Provoking offbeat sexual acts, challenges the binary of marriage and explores sexuality in perimenopause.  All Fours is tender, hilarious and sexy. A semi-famous artist announces her  pan to drive cross-country, from LA  to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey. Miranda July in All Fours, a 45-year-old “semi-famous” artist who remains unnamed locks eyes with the young man who’s squeegeeing her . Their intense but ultimately unconsummated affair, July captures the agony and ecstasy of texting a romantic interest, and the revelation of being engulfed by desire. “ I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself”, the narrator tells us. “ I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real  and specific body on Earth”.

The narrator sends regular dispatches pretending she’s on the road to her husband, Harris, and seven-year-old child, Sam. The first-person approach allows for July’s idiosyncratic internal monologue, with wry one-liners  and home truths that at times took my breath away.

The narrator says “ How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees …  Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. “I suddenly understood all of classical art, endless nudes, Venus in her shell, David”.

“Maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I Imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you seeker”.

The couple were “fairly equal” in the domestic sphere at the outset, she reports when parenthood arrived “ a latent bias, internalised by both of us, suddenly leapt forth”. Upon her return to reality, the “stupid, pointless joy” evoked by the affair provokes a reckoning with Harris and they decide to open up their marriage.

July writes what it really feels like to experience sex and intimacy when you’re no longer young. “It’s a mapless unknown, mysterious place”, she said in a recent interview.

All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. 

All Fours by Miranda July, Riverhead $29/ Canongate £20, 336 pages.