Miranda July: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July is a filmmaker, writer and performing artist whose first feature-length film – Me And You And Everyone We Know – received the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Harper’s. Her short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was published last year. This week, two Foxes discuss the collection and its author.

Trilby: I discovered Miranda July completely by accident. Although I’d read the story ‘Something That Needs Nothing’ in the New Yorker some time ago (I remember being impressed by her writing at the time, if slightly perplexed by her choice of subject matter – the destructive relationship that develops between a pair of adolescent lesbians who run away from home to work in a peep show), I only started to take notice of her when I stumbled upon the website created to promote her first short story collection (www.noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com). The whole thing is made up of photographs of text that she magic-markered on her fridge and cooker. Simple, quirky brilliance.

Jenn: I liked that too, and it was one of the things that made me want to try her book. I liked the personal, home-madeness of it. Miles better than most author directed promos that I’ve seen, and the ‘quirkyness’ of it (even though I hate that word) was a good clue as to what the book was going to be like. I especially liked the bit about matching the book about what you might be wearing that day. I didn’t think she had to be so self-consciously female and fluffy about it, but it did make me laugh and I haven’t seen anything like it before. I wondered if she was saying something about how we treat books – especially ‘trendy’ books like hers – more as fashion accessories than things to read and think about, but even if she wasn’t trying to allude to all that, I still thought it was fun. Have you seen the youtube video No One Belongs Here More Than You where she talks about her book with her friend? That’s fun too. I seem to be using the word ‘fun’ a lot in this paragraph. I think what I am trying to say is that I didn’t feel like she was taking herself too seriously. And I liked that.

Trilby: I wasn’t so keen on that video – it all started to seem a bit self-indulgent, albeit in a roundabout way. I much prefer the ones where she talks a bit less (or not at all). That sounds harsh, and I’ll be the first to admit that I completely fell for the cult of MJ’s author personality when the book first came out. I know it’s uncool of me, even – dare I say it – devastatingly mainstream. But one of the things that first struck me about this book was the author pic on the last page. I’m all over MJ’s geek chic. I want dustbowl-era curls like that, I wish I could wear polka dots, and I’d give anything to look so edibly startled without appearing gormless.

Jenn: But it disturbs me a little when women have to dress up and open their eyes really hard to pull off geeky chic. The whole picture thing annoyed me. She was trying too hard, or her publicity people were. I don’t think what people look like is, or should be, relevant at all. It isn’t a bloody fashion show, and the whole ‘author persona’ thing really turns me off. Author pictures get on my nerves generally, but especially this one. Of course it helps if you are pretty, it always does, with everything, but having to be so wide-eyed and ruffled in an especially big picture (I read the Canongate paperpack ed.) really, really got on my nerves. She’s written some clever and original stories and she really didn’t need to stick her face in my face to make me buy them.

Trilby: I know that you’re right about the author persona thing. And I am totally ashamed of my girly crush. But. July is first and foremost a performance artist (and actress, and film director…and only latterly, an author). The kooky website, the interactive artwork, the aura of boho eccentricity and mystery that has been quite consciously cultivated by her and/or her marketing team. Her neuroses fuse with the neuroses of her characters – and, if I wanted to be very lofty, I might suggest that she’s appealing to the broadly neurotic society in which she lives, and which she tries to represent.

Jenn: ‘Consciously cultivated’ – yes – I think it is this that irritates me – the cynical and quite blatant dishonesty of it, especially when her writing strains, sometimes unsuccessfully, for a naivety in its style. Representing a neurotic society? An interesting idea – but the uber trendy and ‘feminine’ representation she attempts to create isn’t saying anything – surely writing is supposed to be something more than a mirror? And yet here we are, reviewing the promo and the picture rather than the actual book…

Trilby: You’re absolutely right. On to brainy literary debate:

Jenn: The characters and ‘plots’ seemed to strain for an effect and wrench themselves into situations that might have been ‘quirky’ or ‘pretty’ but mainly lacked any kind of feeling or emotional depth for me. Not even shock value. People have described her writing as ‘twee’ and I’d go for that too. My edition’s blurb says ‘ordinary people living extraordinary lives’ but actually I’d say she’s dealing with characters rather than events – the strange stuff that happens seems to be a manifestations of the character’s inner lives – we see things highly coloured through eccentric narrator’s point of view. I wouldn’t say these were realist, I’d say they were impressions, rather than representations of things that could actually happen.

