All Fours & California Sourdough

A truly unique book from Miranda July and a bright, tomato-filled fermented loaf

Nov 10, 2024

Hello and welcome to Good Book/Good Bread!

Last issue, I included Miranda July’s All Fours in the “What I’m looking forward to” section of the newsletter, where I also list new music I’m excited about and bread recipes I want to dig my hands into. The next day I received a message from a friend, saying she couldn’t wait to see what bread I would pair with All Fours. It made me laugh, because the book dives into expansive themes like aging, death, desire, betrayal, and does so with a few explicit and wild sex scenes. I wasn’t sure how I could connect a humble loaf of bread to it. But then I spent all week thinking about how the book made me feel, and what kind of bread that feeling could translate to.

Read below for my recap of All Fours, and to learn why I baked the bread I did.

Good Book: All Fours by Miranda July (2024)

In a Nutshell

The unnamed protagonist of All Fours is a semi-famous artist who decides to embark on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York City. Then, she will spend a few weeks by herself in the city working on creative projects. It’s a big deal for her to leave her husband and child behind, and she’s never been on a long drive like this by herself. About 30 minutes after leaving her front door, she gets off the freeway to get gas, and encounters a younger man, Davey, their eyes locking through the glass as he cleans her windshield. Instead of continuing on her journey, she checks into a roadside motel and has Davey’s interior designer wife redecorate her rented room. She spends three weeks there, and her perception of her life becomes entirely unmoored as she has an intense emotional affair with Davey. All the while, she communicates with her husband as if she is on the planned trip. When she returns to Los Angeles, she has to decide if anything about her life still makes sense. All Fours is a hilarious, bizarre, and sometimes stressful-to-read story about a woman reinventing herself in the unlikeliest of places.

All Fours in Three Words

Funny, absurd, honest

Three Things I liked about All Fours

Sharp turn from a typical journey narrative
All Fours lulls you into believing you’ll be following a cross-country adventure. Our protagonist is nervous, knowing driving to New York City will be challenging both as it is something she hasn’t done before, and because it will be the longest she has been away from her eight-year-old child. There are preparations, maps, routes, and towns written down that will be safe and interesting for her to stop in. She makes plans with friends in New York City, envisioning luxurious days spent immersing herself in the east coast art scene. Stopping off the freeway on the outskirts of Los Angeles is such a blunt and unsatisfying start to the book that it made me pay attention, knowing this book wasn’t going to follow a conventional structure.
Keeps ramping up
Once our narrator starts to upend her life, each decision she makes takes the hilarity and bizarreness of this book to a new level. We watch her make decision after decision that continue to push both her boundaries and those of the people around her. It reminded me of the feeling I had watching the recent movie The Substance. While All Fours isn’t body horror or gory like the movie, both gave me a similar feeling of “oh my god I can’t believe this went there.”
Contrast between self-obsession and collective wisdom
I typically find books that have a tremendous amount of introspection from the narrator hard to take. At a certain point, I can’t handle endless reflection and self-exploration. I just need something real to happen. The protagonist in All Fours was a fascinating character because she certainly is consumed with thinking about herself and her life for so much of the story. At the same time, when she is trying to work through her beliefs about her life and what it means, she reaches out to her community of other women for their insights, experiences, and guidance. I found that to be such an interesting combination and made me like her more.

Notable Quote

“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”

Good Bread: California Sourdough

Why this bread for this book?

Second question: what is California sourdough? Well, I made it up. Reading All Fours, California and its climate seemed so omnipresent, especially held in contrast to New York City, the destination the main character never makes it to. When I imagined her three weeks spent on the outskirts of Los Angeles, I pictured her under the bright midday sun and an open sky. And as dark as some of her actions during that time were, they illuminated a lot of truths her and her husband were denying about their marriage. I thought that idea of lightness and sun would be a good fit for a bread for All Fours, and so folded in turmeric to give the crumb a golden hue. Tart sun-dried tomatoes seemed like the perfect California ingredient to round out the recipe.

Recipe

I used my go-to sourdough recipe, which is from The Kitchn, linked here. After the third fold, I added a quarter-cup of turmeric, and one-and-a-half cups of julienned sun-dried tomatoes. I did an overnight proof in the fridge, and the resulting loaves were extra tangy from the longer fermentation time. Next time I might add some lemon zest or rosemary.