How’s it going for my readers from conservative Christian communities?

A post for those who are particularly alone, or have traveled far to get here

I think there’s an assumption that we all resemble each other, us women rethinking our lives. I know that’s not true. The misogyny is so broad, so complete, that it impacts every kind of woman and if All Fours is igniting something it was only the last straw (or a tiny match on the biggest, oldest pile of straw you ever saw.) My child is just starting to understand what it’s like for women – in their own way, apart from me. The other day they described how they are not so different from their cis girl bffs, who also have to work for their femininity (it’s called “the clean girl aesthetic”, all the rage for 7th graders. I’m actually not totally against it since my child has always been alarmingly untidy; I kinda appreciate the peer pressure in this one area. It takes a village! I was a totally feral wolf coming out of my family of origin – I didn’t even consistently say “hi” back to people until a group of fellow 9th grade girls came together one recess to inform me that I “was a bitch.” Wow. That was a shock. I think I got into punk pretty soon after that but also got the message: say hi, for fuck’s sake.)

Ok, I got way off track there, my point was actually this: how’s it going for my readers from conservative Christian communities? I noticed an article by The Institute For Family Studies¹ called Ladies, Miranda July Is Not Your Friend. (Catchy title!) It’s extremely quotable, but I don’t even have to because they made a handy little Highlights chart:

Zero mention of perimenopause in the article but lots of focus on this very Substack, suggesting it might be even more dangerous than the book. I think it might be actually. Women talking….

The writer² really emphasizes that I’m urging women to abandon their husbands and kids (?!) which really isn’t what my particular book is about but I understand that it feels like this to the writer. (A little like how men sometimes feel like they are having their rights taken away when women start to have rights at all.) My narrators’ journey (and our conversations on here) create an upset, angry feeling in the writer. She isn’t alone, there are many, many similarly outraged one star reviews on Amazon, almost all of them by women. But for every 20 (50? 100?) conservative women who wish they “could give it less than one star” I’m guessing there is one conservative woman who is feeling something else. In another article, in The Guardian, a reader describes this experience:

Imogen (not her real name), 40, is a photographer who lives in a very conservative part of the US. “I read the book for the first time in September. I’ve got it right here,” she says, holding it up for me on the video chat. “It’s my bible.” Imogen grew up in a strict, evangelical household and married aged 21. “In the region I’m from, if you want anything other than the normal life, you feel a little crazy.” She’d been peeling apart from her faith for a decade, and finally broke from her church after Covid. She and her husband have two children under 10, and she felt “I never got to have my own time to discover who I am.”

When she read All Fours, it described her feelings so precisely that she tried to get her husband to read it. “He’s not really a book reader, so it was awkward … I think that my sudden change hurt him, and his response was: ‘I don’t really want to understand, I need you to understand me first.’ I get that.”

But she also got that she wanted to separate from her husband. “We’re in the beginning stages of uncoupling. It’s a big, scary thing. No woman in my family has ever been divorced. It’s hard. You feel strong and powerful one day, and the next day, you can’t eat. Any woman that’s going through this transformation, if you don’t have a community of other women, you’re going to be lost.”

That’s the reason for this post; I wanted to reach out to the readers who came from further away to get here. Not just people with conservative Christian backgrounds, but women whose friends simply don’t agree and don’t condone. It’s easy to point at this article and lol, but actually this is the morality we all grew up with, if not in our families, then on TV, in books, every song. It’s what we’re all working with, to some degree.

I’ll never forget sitting at a cafe in NY with a friend, catching her up on the recent changes in my marriage (my husband and I both had girlfriends.) “But what if he stops loving you?!” she gasped, terrified for me. This friend is no dummy, she’s actually someone I look up to. I reassured her but walked away from that lunch on shakey legs. It’s very hard to have faith in something that can easily be described as selfish nonsense. The selfish nonsense costume is so convincing that you’d have to be almost insane to grab it by the nose and pull, expecting it to come off like a clown’s mask. It did, for me. Everything crumbled – not the love, but every right/real/rigorous concept I had built my life around: rubble at my feet. And it just keeps on falling! Which has become less of a crisis or revelation and more of a practice. When I get too convinced of the right way to approach a morning, a conversation, a meal, a relationship, I start to feel kind of swimmy and off, almost carsick. So I get out of the car and in doing so, realize there was no car. (This is the sort of notion an editor would suggest I “unpack a bit for the reader”.)

But night is falling and I have to make dinner.

If you are particularly alone, or have traveled far to get here, please tell us all about it below. Or if that feels too exposing, then do it in the chat. Or in a real life All Fours Group Chat (like this ongoing one, every second Thursday in Iowa City.)

x mj

1. While I’m a bad mom, The Institute thinks J.D. Vance is a terrific father: “As A Hands-On Father, The Vice President Is Leading By Example”.

2. Weirdly I don’t feel like naming her. I just know it’s a bad feeling when a bunch of people pile on, hate-wise. I’m only using her article as a concise primer of the kind of thinking that some women are up against.