In Miranda July’s collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, July’s protagonists live, almost always unsuccessfully, in imagined worlds that not only bleed into, but define, the social and personal interactions of their everyday lives. The result is a compelling, intimate, and experimental work that, much like a carnival’s room of funhouse mirrors, simultaneously entertains and mystifies the reader by both shape-shifting reality and reflecting a strange, distorted fantasy world in its place.
In each of her stories, July first exposes the fantasy worlds that the characters create. For instance, in “Mon Plaisir,” a female narrator introduces herself and her husband by depicting the imagined nature of their seemingly happy marriage.
"We are not people who buy instant cocoa powder, we do not make small talk, we do not buy Hallmark cards or believe in Hallmark rituals such as Valentine’s Day or weddings. In general, we try to stay away from things that are MEANINGLESS, and we favor things that are MEANINGFUL. Our top three favorite meaningful things are: Buddhism, eating right, and the internal landscape."
Likewise, in “The Shared Patio,” a woman imagines her and her neighbor’s shared patio as a place where she can find her identity and connect with others. In the “The Swim Team,” a woman, writing to her ex-boyfriend, details the swimming lessons she gives to elderly townspeople by dipping their faces in small, water-filled Tupperware laid out on the kitchen floor. In “Majesty,” a woman fantasizes about seducing Prince William at a pub near his school. And in “I Kiss a Door,” the narrator dreams of being the proverbially perfect Eleanor, of having Eleanor’s “perfect” father as her own.
However, July shows through these stories that, when fantasy and reality do finally meet, it often occurs in a sort of reverse-epiphanic moment, in which the main characters realize that being extraordinary is a myth like any other. Hopes and wild aspirations are replaced with a gravity, a humbleness, that makes July’s narratives more than simply zany and clever; her true depth as a writer emerges organically from her own outlandish plots in the same way as through her characters’: the more vivid the fictional world is, the harder it comes crashing down.
In “Mon Plaisir,” this shift takes place when the husband and wife are forced to create and maintain marriage as background actors in a movie. They realize, in this scene, that, like the movie couple they have created, their romance is just as fictional.
“Here we were again, eating together in silence.... Carl looked up, we stared across the table at each other. It was plain between us: we should not be together any longer. And cut.”
Additionally, in “Majesty,” when the narrator realizes she will never really meet Prince William, July gives us a haunting description of what, as in all the stories, has become of the narrator’s fantasy world.
“This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.”
In addition to being unable to escape their imagined worlds, the characters also fail to communicate with each other across the fictional or real borders they have created. The most haunting story of the collection, “The Person,” revolves around an unnamed person who believes there is “a place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life” -- a place the narrator finds out, eventually, is unattainable.
“This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her chance to be loved by everyone... the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft.”
Yet, one of July’s more controversial stories, “The Sister,” while revealing how sexual desire is often defined more by time and place, age, and desperation, than by the fantasies that bring us to those points, simultaneously gives the reader a glimmer -- be it a distorted one -- of hope. In this story, the main character, an elderly man seeking an imaginary younger sexual partner, finds that the realness of his sexuality is more important than accessing it through this “imagined” girl. The poetry of the final scene, in which two older men embark on a sexual relationship, undermines the assumed cultural taboo of the moment and shows how people actually can find ways to connect across the arbitrary moral and ethical (see: fictional) borders we set for ourselves.
“We slept. It was the sleep of one hundred years. And when we woke, it was still night, and Victor reached across me and turned on the lamp. We were two old men. Everything seemed ordinary, even overly ordinary. There was a fly in the room and it buzzed in a way that told us nothing amazing had ever happened in this place.”
This is a really good write-up. Thank you.
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