Wallflowers, Freaks, Us

Back in 2006, a friend from college called me up and said, “I just finished watching one of the weirdest, most fucked-up, disturbing movies ever. You’d probably like it.”  The movie was Me and You and Everyone We Know, written and directed by a young performance artist named Miranda July.  I knew that the film had generated considerable buzz at Cannes but apart from that, I knew nothing else about it or July. 

As it happened, a few weeks passed before I got around to renting Me and You and Everyone We Know from my local library.  When I finally watched it, I was simultaneously moved and repelled by the extraordinary lengths the characters went to in order to forge meaningful relationships with one another.  Miranda July’s intelligent handling of the generally oddball situations in which these sad characters found themselves left a good impression on me—which is to say, I looked forward to future Miranda July films.  But that’s all I looked forward to.  Just films.

Let me explain.  Typically, I’m wary of books written by actors, athletes, politicians, filmmakers, etc.  I think, “Hold it right there! Stay on your side of the street! As it is, there are too many books written by real writers. We don’t need your books clogging our literary arteries.”  For that reason, when I learned that July had published a collection of stories (never mind that many of the stories were originally published in leading literary journals), I didn’t run out and buy the book. 

In fact, I completely forgot about No One Belongs Here More Than You until coming across a story of July’s called “Roy Spivey” in The New Yorker.  In this story, a young woman is seated on an airplane next to a famous actor.  After striking up a conversation, the actor gives the woman a piece of paper with his phone number written on it.  Throughout the remainder of the story, the woman debates whether or not she should call the actor and considers the ways her life could change as a result of making contact with him.  Reading this story, I was taken by July’s eye for detail and her uncanny ability to express her protagonist’s dreams and apprehensions so convincingly.  Putting my reservations aside, I decided I wanted to read more stories by this talented young writer.

Like “Roy Spivey,” many of the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You begin with an odd premise in which an opportunity for human connection presents itself.  For example, in “The Shared Patio,” when a man has an epileptic seizure on his apartment patio, instead of seeking medical attention, his lonely neighbor cozies up next to him and falls asleep.  Meditating on this “dangerous and inappropriate thing,” she invents a conversation between her and her neighbor and says, “He loved me. He was a complex person with layers of percolating emotions, some of them spiritual, some tortured in a more secular way, and he burned for me. This complicated flame of being was mine.”  Regardless that the man has a wife and that the feelings the narrator ascribes to him are imaginary, she is pleased to have experienced these brief moments of intimacy.

Her characters’ loneliness is palpable and heartbreaking, but the decisions they make to alleviate the loneliness are comical—sometimes plain bizarre—but always profound.  In “The Swim Team,” a woman “shocked to remember” she lives alone invites elderly women and men to her apartment for improvised swimming lessons.  In “The Man on the Stairs,” a woman’s decision to confront a possible burglar prompts her to consider all the ways she’s disappointed by the direction her life has taken.  In particular, she is disappointed that she hasn’t experienced idealized love and friendship.  She says glumly, “Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.” 

Perhaps July’s greatest gift is her ability to communicate these characters’ yearnings without being overly sentimental.  The narrator of “Ten True Things”—my favorite story in the book—is a lonely secretary who reaches out to her boss’s wife for friendship.  Although the two women communicate on a daily basis—via phone—they have never met in person.  The narrator tells us she’s drawn to the wife because she doesn’t seem to “recoil” from the narrator: “Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.”  When the narrator learns that the wife has enrolled in sewing classes, she decides to do the same.  Although the friendship doesn’t pan out quite as the narrator imagined, she seems grateful to have learned a bitter lesson about love’s fleeting nature, as do the other characters in the book.  No One Belongs Here More Than You is a startling, funny and heartbreaking testament that Miranda July is a true Renaissance Woman.  

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Bryan Rice wrote this wonderful review. Please feed him. He's a poet.