The Pleasure and Peril of the Aftermath: On Miranda July’s “All Fours” and Sarah Manguso’s “Liars”
Miranda July | All Fours | Riverhead Books | May 2024 | 336 Pages
Sarah Manguso | Liars | Hogarth | July 2024 | 272 Pages
When I was a kid, the end of any athletic season brought with it an inexplicable, overwhelming emptiness. After winning the championship basketball game in seventh grade, I dug my face into the backseat of our Subaru and cried. It wasn’t that I had played badly: it was the feeling that there was nothing left to look forward to; that everything in my life had been leading up to this one event and without it I was untethered. I’ve felt this purposelessness countless times since—after breakups, parties, graduations. I feel it when I leave a job, or move apartments. It’s the realization that a single event has furnished all my life with richness, and with that moment in the past, there is no place from which to derive meaning. In a sense, all these experiences exist in one place: the aftermath. Not even fame or beauty can inure one to the thud of the after: Phil Stutz, the celebrity therapist recently profiled in NY Mag, coined the “Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle” to describe the depression that plagues recipients of the coveted award: “by the fourth day after winning, life sucks again.”
Miranda July’s All Fours is a book of aftermaths: the New York Times called it the “First Great Perimenopause Novel.” A scandalous post-period scene made the Washington Post reviewer “blush” (as it would anyone reading about a romantic interest plucking the bloody tampon out of the narrator—but more on this later). As much as the book depicts what it’s like to live after menopause (or rather, within perimenopause), this is only one in the long list of aftermaths that July represents. It’s about what happens after reproductive feasibility, yes, but also after marriage, childbirth, extramarital desire, midlife; it’s about what happens to women after the so-called dominant narrative arc of their life ends; about life after artistic success; about waking up when the streamers are still up and the balloons deflated.
But before the aftermath—the cover: a luminous sun peeks out from behind a cliff over the Yosemite Valley, rendering the landscape full of godly promise. This image comes from Alfred Bierdstat, one of the Hudson River School painters, known for his romantic landscapes of the west. This is the era of American Expansionism: one of endless land ripe for exploration and exploitation. It’s also, of course, a myth. People did live in the west and the aftermath of that golden promise of California was a bloody war fought to expand the country and the institution of slavery. All of these realities are hidden beneath, or after, Bierdstat’s painting. The cover encapsulates an American tension, which also happens to be a tension July wants to explore: the friction between what we want to see and what we end up seeing. She continuously asks: What happens when the fantasy is over?
July’s narrator describes herself:
“A woman who had success in several mediums at a young age and has continued very steadily, always circling her central concerns in a sort of ecstatic fugue state with the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path—her whole life will be this single conversation with God. God might be the wrong word for it. The Universe. The Undernetting.”
This description bears uncanny resemblance to July’s own background as a film director, novelist, short story writer, producer of strange multimedia projects, and prolific poster of strange and sensual dance moves on Instagram (another similarity she bears to her protagonist). It very well might be an insight into the author’s process—the Universe speaks through many mediums. In this case, her narrator-protagonist has won a chunk of money for a sentence she wrote years ago: “It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey. Twenty grand.” She has decided, encouraged by her sculptor friend, Jodie, and her husband, Harris, to spend it on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York, where she plans a stay at a fancy hotel, spending time with friends and doing other things you’d expect of an artist who self-identifies as conversing with The Undernetting.
All Fours can be framed as a series of fantasies displaced by realities, or usurped by new fantasies; the first one of these fantasies is a great American tradition: the road trip. A road trip novel. We know this one. We learned it from Thelma and Louise, Jack Kerouac, Lolita—the usual suspects. She'll drive across the country, meet some buddies along the way, and discover something new about herself. “For the rest of my life I’ll tell people about this cross-country drive I did when I was forty-five,” she hopes. “That’s when I finally learned to be myself.”
But the narrator can’t go down such a tired path. For one, she’s already in Los Angeles. So the vision of the road trip as an extension of westward expansion to the promised land of the wild wild west is already thwarted. She is already starting at the end—after the end—of the road trip trope, for that Bierdstatian destination is indeed where she already lives a fairly conventional life with Harris and their nonbinary child, Sam. She is in the aftermath of a collective American fantasy.
