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Few books manage to top the New York Times bestseller list and other overseas charts while also generating genuine enthusiasm from literary reviewers and collecting nominations for all sorts of literary awards, including the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction. The novel *All Fours* by the versatile artist Miranda July has achieved this remarkable feat. So what is this book, which has so captivated both professional critics and the general reading public, actually about? The narrator of the novel, a moderately famous artist experiencing an acute midlife crisis, decides to take a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. She says goodbye to her husband and child, but half an hour into her journey, on a sudden impulse, she turns off the motorway, checks into a nondescript motel, and her journey takes a completely different and utterly unexpected direction. The novel tells the story of a woman's search for a new kind of freedom, and does so sarcastically, with perfect comedic timing, with an untameable need to explore the greatest of intimacies, and with a tangible delight in pushing boundaries. This book—part grotesque farce, part tender text about the transformations in the sexual, romantic, and family life of a forty-five-year-old artist—surpasses all expectations while exposing our fixed ideas about a woman's life. In her novel, Miranda July has taken intimately familiar material and kneaded it into a text that is compelling and alive through and through.