Miranda July's Weird Road Trip

The author's midlife-crisis novel is full of estrangement, eroticism, and whimsy.

- Jordan Kisner

Back when the word weird (or, in the spelling of the day, wyrd ) was first commonly used in English, it was not an adjective but a noun, and it functioned as a synonym for fate. A person wasn’t weird; instead a person had a weird, which was theirs alone, determined by forces beyond control and understanding. Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth helped transform the word, linking its supernatural connotations with an aesthetic quality. Those three crones know the future—they seem to know everything, standing astride the temporal and the miraculous as they do. In them, the old and the new weirds meet: They are creatures in touch with the workings of fate, but they are also inexplicable, creepy, queer, spooky, deviant from the norm.

I have been thinking about this word and its overtones since reading All Fours, the second novel by the idiosyncratic interdisciplinary artist Miranda July, probably best known for her work as a filmmaker. As I made my way through the book, I kept remarking to myself, and writing in the margins, “This is so weird.” That’s not a bad thing, in my personal lexicon, though in this instance I was registering a persistent feeling of bafflement. July’s middle-aged protagonist—a “semifamous” artist known for her early multi-genre success (who, like July, has worked across film, writing, and performance)—consistently acted on instincts I didn’t understand and made choices I couldn’t imagine anyone making. As a narrator, she was not just unreliable but unpredictable, unsettling, shimmeringly strange.