Then, not thirty pages (and thirty minutes!) into the glorious trip, she stops in Monrovia—a veritable antithesis to the Bierdstatian purity—full of strip malls, highway, fast food—and she doesn’t leave. For she has developed a crush on a young Hertz employee, Davey, whose wife is an interior decorator. July rents a room at a local motel, Excelsior, and employs the wife to redecorate the motel room that she will eventually use as a haven for an unconventional affair with Davey.
Oh, we say to ourselves. What? In halting her road trip, she defies the narrative trope, forcing herself (and us) onto a path that isn’t pre-determined. Rather, it’s predicated on capricious impulses: “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” the protagonist asks, reasonably. “Who made the stars? Why is there life on Earth?” So we watch her, within the first hundred pages, construct a fantasy, deconstruct it, and construct a new one. She has shifted from desiring a road trip (based on the stories that her husband and Jodie tell her), to the solo adventure of an affair. Now, the fantasy is to woo Davey. This is the second aftermath.
These re-configurations of reality do not end—they lead us careening through the novel like a series of blind turns that not even the author seems to have mapped out (though, of course, this feeling of blindness is a part of her genius). This is true not just on the sentence level, but structurally: The book is split into three parts, where each constitutes an ending and a beginning of a new set of fears and fantasies: These are:
The road trip (being adventurer as fantasy; being boring as fear)
The affair (Davey as fantasy; the shame of being a bad person and cheater as fear)
The attempt at repair with her husband (monogamy as renewed fantasy; loss of independence, sexual and otherwise, as fear)
Life beyond the marriage (freedom from convention as fantasy; loss of security as fear)
Each involves a tension between stability and freedom, between individuality and collectivity. The affair comes in the aftermath of feeling confined in her marriage, while the aftermath of the affair makes her seek sexual revival with her husband. They even role play together—create a shared fantasy—to try to absorb the emotional shockwaves of her obsession with Davey. But then the descent of menopause makes the narrator fear that she is about to enter into a post-sexual era. Just as the road trip was a fantasy given to her by her husband and Jodie (and the American canon) and the affair totally her own, she similarly realizes that she needs a sex life outside of her marriage, born of her own desire. Thus, the fantasy of saving the marriage is usurped by a fourth, and last, notion: the possibility of co-parenting with Harris and dating other people.
But just as she falls for a new girlfriend, seeming to have realized the fantasy of co-parenting, of queerness, and sexual fulfillment—she is dumped. Freedom undoes stability; fantasy has been razed once again. It is in this moment of renewed barrenness that she goes to New York (this time by plane). She realizes that Davey is there at the same time, no less, performing with a dance troupe. She ends the book watching him on stage in an ecstatic moment of viewership:
“Suddenly I wanted to stay here and for this to go on and on, but from the music I could tell the performance was almost over; it would end when he landed. Any second now I'd be clapping, the lights would come up. In the meantime he was still rising and the warm, hallowed feeling kept growing; I could feel it expanding beyond the walls, into the street.”
She anticipates the aftermath; she pictures the ending of the performance. Characteristically, her view shifts: “It would still be there when I got outside, gilding the whole neighborhood, the whole city. Indeed the whole world was the motel room. The whole universe? Yes, everything was the room; you could not step outside of it, not even by dying.” Davey is no longer part of her personal fantasy, but fantasy itself. She compares the world to the hotel room, as if everything can become the symbolic site of the Excelsior—that is, the site of fantasy. To be free means to be constantly seeking, or creating, something new: real or imagined. She calls these cycles “never-ending preparations,” but preparing is necessitated by the fact that her past fantasy has dissolved. As much as we watch her prepare, we also watch her writing from within the wreckage of fantasy, the aftermath. And then the aftermath of that aftermath.
This de- and re- construction of fantasy happens on the sentence level, too, as she thinks to herself:
“Why do such a thing? What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby? But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross.”
