It's Been One Year of All Fours
A peek inside my DMs
The whole time I was writing All Fours there was a voice in my head saying: this could go very wrong. You could be mocked. Other women could mock you in order to distance themselves, to reassure their husbands that they don’t think like that. And who could blame them? We’re all just trying to hold on to what little we have.
But people are always thinking women will turn on each other, that’s the bet that’s always placed, was the next thought. Place a different bet.
So I wrote as if all the women in the world knew just what I meant and were urging me on. It was thrilling, kind of breathless, for years. With the help of my friend Isabelle I whipped myself into a state of utter belief (it’s hard to do that alone.) The intimate conversations we were having would become a global conversation! So be it! See to it!1
That bet payed off (big time) but it’s not exactly what I pictured. The fantasy I had in my head while writing was more like a sex fantasy – crystal clear at the start, then vaguer and vaguer, then looping back to the start again. Grown women yelling out the window…or something. Maybe a parade, a stampede. I couldn’t actually picture this global conversation; nothing specific came to mind.
The reality is startlingly specific, in fact it’s unimaginable power comes from it’s specificity: texts, voice memos, conversations in kitchens, bedrooms and preschool parking lots. The sudden articulation of many, many complex, unresolved, lustful, tired, furious inner lives, bound with the lives of partners and children. These exchanges could never be summed up in a book and they don’t have to be because they are alive – talking and doing – all over the world. This was the biggest thing I could not have foreseen: Your talking changed my world; my sense of what is possible. You've reshaped everything.
Thank you, readers, for revealing your actual selves and rooting for each other (the opposite of mocking.) It's been one year of All Fours and the book just came out in paperback; lighter, cheaper, faster — I can't wait to see where you take it next. Please report back here so we can all get stirred up and brave.
x, mj
Before this Substack there was just a million Instagram DMs and I worried that I would be the only person who knew that none of you were alone:
This book made me feel like I wasn’t crazy. Like the longings and yearnings in my heart weren’t vanity or selfishness—they were truths.
My marriage ended about two months ago. I’m slowly letting myself feel happiness again. Peace. I get along better with my kids than I ever have. I sleep better. I know myself better. My career is growing. I’ve been going on fun dates with other creatives. I’m writing my own story now.
That said—like a lot of women, I’m still carrying the weight of family schedules, doctor appointments, school stuff, meals, carpools. Some days it’s a lot. On Tuesday, I sobbed to the new Bon Iver album.
But I’m free. For the first time since I was 19, I’m free. And I’m not sure I’d want to change that.
I’m just so grateful to you but also all of us that I get to unlearn *gestures wildly at the world* in the course of my life. And to know that we are all in the dark together with the savage need to fuck everything up, to be ALONE, to want complicated things, to want to feel everything, and to then be able to laugh about it, chat about it, cry about it. In the light! With each other! Holy fucking shit what a gift.