It began with clocks. Then old dolls with cracked faces, typewriters, cameras, Victorian scrap books, animal skulls, and California pottery. Last month it was cobalt blue bottles. Currently, it’s “death assemblages,” communities of different organisms fossilized into a single rock. I’ve been digging them out of the sand at the beach since the last storm. Some of these rocks are covered with beautiful calligraphy in a strange language I can almost decipher. These are the ones I take home.
While my collections might seem random, there is a unifying theme. Every object holds a story. Each has passed through some sequence of events before it came into my possession carrying within it the latent memories of its history. My impulse is to coax forth the ghosts of the past that inhabit them.
My mother’s hearing loss started with the dissolution of high-pitched sounds, such as the subtle trilling of the migrating sandhill cranes where she lives near Waco, Texas. Soon high-frequency consonants melted into the din. Then whole sentences. What began as an irritation became a daily hindrance to social interactions. When we tried a new lunch spot, I realized just how isolating her hearing loss had become—especially in restaurants, where it can be difficult to hear over the din of talk-shouting conversation and blasting music. She couldn’t hear me praise the hand-formed huarache and missed the soft-spoken server’s offer of more iced tea, some dessert, or the check. The few feet separating us felt like miles; she retreated out of frustration and embarrassment, resigning herself to eating in near silence.
A good long conversation on screen isn’t a spontaneous construction but a deliberate exchange shaped by multiple creative minds. Each line of dialogue is honed to its most poignant expression. The entire sequence is made to feel like one perfectly calibrated whole. The initial chit-chat and personal shorthand is minimized. The dramatic revelations are heightened. The intrusions from the outside world enter the scene only as required. But the feeling of being heard, or somehow revealed, can be just as intense as in real life.
Flowers are often coded as sweetly feminine, especially in fashion, but their historical use is far stranger and more subversive. Before I became a writer, I trained as an herbalist, falling deep under the spell of medieval herbs, with their bewitching floral associations. Flowers had once formed a kind of secret language, an arcane code that only an adept could read. Bouquets, paintings, even dresses could carry a hidden message, by way of the humble plants they contained.
Historically, menopause has rarely been treated with compassion, more the butt of jokes—the hot flashes! the dryness!—and simultaneously something women must hide, elegantly.
Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, is hyper-aware of this way we’ve failed women. The novel is a funny, sexy, and loving portrait of a forty-five-year-old woman’s journey to becoming herself, to accepting sexual freedom, and to lifting up the women around her in the process.
Tan is always wondering what the birds are seeing, feeling, thinking — about the world, about one another and about her, the quiet giant who feeds them and is always watching.
This is the book’s signature blend: ardent and undying curiosity, mixed with equal parts wit, courage and respect for her (flighty) subjects.