As seen on noonebelongshermorethanyou.com


Puberty is not dead.

Even if you are 27 and attending graduate school in the fall. Even if you were supposed to stop getting pimples ten years ago. Even if you've been in love (Ok, ok. Some snafu action, too) and now hold the experience-born potential to become a bastion of healthy girlfriend behavior. In theory.

In theory, puberty should be dead for the characters that populate Miranda July's No one belongs her more than you. In practice, the awkwardness and unpredictability of the adolescent turn is thriving. Hilarious and devastating, you feel the giddiness of reading someone’s diary as you turn the pages. A melodramatic fervor coats all of the decisions July's characters make, whether mundane or critical. The characters cannot stop throwing themselves at lovers who do not love them back, ignoring the good friends who really care about them, and demanding intimacy far too early in relationships, and no matter how ridiculous the scenario, it feels so personal to the reader. These stories show what we always suspected, that the awkward emotional mosh pit that is puberty continues far beyond the age of 13, and it’s almost worse later because by “the books,” you’re supposed to be over it. We are all erratic hormone bombs. Rational considerations be damned.

"The Swim Team" takes us to the small town of Belvedere where our narrator is able to carve out an identity by giving swim lessons to senior citizens on the linoleum floor of her kitchen. She backs into her coaching position, surprising herself with the new plan: “Then a strange thing happened. I was looking down at my shoes on the brown linoleum floor and I was thinking about how I bet this floor hadn’t been washed in a million years and I suddenly felt like I was going to die. But instead of dying, I said: I can teach you how to swim. And we don’t need a pool.” An unexpected trigger puts everything at stake. In true-to-life and especially adolescent form, it is something seemingly minuscule and non sequitur that brings her back from the brink of death. "Swim Team" captures the seeming randomness of many of our decisions—we often don’t know why we make them. It’s almost more of a physical response that we can’t control.

If we were less impulsive, we would certainly not choose a course the likes of "This Person." We meet this person on the day that she has gotten everything that she seemingly ever wanted. Every worry she has ever had, the affections she doubted, the decisions she regretted, all of it is abated. This person goes to a party, a celebration of her attended by every person that she has ever known, only to head home alone to check for mail that is not there. She ends up staying home, unfulfilled with getting everything she thought she wanted, and chooses to embrace loneliness instead. "This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this person's tragedy seems to bear down upon this person's chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft." This person feels lonely without tragedy; the void of things she wants is more familiar and comforting than the things themselves. We are dissatisfied, but we do not want to change. When we change, it feels like we lose intimacy with ourselves.

Our protagonist in "Birthmark" has spent her life on the brink of beautiful, held back by the port-colored birthmark on her face. She is finally able to afford laser surgery and has it removed, but rather than gratification, she feels a sense of betrayal to her authentic self. The people who only know her without the birthmark do not really know her. She writes, “Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be…Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.” It's a poignant illustration of want and need out of alignment.

The power and the resonance of the stories often lies in the sadness that catches us off-guard. They are unexpectedly depressing. No one belongs her more than you. At first the title seems positive: You are more than welcome here, you belong so much. But it can also flip on itself. No one belongs. No one belongs here more than you, and you don't belong very much. That’s the fuck, we’re living in a paradigm where absolutely no one feels like they belong, where everyone feels alone. You’re not alone in your loneliness. Perhaps this is July's overarching question: Does shared loneliness and disappointment offer company and relief?

By the end of the collection, reading these felt a bit self-indulgent—like you just want to slap the characters and your sympathies for gorging on emo. But July is taking risks, she's letting her characters eccentricities, neuroses, and humiliations have an orgy. If you're not overdoing it some of the time, than your risks are not risky enough. On the sentence level, July has balls, too (or ovaries as it were). She will write streams of simple, straightforward sentences that aren’t always pretty, but they move the story forward. And she knows just the right moment to lob you a longer, lyrical sentence that is utterly devastating in the frame of the matter-of-fact strings of words that came before it. A few shallow pronouncements showed up, pretty words that didn’t add anything to the story, but those were the exception, not the standard. I think that's pretty fucking impressive for a first collection of short stories.

Excellent summer reading, but I would recommend consumption of only a few stories at a time to avoid rocketing yourself into preteen steez depression. The proverbial spinach is firmly wedged between all our front teeth in some capacity, but you don't need to beat yourself over the head with it, particularly on your summer break.











This person is the everyman/woman for the characters in this collection