She took one interviewer rug shopping. She brought another along on her search for a coral-colored toilet. For one story, she did a photo shoot in her own refinished kitchen and struck a pose on her own velvet couch, which might have felt rare and intimate if she hadn’t gone ahead and done another. Miranda July, who’s made movies and performance art and all kinds of other things, agreed to these meet-ups because she’s promoting a novel, All Fours; since most authors with a new book ask journalists to meet them at, like, a café, the fact that July was letting her profilers enter her Echo Park home and watch her buy furniture probably made them feel as if they were really getting the scoop. Now it looks more like they were drafted into co-creating a project: the very public divorce of Miranda July.

The divorce is both real — she’s spent the past couple years splitting from fellow filmmaker Mike Mills, and the home she’s shopping for is hers alone — and a font of inspiration for All Fours. The book’s Venn diagram of art and life and niche celebrity has resulted in a bit of a media blitz. Even if you only know the bare facts about July, you will wonder how much of the novel is true: It follows a woman living in L.A. who self-describes as a little bit famous for making work in various mediums. She’s going through the motions, lovingly raising her kid while idling in the valley between creative projects and stuck in a ho-hum marriage to a man. Everything’s fine, but this character does not thrive on fine; she needs ecstatic highs to feel truly alive. Unexpectedly, she finds that when she pretends to light off on a cross-country road trip — and secretly checks in to a nearby motel instead.

What follows is a kind of picaresque of desire through greater L.A., in which the narrator meets and becomes obsessed with a married younger man, masturbates a zillion times, enters perimenopause, gets a girlfriend, and blows $20,000 on renovating a motel room she does not own. And the book is good! Some might even say, despite the motel thing, relatable! In her review for Vulture, the critic Christine Smallwood admits that there was a scene set at an OB/GYN that made her think “for a moment that July had been reading my texts.” In an essay about the book for the Cut, features writer Emily Gould recalls feeling “a pang of recognition” during a scene where the narrator’s barely holding it together while playing LEGOs with her kid: “What parent can’t relate to having to conceal one’s inconvenient emotional meltdowns from a kid who just wants to show you the cool thing they’ve built in the corner of the living room?”

July has said that she was annoyed when people assumed she was like the character she played in her breakout film, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she also wrote and directed. But that’s because she was acting. At other times she’s encouraged slippage, greasing the boundary between what is “art” and what is “real,” and bamboozling her audience. In 2020, she and the actress Margaret Qualley made an Instagram series in which they acted the parts of former lovers who were engaging in some unhealthy long-distance pandemic intimacy. (“Have you been thinking about me?” asks Qualley in one video, eyes watery. “Of course,” says July. Qualley’s voice quivers: “But not every second of every day?”) Comments on the videos were either “I am sobbing” or “What is this?” That year, July told New York writer E. Alex Jung that it was “queer” between them but nonsexual. Later she’d say they were really in love.

All Fours includes a similar kind of semi-chaste longing between the narrator and that married younger man. This repetition on a theme could be seen as confirmation that the Qualley thing wasn’t strictly fiction, or that none of it is real, or it all kind of is. Just like haggling for a rug during an interview could be seen as performance or practicality or — as my colleague suggested — a clever way to write off your home décor as a business expense. (File that rug under “publicity costs.”) Whatever tricks All Fours is turning, at least one of them feels completely new: I’ve never seen so many critics mention perimenopause at once.