by Miranda July
First published 2024
A semi-famous artist announces that she is driving across the country, Los Angeles to New York. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and her child at home, she takes an exit she had not planned on, checks into a nondescript motel off the freeway, and stays. The cross-country trip never happens. The journey she takes instead is closer and much stranger, run out of a rented room she could drive home from in half an hour. She is forty-five. She has the career, the marriage, the child, and a growing suspicion that the shape of all three was settled without her. In the motel she starts taking that shape apart, in her sexual life, her romantic life, and the domestic arrangement still running back in LA. Miranda July writes it as first-person comedy, broad and physical and entirely unembarrassed about wanting things. What the artist is after is not an escape from her family. It is a different kind of freedom, and the book declines to make wanting it look tidy.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: dark, emotional, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: missing-person, unreliable-narrator
400 pages · Paperback · Canongate Books
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness