Miranda July is in the back of a New York cab wearing a polo-neck and a large parka, the fur of the hood neatly framing her face and her bobbed, curly hair. We are speaking over Skype, and every now and then a shaft of sunlight will filter through the car window, July’s eyes will squint and she’ll stop whatever she’s saying, turning to one side as if allowing her thoughts to re-form and coalesce. For a moment, the image on screen seems to be lifted straight from one of her films: a scene where the offbeat female lead character is caught looking pensive, her face suggestive of some deep inner dialogue.
It is not a huge cognitive leap, given that July wrote, directed and starred in her debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know. The film dealt with loneliness and love in an era of cybersex and divorce and was called “charmingly offbeat” by critics. It won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2006.
But the 40-year-old July has a horror of being pigeonholed. Until that point, she had been making a name for herself as a performance artist, crafting multimedia installations she referred to as “live movies” which she took to venues across the globe, including the ICA in London.
After the success of her first full-length feature film, July wrote a collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, which promptly scooped the 2007 Frank O’Connor award and was described by the chair of the judges as “a book of original genius”.
And now, as if that weren’t enough to engender an existential groan of self-hatred among struggling writers and artists the world over, July has written a novel. The First Bad Man has already been garlanded with praise from Lena Dunham (“astounding”), AM Homes (“a book that must be read”) and Dave Eggers (“unforgettable”).
I tell July, as she is driven to the next stop on her promotional tour, that in the UK we’re not particularly good at congratulating people who excel at everything. We like our writers to write, our film-makers to direct and our artists to make art. “Yeah, no, we have that problem here too,” she says. “I think I have the same bias, to be honest. It’s hard to fully take someone seriously in each medium. You just want them to be really good at one thing and then you can believe they care. All I can say is that the creative art of moving between the media is my process – genuinely. I’ve done it from the get-go.”
She grew up in Berkeley, California where her parents, Lindy and Richard Grossinger, ran an independent publishing house specialising in alternative health and spiritual titles. At home, July and her older brother, Robin, were encouraged to make their own entertainment. “He built me our own little house in the backyard with two storeys and running water,” she recalls. “We built that together and designed the furniture, so there was this sense that we could make anything. Also that our parents weren’t going to buy us anything, so we’d best figure out how to make it.”
July went to the University of Santa Cruz but dropped out in her second year before moving to Portland, Oregon and starting out as a performance artist. She changed her surname as a feminist act of “self-authoring”, re-christening herself after a character she had created with a friend in a fanzine.
When Me and You and Everyone We Know was successful, she was gripped by anxiety that everything she had done before or wanted to do subsequently would be overshadowed. “It felt kind of uncomfortable because everyone thought I was a film-maker. I thought ‘It’s very important I get this book of short stories out immediately to dispel that notion!’” She gives a wry little laugh and then adds, with complete sincerity: “I have to make it new by actually being new.”
After the short story collection was published, one of her subsequent projects, We Think Alone, involved getting her famous friends to share previously sent emails with 100,000 subscribers. The participants included actor Kirsten Dunst, writer Sheila Heti and Lena Dunham, who sent out a reply to her assistant about a $24,000 sofa which read: “Decided it’s just too expensive”.
We Think Alone might have been intended as a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of modern voyeurism, but it also proved just how well connected July is. Dunham and Heti are good friends. Another friend, the pop star Lorde, recently tweeted about how “amazing” The First Bad Man is to her 3 million followers (July herself has an impressive 59,000 but is “paralysed” by tweeting: “Yesterday I found myself looking up if ‘it’s’ was spelt right [in a tweet]. I suddenly had this moment of doubt that it wasn’t. It’s not exactly liberating.”)
On the whole, July thinks Twitter has made it a good time to be a feminist: “more than anything [women] are supporting each other and they can do that in very powerful ways because of social media… It’s kind of a wild time. I think we’re all very aware of that power. It feels really good to think: ‘Oh wow, it is actually in my control to impact on this woman’s life’… you know: I can make someone’s book of experimental poetry really sell!”