The first part of the paragraph suggests that the primary narrative is the road trip (“big show of going away”) and that her desire for Davey is the deviation (“hides out right nearby”). Then, partway through the paragraph, she posits her desire for Davey as her “greatness” rather than her “monstrosity.” The affair with Davey and the independence it symbolizes take center stage as she places herself in a group of “great” women whose marriages hold them back—a collective aftermath, one that allows—nay, requires—you to admit your extramarital desires and even act on them.
These twists might tempt us to give her the timeworn title of “unreliable narrator,” when in fact she is excessively reliable. She traces the cadences of her desires and prejudices, even as she tries to convince herself they don’t exist, even as she admits they do, even as they shift, evolve, grow, and sometimes disappear. Each sentence becomes an aftermath of the one that came before. These renewals require an exorbitant amount of energy. To take precise measure of your own thoughts from moment to moment is also an exercise in loss. It means allowing the possibility for your whole life trajectory to shift in a moment. That’s why it’s so surprising to watch July’s narrator re-evaluate her life over and over. It’s also probably why most of us don’t do it. Perhaps it’s why writing from the aftermath often looks desperate and fragile, because past fantasies have been destroyed by unavoidable experiences like, say, having a child, or an affair, or a divorce—experiences that render previous worldviews untenable. They are stories of coming to grips with one’s own failings.
Many of these incontrovertible destructions of fantasy are gendered. Reflecting on menopause, Jodie says, “Imagine what it feels like to be a man. No cycles. No deaths-within-life. No transformation from one kind of person into another.” Even more than losing the biological function of reproduction, or the hot flashes or (supposed) loss of libido, menopause is about being remade with no option but, as the narrator puts it, “to submit” to your body.
Another feminine aftermath: “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it,” July writes. “It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things.” She lives out the renewed gender expectations of the Mother. Within this, there is the aftermath of giving birth—in the narrator’s case, an almost still-born birth, which resurfaces in PTSD flashbacks throughout the novel: “So. It wasn’t over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements. It was all still with me.” The book itself is located in an afterlife, or second life, for her child, while the birth experience materializes like a ghost, rendering her isolated from her child (who doesn’t remember) and her husband (who doesn’t experience these flashbacks).
The aftermath of each of these destructions creates a space of female friendship for July. It’s not a coincidence that the narrator’s only stable relationship is with Jodie. After the narrator’s traumatic birth experience, she finds an online support group. After her attempts at revitalizing marriage have failed, she returns to the Excelsior—the site of the affair with Davey, months after she has last seen him. This time, she turns the hotel into a meeting place to poll her female friends about marital dysfunction and extramarital desires. No one solves their problems, but that’s not the point. The point is that the Excelsior is still the site of imagining, no longer of Davey, but a collective imagination: one about life after marriage. The romantic is replaced by the female collective. A similar collective forms after the narrator realizes she is in perimenopause; she polls women online, and gets varied and prolific answers about what life looks like post-period; the female aftermath is about the shared experience.
The aftermath of the book itself mirrors that female collective. One friend told me she was already mourning the loss of the book before finishing it and trying to find a reading group to discuss it with; my mom, too, texted me to ask if I had heard about this “funny novel about middle age.” Yet another buddy called me and said that everyone in LA was talking about July. Picturing hoards of women in linen walking around Silverlake hunched over All Fours, as if in prayer, it seems true that July has found a collective of women with whom to confer in the aftermath of writing her book.
•
These very same women might be bowing their heads over Sarah Manguso’s Liars which was published in the same year as July’s and shares many themes, but which is notably less pleasant to read. Not just that: it’s pointedly disinterested in any idea of “pleasant.”
July and Manguso share narrators who are author-mothers in marriages that no longer function. There are some key differences: In Liars, the narrator’s marriage has never—as far as the narrator frames it—been good. Her husband is a jealous, paternalistic, pseudo-intellectual, insecure slob, unwilling to recognize her labor or share in the domestic load, and who ultimately cheats on her, leaving her with their kid and house. This is different from July’s narrator, whose husband is a partner in an unfortunate dissolution of feeling, and a co-creator of a new parenting situation. Manguso seems to live in the aftermath of a rotten marriage even before she enters it: “Agreeing to be someone’s wife should be done only if you can’t help yourself, I thought, but of course no one can help herself,” she says, early in the novel. In this way, she positions herself in the wisdom of the aftermath, even before the event of marriage.
