A Field Guide To July
Mirandas - a sentimental (& probably not quite factually accurate) journey
First of all, it feels weird to write a vaguely frivolous (who are we kidding: 100% frivolous) newsletter while seismic changes are happening in the election cycle, but I always said that if you grew up where I grew up (a less than ideal geopolitical location in a particularly unfortunate time window) you either become a total news junkie (I remember my parents watching a minimum 4 sets of news every day from different outlets with different agendas to try and cull some sort of objective information about what was going on) OR you become someone who avoids news at all times and mostly all costs.
No points for guessing which of the two I became.
But also, in retrospect, I chose to live in America (even when America wasn’t particularly choosing to have me) and a huge part of that decision was, well, books and magazines and movies and television. How else do teenagers make life-altering decisions? Actually don’t answer that.
And I feel very lucky that I am exactly the right age for a bunch of truly seminal, landscape changing American culture hit me at the *right* (read: deeply relatable) time. I was in high school with “Dawson’s Creek”, I was in college with “Felicity”, my transition from a teenager to an adult was filled with emerging-era Ryan Murphy (“Popular”! OMG!) and baby Lee Pace / Brian Fuller collaborations (“Wonderfalls”, which was the weirdest, funniest show on network TV bar none at the time, and then “Pushing Daisies” - though I am still a little sad Lee never quite made it into Fuller’s ultimate party that was “Hannibal”) etc etc.
BUT I DIGRESS! (Lee Pace will do that to you) Without belaboring the point too much (too late!) - all this is to say, I love it when art and entertainment truly speaks to me. I love it when I can relate easily, but my brain and empathy are also forced to expand a little in the process.
And in the realm of right art hitting you at the right time Miranda July’s “You And Me And Everyone We Know” is the film that, without a doubt, changed my life. I was 25 years old, dating someone who kept moving further and further away from me (eventually I became a person that could take a hint, but this was not how I operated at 25 - zero hints taken, preferring maximum delusional optimism), and with this someone in LA, I was in LA as much as my credit card balance would allow. I also don’t have a driver’s license (still! but especially not then) so I often went with friends, and most often with my friend Laura, who now actually lives there and wrangles Sabrina Carpenter videos into reality for a living (she was always going to end up in LA and Sabrina Carpenter adjacent, me - not so much).
At the time Laura was a touring musician (she would go on to be in the Postal Service reunion tour and Bright Eyes records - I love to brag about my friends) that was also in HR at Catholic University here in DC, and I was a baby architect. We had zero money, but what we had we spent on terry cloth shorts and boy briefs from American Apparel (in the immortal words of another friend, Haley: “You don’t need game if you don’t wear pants”) and old school photo booths.
So anyway, on one of these particular occasions, we’re in LA, visiting our friend Rachel (who we met on MySpace, which was a totally regular thing to do, I promise) who is a GFX wizard in knee high socks and lives in this DTLA warehouse (this is 2000s so DTLA was just Downtown then and didn’t have much to show for it) where there is a giant trampoline in the middle of the room and people literally skateboard in and out of their bedrooms. We go see museums and the Griffith observatory and shows at the Short Stop and movies. Postal Service is playing a lot while we drive around (cosmic premonitions right there?).
So, that sort of sets the scene. We don’t live in LA, but we like to think we know it. In a way that isn’t tourist-y but, you know, kind of real: Koreatown and weird tikki bars and secret-ish hotel shows and whatnot. I genuinely don’t think we are ever west of Sunset and Cahuenga (and we only go there for Hotel Cafe and Amoeba records - I am aging myself SO HARD right now).
And “Me And You And Everyone We Know” comes out around that time. And we go see it. I am pretty sure maybe not in LA, but even if we did see it in DC, it feels like OUR LA.
And OMG my brain is immediately reassembled - WHY IS THIS MOVIE LIKE A POEM AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM AND WHO IS THIS WOMAN AND WHERE HAS SHE BEEN MY WHOLE LIFE?
We make DIY Back-and-forth-forever t-shirts (IYKYK), and I spend all my time digging out Miranda July stuff - random zines and low quality videos and then…
I get my dirty paws on her Learning To Love You More website which to this day remains the most perfect destination on the internet (to me) - a series of 70 assignments (ranging from “Lipsync to a Shy Neighbor’s Garth Brooks Cover” to “Paint a Portrait of Your Friend’s Desires” to “Describe Your Ideal Government” (ha!) etc) all intended to get you in touch with your creativity and increase confidence in being part of this world - AND THEN, in a totally miraculous and unjaded way, PEOPLE DID IT AND THEY POSTED THEIR EFFORTS ON THE WEBSITE (this one family - 7 of them - did all 70 each and … I mean, how cool/vaguely cultish is that? And because this is the 2000s, and Miranda July - they have their own section on the website).
And July’s first book of short stories “No One Belongs Here More Than You” comes out at around the same time and it is PERFECTION. I feel these stories - the humor, the sadness, the isolation, the tenderness, the hot pink cover (it became very yellow in paperback). I am not a short story reader, per se, but I proceed to think about these regularly over the next 19 years.
And within a year of this year (2005 into 2006), my life changes.