But July has her detractors, and her earnestness makes her an easy target. Her work can be polarising – for every viewer who gasped in recognition at the tender awkwardness of the relationships in Me and You and Everyone We Know there was someone else who found the talking cat in July’s follow-up, The Future (2011) to be a horrible indulgence typifying the worst kind of postmodern faux-profundity.
July has been called “kooky” and “whimsical” so many times that she’s beginning to tire of it – and it’s hard not to think that these adjectives are designed to be patronising to women. “Yes, it’s pretty clear that ‘whimsical’ is a diminutising word,” says July when I ask her about it. “I almost think asking the question is like I’m being asked to gossip about myself. I think it’s kind of a female thing, being asked to gossip about yourself. I think I’m maybe done with that.”
The First Bad Man might be many things but it is definitely not whimsical. It tells the story of Cheryl Glickman, a single woman in her 40s who lives on her own, unrequitedly in love with a man she works with at a self-defence charity. When her employers ask her to take in their 20-year-old daughter, Clee, Cheryl’s well-ordered life is thrown into chaos. Clee is big, sexy and unwieldy (“she had a blond, tan largeness of scale”) and the two of them fall into a routine of physical sparring (“Clee covered my mouth and grabbed my neck in the hallway”) which soon turns into something with a more unexpected undertone.
It is a strange experience, reading about two women who have a tacit mutual agreement to beat each other up. Female aggression is not often dealt with in literature and July uses it as a metaphor for the tackling of other repressions, both cultural and sexual. July describes herself as “consciously feminist”, so was it a deliberate attempt to provoke a discussion about women’s physicality?
“I myself had some rough episodes when I was younger,” she says with a half-smile. “And it wasn’t totally out of the question that if you went out and a guy was being a jerk, that you might get into a physical fight with him. That was the crowd I rolled with.
“There were rumours that a friend of mine accidentally kicked someone too hard in the head and killed him. I don’t know if it’s true,” she adds, vaguely.
Well, this is one direction I hadn’t expected an interview with Miranda July to take. She goes on to admit she “punched someone” but that it was “a long time ago”, and that when she was 11 or 12 she and her best friend would stand on a bench and fight each other “and there was something completely intimate [about it] and woven into our otherwise girlish relationship. It was really satisfying. I remember getting really angry and that being a release for us.”
She says it is perfectly possible for people who live primarily in their own heads (artists, writers, intellectuals) to hanker after a physical communion: “You can have the fantasy that it would feel good to fight back, even to be knocked over. It’s a hard thing… but I guess the one other detail I would add is that I was pregnant when writing this… I was more in my body than I ever had been. Then I was nursing so I was in about nine different hormonally altered states as I was writing – as interior a book as this is, my body demanded to be in it.”
Her son, Hopper (not named after either Dennis or Edward, it turns out, although “I like them both”), was born in February 2012. July’s husband, Mike Mills, is also a film director whose 2010 movie, Beginners, was based on the real-life experience of his father coming out as gay at the age of 75. They live in Los Angeles.
July admits that moving from short to long-form was a challenge. She wrote her short stories “really quickly, no drafts”, whereas the novel started with “a good idea” but the writing of it was “torture”. When she read back the first draft, she was taken aback: “It was just such bad writing but the amazing thing was, after that was done, I had a book. Then I was just re-writing from there – and that, I loved. To me, it was like editing a movie but with the endless ability to re-shoot scenes for free. I love editing. That’s my favourite part of making a movie.”
After her son was born she took to recording scenes and ideas on her iPhone while breastfeeding. So, looking back, which was harder to conceive – the novel or the person? She laughs. “The person, right? It would almost be an insult to say otherwise. But ‘harder’ in the best sense. A person demands more of all of you, a book you can…” She drifts off. “In the end, it doesn’t really matter. If it didn’t work out well that would be a bummer but I’d get over it. But yeah, the love… I guess it’s just measured in pure love and there’s no comparison, right? My love for my son just destroys me. I can barely even talk about it. Whereas my love for my book? I’m just proud I finished it.”
The First Bad Man is published by Canongate at £14.99 on 19 February. Click here to buy if for £11.99