Liars is the story of a marriage falling apart, told in fragments of recurring frustration and disempowerment; at times it seems to be a list of arguments, moves for the husband’s job, domestic chores, and regrets that the narrator is not doing more to write:
“I did laundry, bagged trash, dealt with mail, fed and played with the cat, cooked, iced John’s nose, bandaged his fingers, fed him meals and vitamins and Gatorade and water, did dishes, calculated our October expenses, answered emails from my publishers, bough groceries, went to the drugstore, cleaned the bathroom, made the bed, did calisthenics, and so on. I just went from task to task, slowly, so I didn’t have to think about anything.”
Manguso repeatedly lists out the chores like this. This repetition is grating. It feels like it’s going nowhere. And that is partly the point: Our reading, like her life, becomes a chore. She brings us into her reality. As July takes us with her from one fantasy to another, the pure exhaustion of Manguso’s life after marriage (and then after having a child) could be conveyed in the form of the list, of the repeated tatters of her world, where she has no time to write anything but these little strips; the fragments are the aftermath of the blank canvas her life once was.
Manguso, like July, turns to a female collective—her friends warn her against John’s behavior. John’s mother even cautions her against marriage. At one point speaks for the other mothers she knows:
“All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do, after all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything, after having children in America. We’d all assumed we’d continue our lives as before, and that the only difference would be a child or children silently napping in bassinets or playing with toys while we worked. We hadn’t known we’d be holding grimly on to screaming, incontinent, vomitous creatures twenty hours a day.”
She’s living in the aftermath, too, of her vision of America as a place where all things can happen—work and play. A place post-fantasy, and what comes of that is—unlike July—a flatness, annoyance, a rage.
We feel that rage emerging, mostly directed at her husband, who certainly seems to deserve it: “I was exhausted by John’s return—the mess, the dirt, the intolerably slow rate of completing tasks, the constant assumption that I wanted to watch videos on the internet. The child was still teething, crying, not sleeping.” Part of the success of this book is its thwarting of a narrative arc—its shape is more of a spiral than an arc—in a diaristic mode. John apologizes! Things will get better! And then John is drinking and spending money again. Or The baby is a treasure! But now he is sick and John is absent. Life for Manguso’s narrator seems to be a flat expanse with tiny peaks and major valleys, but no tautological procedure forward: it is the landscape of a very bleak female aftermath. And if it remained a topography—even if I would have not enjoyed reading it—I would have seen it as a success.
Instead, this fragmentation was thwarted by certain moments that fostered distrust in me, a feeling of manipulation. At times, it felt like I was being called in to witness the petty details of a parental dispute and being asked to litigate, with a clear right answer. Like that time “John started making the child an open-faced tuna salad sandwich even though he knew the tuna would wind up on the rug I’d just shampooed. I took the bread out of the toaster and threw it across the room.” It seems reasonable that having a child would entail the dirtying of a rug—and that throwing a piece of toast is extreme? Elsewhere, she writes, “All that mattered to him was that he felt right about something.” The purpose of this direct explanation seems to come from a desire for external affirmation from me, us, the readers, or her child. At one point in the aftermath of the affair, she relates a conversation with her kid: “the child asked me what the hardest part of the divorce had been, and I said that it was watching Dad get away with lying. Me, too. He said, but he didn’t get away with it.”
These moments, while they strike me as having a source in truth, also felt like Manguso was asking me—and her child—to be on her side, recounting these experiences as if to say, he’s so fucked up, isn’t he? And the problem is, if she weren’t asking that of me, I’d be much more inclined to empathize. We get that John is bad: we only need to see the facts of the situation to understand that. Why, then, does the narrator seem to need us to agree with her? Why is there no trust that we will understand? Here is I think the very fine line that authors of the aftermath walk. On the one hand, I don’t want to engage in a long tradition of penalizing women for writing about their personal, emotional, messy experiences (what theorist Kate Zambreno would call “criminalizing the confessional”). On the other hand, this can lead to the kind of litigious writing in which the audience becomes the jury, with a single testimony. This felt unproductive, rather than productively uncomfortable.
