julia's new novel All Fours, is available wherever you
Speaker 3: buy your books. Her short stories have appeared widely, including
Speaker 3: in The New Yorker, and are also worth checking out.
Speaker 3: And that New York Times piece you mentioned women have
Speaker 3: been Misled about menopause. That was by Susan Dominus. There's
Speaker 3: a link to it in the show notes.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite
Speaker 1: interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with
Speaker 1: Malcolm Knox and Louise Milligan. And if you don't want
Speaker 1: to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This,
Speaker 1: you can serve for it wherever you listen to podcasts.