Thoughts on a Cosmological Scale - No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

Today on the train I finished No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.

Maybe I'm not deep enough, but I really didn't enjoy the collection until the last story, which is probably because I don't typically like shorter pieces of prose. There's something about growing with a book that I appreciate, and that I can't seem to get out of short fiction. It's not that collections can't impact me, because they can. And it certainly isn't because they're not any good, because they are. It's just that when reading shorter stuff, I never feel as if there's enough time for the stories to really capture me.


I guess the problem is that I'm not a terribly mobile person. I need a novel to alter my psyche because it takes me 300 pages to register which themes I'm dealing with, much less feel moved by them.

Which might be why it took me until the 16th and final story of the collection to warm up to Ms. July. See, I thought stories 1 through 15 were impressive but not especially moving. While clever, they were also forced, artificial, and sort of desperate in their need to shock and astound the reader in forty pages or less. July, to me, spent most of her energy making her stories sensational rather than making them genuine. Emotion and resonance came second to brief and clever innovation in the form of short staccato sentences, intriguing tangents, and protagonists as odd and evasive as the prose itself. And while I found all of these things interesting, what lasting satisfaction can be had from reading something that's impressive but not evocative?

And then I read the final story, "How to Tell Stories to Children." It's a love story about loving someone who doesn't belong to you. As such, at first the plot of this tale seems pretty straight forward. Woman loves man. Man has a wife. Woman pines. Wife gets pregnant. But then Tom and Sarah have a daughter, Lyon. And Deb falls in love with the child instead of the father.

And then we realize that the love story is between a woman and the daughter who will never be her own.

Whereas other tales in this volume seemed melodramatic to the point of absurdity, "How to Tell Stories to Children" occupied a whole different sort of melodrama. While her language and tone remained the same as earlier installments, this time it was clear that such a tone was serving the story July had to tell. And while the tale took more than a few melodramatic turns (the only interesting kind of turns, after all), there was something organic about the shifting affections of Deb from Tom to Lyon, and something all the more familiar and natural in Lyon's eventual falling out with her surrogate mother. It's over the top, but for the first time in her collection, I was following the emotion of the story rather than the literary spectacle.

But then, I suspect that if I re-read the small volume now, I'd like all the stories in the text.

It might take me a while to grow attached to fiction (which is why I'm so fond of novels, because they give me the time and devotion I need to fall in love with them), but once I'm hooked I can't let go.

Guess I have to go and watch "You, Me, And Everyone We Know" now, don't I?

Bother.