I can’t remember where I learned to swim. Maybe in the pool at summer camp, or maybe during my endless number of pre-kindergarten swim lessons, paddling around the shallow end at the YMCA with my neon orange water wings (you grew up in the ’90s; you had them too). Wherever it was, I did not learn to swim in a bowl of water on my kitchen floor. This is exactly where Miranda July places the focus of one of sixteen short stories in her first published collection, “No One Belongs Here More than You,” which was published by Scribner in May.
A self-identified multimedia performance artist, July is best known for “Me, You and Everyone We Know” (2005), the full length film she starred in and directed, which won four awards at the Cannes Film Festival and earned her even more bizarre, astonished respect from the bastion of reviewers chomping at the bit for the next solid wave in indie-esque performance. Sources ranging from The New York Times, to fringe feminist film magazine Camera Obscura, to Time Out and Filmmaker Magazine have all decided that the single coolest thing happening in sidelined postmodern art is Miranda July. Me? I’m not so certain.
Everything absolutely wonderful about July’s writing is expertly profiled in her website for the book (noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com), in which she plays with the conventions of visual presentation to incite laughter, among other things. However ridiculous you think that is, you are practically guaranteed to laugh. To this end, the book itself is a beautiful object. It is either fluorescent pink or rain slicker yellow, depending on your edition, with carefully weighted and centered text. It is both clean and angry. Together with the website, the text and the cover make up about eighty-five percent of the book’s brilliance.
In the course of sixteen stories, July profiles a number of protagonists, most of them young and female, and most at odds with some aspect of society. Halfway through the book, which moves very quickly and is best read in one sitting, a feeling sets in as something akin to having eaten an entire jar of pickles – there is both a benign guilt and domestic excitement at having been exposed to the fragmented worldview of performance art’s next master, and a slight twinge of discomfort at being unable to digest what you’ve just consumed. From her writing, it’s clear that Miranda July enjoys saying outlandish things to make you feel exposed, included, and severely uncomfortable.
In “Something that Needs Nothing,” July profiles two females in their senior year of high school who run away from home, break each others’ hearts, and leave the story’s protagonist with very little to do. Of course, she does exactly what you hope that no vulnerable eighteen-year-old will ever do (and you learn to love her despite this, or maybe because of it). July’s writing is full of abstract images and worst-case scenarios. She has held fast to the explosive ability for imaginative play that coaxed you into making forts and rocket ships out of couch cushions and sheets as a child. It is clear from July’s writing that she has never let go of the vast back stories of her paper dolls—and, for the first half of the book, this is frightening and thoroughly enjoyable. The best thing about July’s writing is that it is deeply disorienting and riven with heavy, intense characters who, although they are disturbing, become long term companions. If this weren’t enough of a reason to deal with July’s over-inflated prose, she is, after all, indie performance art’s next big thing. Her next book, a collaborative effort called “Learning to Love You More,” the product of a five-year interactive website chronicling a number of obscure activities executed by “ordinary people,” comes out next month.
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