I realize that I am never going to date that person in LA forever. And I am free to love where I live and people I am meeting, because all of a sudden my life isn’t about an exit strategy. I decide to find beauty in everything (to include pre-Obama D.C. which felt like a very big challenge to me at the time). I realize I miss being in art school, miss making things with other people, miss the giddiness of a thing you made making a connection to someone (architecture is fine, but the return on emotional investment is not very high). So I start this shitty little blog/ island of misfit toys company and it becomes my life for the next 15 years (12 of which, which still feels like a medium sized miracle, a full time job, with health insurance and everything).
In 2009 Washington Post writes an article about this website/company/thing (we started producing a comedy festival, having never produced anything and it somehow warrants the cover of the Style section) and in it, my “clipped cadence” and visual energy were compared to a Bond girl and my “quirky POV” was compared to July’s and it is TO THIS DAY #1 THING I’D PUT ON MY RESUME, IF I HAD A RESUME (living a life that doesn’t require having a resume is a pretty solid way to honor the spirit of Miranda July, and come to think of it - Bond girls everywhere too)
And over this time, Miranda July who is exactly 6 years older than me, a perfect amount of time to process something and turn it into art just in time for me to find it, keeps making things. Things that took many different shapes and forms, but were ALWAYS art. Some are great (I *loved* Kajillionaire) some are challenging (I was medium on “The First Bad Man”), and some were fun (I was delighted by the Uniqlo collab) and marries Mike Mills (who made my favorite non-Miranda July LA movie “Beginners”) and I still email and text with my friends every time something of hers happens (my friend Emily, in particular, was instrumental in making me pay attention to the recent-ish instagram skits and dance videos - the woman embraces EVERY medium she goes for).
And then, after what felt a quiet-ish couple of years (the “Miranda July” coffee table retrospective book, which is amazing, nonwithstanding), “All Fours” came out. I obviously pre-ordered it because I am loyal to a fault, and while my husband (who is also a fan, which is a big reason why I love him) got his hands on it first, I watched the internet lose its mind over it.
It felt both great and, if I am honest, it also kind of sucked (she was mine! keep your non-July-completist-30-year-old-substack hands off of her) and I found myself delaying the reading of it. The book became an instant NY Times Best Seller, Miranda did a press tour that would make Glen Powell feel like a slouch, people kept texting me to ask if I read it, and I just kept staring at the book.
Then, I realized: I was supposed to read it for my birthday! Duh!
And so a week or so a go, as I was turning 44 - I did. Now, I want to say this before everything else: about 4 pages in, I decided to not read it as a novel, but as a piece of art (writing as performance!) or maybe even a manifesto? But once I got over that mental hump - it really hit all my pressure points.
I don’t actually feel anyone under 35 should be reading it now (though everyone should be buying it), and I don’t think anyone should try to discuss it with their spouse (we cordially agreed to disagree about what the point of the book was), but WOW. It was, almost 20 years after “Me and You And Everyone We Know” another true moment of art finding me (me!) at the exact right time.
The description for perimenopause feeling like falling off a cliff (during, what is considered to be, theoretically, the most productive time in an American worker’s life (no points for guessing which gender decided that)) hit me like a bag of bricks.
The line “In a patriarchal society a woman’s body is not really her own until she is past child bearing age” which is just tossed in there casually, is the line I needed to read exactly 7 years a go when having a child felt like the only logical extension of my adulthood, and also today when I know with certainty my adulthood won’t involve it.
The feeling that you have, seemingly out of nowhere, a wall, creatively, developmentally, energy-wise, but being ashamed to share it with the world, felt IMMEDIATELY relatable.
Being an adult but, at the same time, feeling as chaotic as ever and understanding that you are, maybe, performing your entire life?
Hiding in plain sight and (irresponsibly? responsibly? necessarily?) spending money made from partcipating in capitalist society on non-practical beauty as some sort of a inner pseudo-therapeutic experiment was something that is a perfect description of the last few years of my life.
And all of a sudden, the signs were everywhere that without knowing, I needed this book/piece of art, and again, July delivered, and the world around me started to click into place.
This is the time of my life when I get texts from my friends that say: “I am in a store, and they’re playing dance music from 2006-2008, and I am weeping inconsolably. Is this perimenopause?” Or “I am booking a ticket to XYZ so I can spend my birthday away from my (beloved) family ”. Or “I have worked my whole life to be here, and now that I am HERE, I wonder: Is this it? Is this the rest of my life?”. Click.
This is the year I realized that my Mother had a GENUINE renaissance in her late 40s/early 50s, and was probably at the most tired right before then. Click. Click.
In a whatsapp chat I keep with 2 friends mainly about what we’re reading one of them said “I want to write and essay about how impactful “All Fours” felt” and I told her “I am actually going to do it” (well, maybe not an essay per se, but a rambling newsletter will have to do). Click click click.
And just as this is happening, a woman who became a 32nd Attorney General of California at the age of 47, is running for President at 59. Proving, as those “All Fours” survey quotes said that on the other side of this weepy, exhausted, shape-shifting era is, is a whole other ass-kicking, name-taking, dare-I-say (?) -bratty person waiting to come out. MIC DROP (AND ROLL) CLICK.
So here we are, a day late with this newsletter, but also just on time to remind ourselves that:
Art is just the best.
Art can, in fact, help.
