“It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”
We listen and we don’t judge.
We don’t judge when a woman tells her family that she is driving across the country from California to New York City and, instead, stops in a town 30 minutes from her home and proceeds to hole up in a motel room for a few weeks.
We don’t judge when this same woman lies to her family the whole time about where she is and perpetuates the falsehood that she is actually on the road or having fun with friends in NYC when in reality, she could make it home for dinner.
We don’t judge (actually, I did judge and roll my eyes hard) when this woman spends $20,000 on her modest roadside motel room, hiring a decorator to turn it into a luxurious high-end room complete with new carpet, tile, furniture, and tonka bean-scented toiletries. (I’ll come back to this one…)
You know, I get it. If you’re a parent, you’d be lying to us and yourself if you said you never thought about taking a break, running away from home for a bit, not telling anyone where you are and just having some peace and quiet and time to remember who you used to be before marriage and children took over your existence. Women especially tend to be the ones who are expected to suppress who they really are or want to be for the good of the family, their own hopes and dreams becoming the sacrificial lamb for the good of the family.
Our forty-five year old narrator (we never get a name for her) experiences this early on in her relationship with her future husband. As she tells us from her own recollection, when she tried to tell him about her stripper past and he clearly does not want to hear about it, she suppresses that side of herself to make him happy. When we meet her, she is years down the road into marriage and with a young child. She lives in a home that her husband owned and had decorated before he ever met and married her, and she never changed anything to suit her own personality and never seems to have been encouraged to do so, her only contribution is a set of 10 spoons she bought when they happened to keep losing the ones they had. We also learn that our nameless narrator is a creative type of some sort with a low level of celebrity. There are hints of a writing career and success over several mediums, although early promise seems to have never taken her over the edge to superstardom. Maybe a poet, a novelist, a screenwriter? We don’t know exactly, but she continues to work in a converted garage workspace on projects, shedding her creative persona before she goes back into the house each evening to again become what she hopes is the perfect wife and mother. She is well-known enough in her circle but still unknown enough that many of the people she meets on her journey don’t know who she is. We don’t judge when, in this small town where she eventually builds her gilded nest, she meets a handsome young man, Davey, who pays her a great deal of attention and she is allowed to be herself. We don’t judge when, because of this young man, she decides to stay in the motel one night, then one more night, and then a few weeks, basking in his attention and the freedom she is experiencing in her own soul. The narrator falls in love with Davey but also with this side of herself, a side she hasn’t seen in quite awhile.
Eventually, time has run its course and our narrator has to return home. I won’t spoil the affair for you. I will say that it’s not the affair you might expect it to be. (In fact, the whole book is not what I expected it to be.) Our narrator is different when she returns home. She has left the freedom to be herself behind and now has to face the real challenge, “the whole rest of my life.” She alternatively cries and keeps to herself and is robotic when interacting with her family. When eventually pressed by her husband about what happened on her trip that caused these changes, she blames menopause. Lo and behold, she goes to the doctor for a regular appointment and finds out she is, in fact, starting menopause. Haunted by an account from a friend about how her libido will die due to menopause, our narrator panics and decides to experience as much life as she can before that happens. (Insert eye roll here.) She also has a difficult family history with menopause – both her grandmother and aunt killed themselves during menopause, allegedly unable to face aging and the loss of attractiveness. In a conversation with her father about this, he mentions that the two women were just living in a dreamworld that someone would come and sweep them off of their feet. When the narrator asks why he says that was a dream, her father (a man deep in his own mental health crisis) responds, “‘They were too old.’” Menopause is set up to the narrator as the end of life as women know it.
We end up following the narrator as she tries to both live with and outrun this biological clock, but that’s not the least of what she is dealing with in her life. We learn throughout the book that our narrator and her husband had a difficult birth with their child, a fraught situation in which most children don’t survive, but their child miraculously did. Our narrator still has PTSD from that experience that haunts her to this day. We also learn that our narrator has a bisexual past, but her husband seems strangely unthreatened about his wife having affairs with women, relieved almost at the thought of her with girlfriends and not boyfriends.
There were elements of this book that I thought would go one way and ended up going another.
About that motel room – her husband knows she’s been paid 20k for a commercial ad that licensed a line she wrote. Allegedly, that money is funding her trip across the country. When her hotel room is finished, the decorator is paid by Venmo and an old-fashioned hand-written check. Do the narrator and her husband not share a bank account? I really thought that payment would be the clue that tips her husband off to the fallacy but it never comes up again.
And the initial “affair”? Davey and the narrator have an intense, passionate love, and the narrator spends a great deal of energy in trying to recapture that, making some head-scratching and cringeworthy choices along the way.There is a very distinct King Charles III and Queen Camilla moment that is the height of cringe. It’s meant to display a level of intimacy, but was just a no for me. (If you don’t know that story, consider yourself lucky.)
There’s a lot going on in this book that never quite comes together into a bigger story. Everything just stays sort of separately messy. The premise of the book seemed almost titillating, like a mid-life sexual awakening a la Anais Nin, but sadly didn’t develop that way. It is a National Book Award finalist, so there’s that. When Eat, Pray, Love came out, I loved it. That book gets a lot of heat, but, for me, it came to me at a time in my life when I needed to read it. Critics, however, see it as a wallowing tale of self-pity and entitlement. I get it now, because that’s how All Fours comes across to me.
I think I’m just too old for this book. The affair with Davey had a childish middle-school element to it. The comments and attitude toward menopause did not ring true for me, and I just wanted to give the narrator a good shake and tell her to get over herself. The narrator’s journey, I hope, was intended to be empowering but, for me, just seemed sad. There were glimmers that she might step outside of herself and make some good commentary on how women suppress so much of themselves, including their own success, without notice or recognition, but the main character wallows in her own choices, remaining in stasis in a so-called “progressive” marital relationship. At one point, after her affair in the motel room, the narrator sort of tells her husband about a fan she met on the road (it’s really a small story about Davey), and her husband scoffs about fans who think they know her. In her head, she fumes at her husband, thinking, “The real me is in my work. Any fan of my work knows me better than you do.” But she doesn’t say that, just continues making pancakes and letting her husband take her power. In another part, the narrator has a little epiphany about aging and menopause, thinking that, instead of a death of something or a life of bitterness and regret, the choice could be “a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising.” For me, that just never seemed to be realized within the story. There is some redemption at the end, I think, but you don’t really get enough information to walk away with a satisfactory finale. Maybe that’s the intent. I have loved some ending where you walk away from a tale, left to draw your own conclusions. Gone With the Wind and The Sopranos come to mind. This is not those, however, and All Fours left me glad to leave all of the characters behind.