July has plenty of uncomfortable moments; I suspect she is enjoyable because while she may be emotional, personal, and even unfair to the people around her, she also is funny. She turns those qualities into caricatures that the narrator uses—with comedic timing—to beat her character over and over. This allows us to look at her protagonist alongside her narrator, from a kind of narrative aftermath, and laugh—at her, and maybe ourselves. July uses this humor to distance her protagonist from her narrator; Manguso’s narrator is subsumed by the concerns and the anger of the protagonist. This slippage feels accidental and ends up usurping the power of the narrator while also making it seem obvious that the protagonist needs to have the power of a narrator. It is a struggle between mechanisms of control. What is more important: my rage or the power to tell my rage in a way that is compelling to the outside world? And yet, the narrator says that her main problem was that John “wouldn’t accept that the root of my anger was that he dismissed and ignored me.” Herein lies the problem. She seems to speak for a group of women who have been historically dismissed, unheard, and unseen; minimized for their existence in the margins of the public sphere. And rage seems the only response to her situation. Ultimately, the rage wins out against the attempts at constraint. But self-pity doesn’t pull you in. And so I kept asking myself: by turning away from her, do I perpetrate the same indignity as John?
In a way, it’s a perfect tale of female aftermath. That is—it doesn’t just take place after the wedding, or after the child, but a large part of the book literally takes place in the Afterward (which begins on page 181 of 256), which means a lot of the story exists in what Manguso describes as “an unimagined time” after her divorce, after the plot ends. And so we hang with her, in the aftermath of her own marriage, as she attempts to make narrative sense of it and fails. Of this space she says, “What I needed most was to be plunged in a massive holding tank containing all the possible endings, even the one with my corpse floating face down in the water. I needed my suffering to be acknowledged.” She literally floats within infinite narrative afters.
•
It’s interesting to position July and Manguso as members of a group of female writers writing from the aftermath, trying to balance identity, palatability, and literary clout. We might think of Woolf, who says in A Room of One’s Own that women writers inherently exist in the aftermath of a male literary form, claiming that the structure of the novel itself is a male archetype:
“A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a woman any more than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer … who shall say that even this most pliable of all forms [the novel] is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet.”
Aforementioned Kate Zambreno and other more contemporary theorists proffer an answer to the question of the feminine form. Zambreno turns to bloggers, to other women, to the diaristic, the bloody and the physical—the things that have historically been seen as unworthy of critical or academic attention. She writes, “This idea of being a menstrual blogger is something to reclaim. Maybe my style is hormonal (what does this mean? Too confessional? Moody? Emotionally charged female? Irrational?) In this community, if I can call it that, of writer-bloggers, many of us write our bodies. Our periods. Yes, we write our periods.” She talks about “develop[ing] an alternative canon,” one that’s messier, more fragmented and diaristic, one better suited to contain the multitudes of aftermaths, whose narrative arcs don’t dome into clear and easy conclusions. In some ways, Liars is the poster child for this Zambreno’s “hormonal style.” For all the trouble I have with her self-victimization, she is certainly messy, narratively fragmented, unconcerned with her placement in the male canon. July, too, though more traditional in her form, turns to the female collective—both in the Excelsior and with her internet collective of women blogging and texting about menopause. She doesn’t shield us from the bloody and physical; she, as Zambreno puts it, “writes her period” (indeed, she covers Davey’s hands with it!). And so Manguso, July, and Zambreno all turn to the female collective as a radical new form.
And yet, the feminine collective isn’t always friendly.