Trilby: I think that the absence of feeling is entirely central to her writing. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and I could tire of it quickly. But if there’s one thing Miranda July does well, its alienation. Whimsy, yes, black humour, yes…but this collection is full of characters who can’t quite manage to fit in. I think that’s why I finished it feeling quite sad. There’s a real poignancy to it. Consider the title: No One Belongs Here More Than You. It’s a chilly embrace, isn’t it? You watch these characters, you can identify the occasional sensation of “ah yes, I’ve been there before” – but it’s fleeting. At the end of the day, we’re left alone. Now, a lot of readers might not enjoy this – reading is supposed to make us feel less isolated, isn’t it? – but I don’t think that that makes it a failing on the author’s part. Take this excerpt as an example. It’s from the story ‘It Was Romance’:

‘This is how we are different from other animals,’ she said. ‘But keep your eyes open so you can see the cloth.’ We all had white cloth napkins over our faces, and the light glowed through them…The instructor walked around as she talked so that she was everywhere at once. Her face and permed hair were forgotten; there was just the voice and the white light, and these two things combined felt like the truth.

‘You will never be a part of the world.’ She was standing quite near.
‘Humans make their own worlds in the small area in front of their face.’ Now she was across the room.
‘Why do you think we are the only animal that kisses?’ She was near again.
‘Because the area in front of our faces is our most intimate zone.’ She drew a breath. ‘This is why humans are the only romantic animal!’

We were quiet and wondering under our napkins. How did she know this? What about dogs? Don’t dogs feel everything we do time one hundred? But we couldn’t see to form a chain of doubt between each other’s eyes…

‘The tiny world in front of your face is an illusion, and romance itself is an illusion!’

We gasped. But it was a delayed gasp; we were a slow group. Even the distribution of the napkins had been hard to organize. We had finally settled on take one and pass the rest down.

Jenn: That’s a good one. And perhaps I am being too grumpy. I liked a lot of the stories in the collection. Some I hated. That’s the same with any collection of short stories though. I didn’t start from the front and work through to the end – I dipped in and out and read them as they appealed to me. Do you think it is a mistake to read short story collections like that? I know that authors and publishers often think very carefully about what order the stories should go in and you are missing something by not taking them in that order. Do you think they paid attention to something like that?

Trilby: I don’t think there’s any one way to read a short story collection. Obviously there’s some kind of logic to the order – editors want to grab the reader with the first story and end with a bang, don’t they? - but I reckon this is the kind of collection that is very “dippable”.

My favourites here include The Swim Team, The Man on the Stairs, The Boy from Lam Kien, and Ten True Things. Am realising that a lot of these stories are about people in adult education/self help-type classes – why is this?

Jenn: My two favourites were ‘Majesty’ and ‘The Moves’ – I think the thing they had in common was family, and sex. In one, a father teaches his daughter ways to pleasure a woman by showing her the finger moves on the back of her hand. It’s strangely intimate and moving – something important he wants to pass down to her, something he might have planned to hand onto a son, but would give to a daughter too.

And ‘Majesty’ – a woman obsessed with Prince William. I love stories about obsession – I think the trivia that consumes people tells us much more about them than the big events that happen to them. And this story had the main character masturbating during phone sex with her sister. It isn’t exactly like that - there is nothing incestuous about it. It is as if July has thought about the things we do for our family, the kind of duties we perform out of love or habit, and has exaggerated what is ordinary so we can see it better. ‘If I could kill her without anyone knowing, I would.’ And of course, it is very funny. I do think she does humour and that kind of exaggeration very well, if not always very subtly.

The last line of ‘Majesty’, though: ‘Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.’ – I think its overkill. That’s what I mean about her not always being the most subtle writer. When the writing is good the stories don’t try to justify or to explain themselves – there is a confidence or a carelessness about the writing that I like very much – a sure-footed trust that the reader will understand. But this last line, it tries to explain too much, it’s stamping you on the head with a theme that a reader will already have understood – too much of July and so a bit out of character for the narrator.

Trilby: I suppose that’s what I’d have to conclude overall: there’s lots of humour here, lots of poignant intimacy, some fine writing…and occasionally, a little bit too much Miranda. I don’t quite agree with one commenter’s snipe that Miranda July is a “modest talent with a gift for self-promotion”, although I’d have to see her tackle a subject other than herself before deciding if what she has to offer as a writer is likely to stand the test of time.


Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You, Scribner Book Company, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0743299398, 224 pages