(Interview appears in AnOther Magazine, 2015)
Miranda July greets me at the door of her Silverlake, Los
Angeles home with those famous cornflower blue eyes. Delicately formidable,
with her trademark curly mop of brown hair and vintage letter box red cardigan,
she’s like a cheerful Sylvia Plath, a poster child for hip American
intelligentsia in the 21st century, one of the boldest female voices
in underground film, literature and multi-media art since 2004, when Filmmaker Magazine pronounced
her number one among the “25 New
Faces of Indie Film". Her first feature film “Me You and Everyone We Know”
(2005) won accolades at Cannes and Sundance, and her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You won
the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2007. Her 2011 film The Future premiered at Sundance, amid
myriad creative collaborations, including an email-based art project with
Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham, and Kirsten Dunst and her own mobile app, “Somewhere”,
which incites strangers to deliver messages to one another.
Two years ago, shortly after giving birth to her son Hopper
(with husband noted director Michael Mills) July, 40, started work on her first
novel, The First Bad Man. A notable
addition to July’s zeitgeistal, left of centre oeuvre, it tells the tale of
Cheryl, a sexually-frustrated, middle-aged anti-heroine with grey hair and a
dirty mind. In creating this brave, oddly Bukowskian heroine, Miranda paints a
picture both ugly and charming at the same time, forcing us to question what is
“appropriate” these days, when it comes to love?
There are pretty big age
gaps between the various lovers in your book. One of the characters goes so far
as to say: “I think everyone who is alive on earth at the same time is fair game.”
Have you ever had a lover who is much older or younger?
I’ve almost always been with older men. The oldest being
twelve years older, and I was only 24, so that was a lot. Mike, my husband, is eight years older than
me. I mean maybe there’s some psychological daddy stuff going on, but guys my
own age just always felt like chums. The few times I dated someone my own age
it just felt weird, like, “OK so you
knew about the Pixies at the same age I knew about the Pixies. So what.” I like the disconnect that comes from age
differences. I want us not to have
stuff in common. And for us to each know and be experts on our own thing. I
mean maybe it’s almost too intimate
when a romantic partner is the same age. It’s like “ugh, get out of my decade”.
Age differences have
been a theme throughout your work, actually.
Yes, in my first movie there was this five year old and a
middle-aged woman who had a quasi-romantic relationship. It was interesting to
explore that without actually making it about something really awful and scary.
We always see the same people together and those well-worn grooves don’t really
create new feelings for me. Even when the age differences are pretty
implausible, I feel like it sparks all this hidden stuff.
There’s a crying
passage in the book, where one character cries on the phone to another and it’s
a sexual experience for the listener. What’s been a good, sexy cry for you?
I am the kind of person who builds up feelings over days. I
get wound tighter and tighter and at a certain point I have to cry to sort of
reset that to zero. It was late at night and I had managed to not talk to a
single adult all day, and I was feeling totally crazy. I started texting with
Lena Dunham, who is a good friend. She was in Germany and she said she had just
had half a beer, and we started I was all wound up and as we were texting I
started crying. It was all really loving stuff, we were just supporting each
other. And when we were done I was like “that was the first time that I managed
to get that much emotional relief from a text.” It was like sexting, but the
cry version. I felt so much better afterwards. I got off.
Cheryl, the
protagonist of your book is middle aged and grappling with what that means, while
her younger counterpart, Clee, is very much an example of “entitled
youth”. Youth, and middle age—what are
your thoughts on what those words mean today?
Youth has always been power. But now it literally means running
the companies that are creating our reality. I picture youth in the past as
kids at a sock hop (a dance from the 50s). But it seems like technology is the
huge divider between youth and middle age now. I am really on the other side of
this divide. I might not feel old, but just the fact that I didn’t grow up
texting makes me different. It’s interesting to be my age, because it’s really
straddling two eras.
In the book, there’s
a passage where Cheryl talks about ways that women can disguise their pear
shaped figures. Care to share some pearls from your vault of fashion secrets
past?
I was very on my own page in my twenties in terms of what I
wore. I always wore my tights over my shoes, for example. Which meant I’d go
through a pair of tights almost every time I went out, and they would get really
dirty on the bottom. But it was very elongating for the leg, and just kind of
alien looking. Also, when I was younger I wore just a little black mark on
either side of my lips. Little lip extenders. Kind of like making your lips
bigger with lip liner, but much more overt, because obviously you can see there
are two black marks there. You couldn’t
draw them too long, or you looked like the Joker. I felt like it looked good
and was flattering, even though everyone was like “that’s so weird, what are
you doing?” But I wasn’t trying to look ugly. I was basically making sure that
anyone straight felt completely alienated by me. It was cool.