As the indie film and music scene infiltrates mainstream magazines and fashion, the literary world has followed suit, led in part by writer, actor and filmmaker Miranda July. She’s best known for her production “You and Me and Everyone We Know,” a film illustrating July’s fascination with normalcy and the details of small lives, tender yet eerie. July threads similar themes into her latest collection of short stories, “You Belong Here More Than Anyone.”
The short stories, written mostly in first-person, offer a poignant glimpse into the lives of isolated characters yearning for love and touch. Each story contains simple moments graced with an animalistic eroticism underlying the human, conscious condition. Her characters’ involuntary suppression of their sexual desires strangles them, both comedically and compassionately. For example, an overweight, middle-aged American woman grows obsessed with Prince William when she has a sex dream about him. Her loneliness becomes increasingly apparent, paralleling her growing lust. The absurdity is laden with quiet messages, the humor laced with sadness.
The same goes for a man in his sixties who works in a purse factory and who becomes infatuated with a teenage girl he’s never seen. He waits to be introduced to this female who doesn’t exist and ends up having sex with the man who promised to get the two together. The blunt irony of this story educes pity for the old man, but July’s use of lonely characters in sexual situations become an overplayed niche in her pieces.
The language July applies to her characters’ awkward thoughts harbor a plain truth that explores the intimate mentality of fatigued, frustrated and leeching American people. One woman articulates her feelings all too honestly: “You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it’s not true. Generally, people don’t like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. 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.”
July, an ex-Kill Rock Stars-label singer and Portland dweller, has garnered praise and question from critics across the world as she embarks on an international book tour. Though many of her stories have appeared in major publications previously, this book offers the first compiled collection of July’s shorts. “You Belong Here More Than Anyone,” can be read in chunks, and proves thought-provoking and peculiar. It begs us to question our own stream of conscious, our own fragile relationships and our own bodies, human shells, coveting the fragile emotions and biological yearnings within.
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“No One Belongs Here More Than You”
What: A collection of short stories written by Miranda July.
Gist: Each story provides a gateway into the seemingly normal, lonely minds of American people, written in first-person narrative form and sometimes prose-length testimonial poetry.
Gem: Everyone has a body accompanied by innate sexual desires. Watching these wants manifest in the least “sexy” individuals proves comedic, melancholy and bizarrely touching.
