ALL FOURS by Miranda July 

Can one person hold two or more identities side by side and skip lanes inside a life? If you’re the narrator in All Fours, the answer is yes. A semi-famous artist from LA leaves her husband and young son to drive cross-country to NYC for work. Thirty minutes into the drive, she exits the freeway, checks into a hotel, redecorates the room, and becomes obsessed with her decorator’s husband. I loved this novel for its irreverence to inherited roles and the quirky and genius way July’s characters move through the world to show us how it’s done. Happy endings are in the imagination.

Favorite line(s): “What you see is what you get,” these women said about themselves. 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.

“Some people might say a kaleidoscope shouldn’t get married, at least not to someone so traditional,” Jordi had said when I told her this theory.

“But I have a traditional side, too,” I said. “Must I be entirely that to marry? Do we ask this of men? No, that would be humiliating for them since they get their sense of self from their work and from the power and majesty with which they walk through this world as a self-owning creature. Same.”

One day when we were both ready I would reveal lmy whole self to Harris; this would be like presenting a sweater knitted in secrecy.

Oh. My. God, he would say. How did you find time to do this?!

Just here and there, whenever I could. Sometimes even with you right there beside me.

I didn’t even know you could knit!

There are a lot of things you don’t know about me; that’s the whole point of this seater metaphor.

Of course if you’re knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so hug that it simply can’t be hidden.

 

MARGO’S GOT MONEY PROBLEMS by Rumi Thorpe

Margo becomes pregnant with her English professor’s baby. Everyone tells her not to keep it, but at 19, she wants to love and be loved unconditionally. Young, naïve, strapped for cash, and nursing a newborn, Margo decides to start an OnlyFans site with the help of two sex workers. Her father, an ex-wrestler and drug addict, moves in with her to help with rent and childcare and offer advice on how to make an audience fall in love with you. The cash comes, but is it too high a price when the baby’s father decides he wants custody? Humorous and heartwarming, the reader roots for Margo from page one.  

Favorite line(s):  The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.

 

THE SANDWICH by Catherine Newman

I loved this novel about a family renting the same ramshackle cottage on Cape Cod for the past twenty years. That’s a lot of nostalgia inside one space, but the narrator, a 50-something long-married mother of two, doesn’t dwell on old memories but in making new ones. She’s in love with her life, and for the week they’re all together by god, she will make the most of her time with her husband, two grown children, and her elderly mom and dad. Secrets are revealed, emotions revisited, and the task of being human and making hard decisions when shame won’t leave after years of negotiation. It’s all a sandwich—the in-between place the narrator must live in and accept. And she’s always making them, sandwiches, that is, for her family. 

Favorite line(s): I closed my eyes in the car, put a hand on my belly inside of which was our stilled child—a withered little peach, the blush off its cheeks. There was something in my brain like a dial tone and I wondered if I would die. But I wouldn’t, of course. I’d get home and boil noodles like every grieving mother everywhere.

 

Robin Gaines