In the 1960s, Susan Taubes wrote the lyrical, heart wrenching Divorcing about the aftermath of divorce, which earned her a review from the New York Times that dismissed her as a “lady novelist.” More recently, Rachel Cusk received backlash for her writing on the deep ambivalence she felt toward the aftermath of having a child in A Life’s Work: On Being a Mother. The title implies what is so fearful for some about motherhood: that it is a commitment that cannot be undone. That the “after” never ends. The book about her divorce, which was criticized as “petty and irritable,” with “shameless self-revelation,” is indeed called Aftermath. I suspect this aftermath is why she’s been critiqued so bitterly—people are uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the story beyond the story—the day after the wedding, the endless diapers, the inability to work, the trap of being a stay-at-home mom and the trap of being a working mom. It is gritty, uncomfortable, and non-narrative, at least not in the traditional sense, because the fantasy—the marriage, the child, the narrative arc—is over, but the story hasn’t ended. What to do with that barren landscape? Only deeply personal and singular creatures can emerge from here. And it seems that, as of late, a lot of people want to hear about this aftermath.
This interest tentatively began on the heels of Cusk in the 2010s, with texts like Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey, and Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, both dealing with the uncertain undulations of living after married life. In the past five years we have seen a veritable deluge of “hot-flush” texts, in what the Guardian called “the age of the menopause novel.” To name a few: Splinters, Leslie Jamison’s memoir of her life after divorce and motherhood; Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny and Mary Gaitskill’s piece in Granta explore the “raucous burn” of perimenopause; I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Clare Vaye Watkins, which opens with a mother absconding to the desert, leaving her child and husband behind; Love Me Tender by Constance Debré chronicles the fallout of her divorcé turned single-lesbian-artist-mother; The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar, in which she “paints an honest, frightening and claustrophobic picture of new motherhood”; Matrescence by Lucy Jones, is about feeling “hoodwinked” by cultural myths around motherhood, much like Cusk (though she had a much more charitable reception); not to mention Nightbitch, the forthcoming movie in which the mother becomes a dog at night.
Perhaps a critical mass of women living in the aftermath has formed; perhaps this is the “alternative canon” that Zambreno craved; the cohort of women writing “porous, sensitive, excessive, emotional” texts, women who grew up with an intersectional feminist ethos, intellectuals outside the academy, freed by the internet.
There is something to be said for the fact that women are explicitly writing about their position as mothers and writers, and the conflict between the two. July’s book is set in the aftermath of the narrator’s artistic success. At one point, she says, “I just kept emerging, like a bud opening over and over again. But that was a long time ago now.” It turns out that being a mother, and being in menopause, is much like being an artist who has achieved success and is asking: now what? Manguso, too, is in the aftermath of literary success, thwarted by her domestic chores. Historically, these two roles have been seen as antagonistic. But turning the narrative focus on that friction between mothering and writing has proven fruitful for this new cohort; the mother-writer is becoming its own category, one recognizable for its ambivalence and disclosure not only of the difficulties of creating something, but watching your creation live outside your control. The fact of creating—a child, a book—renders one vulnerable to uncertainty, to criticism, and to failure.
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There has long been the sense that “no one wants to read about a mother / … no one wants to hear / about the mother unless it’s from the child. … Don’t write about becoming a mother,” as Natalie Scenters-Zapico puts it in her poem “Baby Blues,” published in the Fall 2024 edition of the Yale Review. In criticizing Manguso for her extremity, I sometimes fear I am playing into the same traps as the critics who dismiss mother-writers as self-pitying, or manipulative. But I hope, with the expansion of the female canon, there is also room to critique these writers as writers, and not as mothers. My frustration with the texts comes from the fact that I want them to succeed—my desire to read women written with honesty, complexity, free of the confinement of moral scrutiny. Perhaps a new aftermath is the one where a woman fails to write about herself over and over again, and yet, we still want to read her attempt. Manguso might represent this kind of writing for me—one that I read simply because it reaches toward something I want to understand, not because it gets there.
Even when the writers of the aftermath fail to woo us, they train us to be more authentic observers of the world. Because all of us live in our own aftermath and honoring that means attending to the margins, the in-between, the notes, the fragments; it’s fertile ground for new fantasy, which will soon become its own monotonous daily routine; it’s the difficulty of constantly creating meaning. And regardless how much I liked them—Manguso and July and all the “hot flush” writers—these women hold up a mirror to the world, saying: wait for the credits to stop rolling, that’s when the real stuff begins.