"Life-changing" for some, hateable to others, Miranda July's wildly successful erotic novel All Fours about the female midlife experience has dominated the conversation.

Every year brings its share of buzzy books: the tomes that top TBR piles, pop up all over social media and are mentioned in countless best-of lists. But it's a rare novel that not only transcends the literary world to dominate the wider cultural conversation, but is still making waves a year after it was first published.

That's the case with Miranda July's All Fours, a strange, sexy and surprising book about a woman tearing up her life in her mid-40s. When it came out last spring, it swiftly became a word-of-mouth sensation, and since then the buzz has only become louder. July has appeared on the cover of weekend supplements and been interviewed on national news programmes. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2025. Meanwhile the book has been optioned for a TV series and nominated for several prizes, including the National Book Awards and the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Yet arguably the novel's biggest impact has been the conversations it has started. Women, especially, have pressed the book eagerly into the hands of friends, sisters, mothers, strangers, urging them to read it. Many have called it life-changing. Some have hated it. But everyone who reads this book has something to say about it.

In the novel, an unnamed narrator – a 45-year-old semi-famous artist (like July herself) and married mother of one – sets off on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York, a gift to herself after a whiskey company pays $20,000 to use one of her phrases in an advert. She hopes the trip will turn her into "the sort of chill, grounded woman I'd always wanted to be". Except she doesn't make it to Manhattan. She barely makes it out of LA, pulling off the motorway for petrol in a town called Monrovia. There, an encounter with a younger man, Davey, leads her to check into a motel for the night, where she winds up spending the next three weeks (and blows her entire windfall on renovating the motel room in the style of a Parisian hotel).

Her geographical journey is swapped for an emotional one. An all-consuming desire for Davey kickstarts not just a sexual reawakening but a complete reassessment of her life at its midway point. Back home, her doctor tells her she's in perimenopause, the transitional phase before menopause where fluctuating hormone levels can cause a host of physical and emotional changes. When she learns that, according to biology, her libido is about to "fall off a cliff", it propels her to ferociously pursue her desires, realising she must choose between "a life spent longing vs a life that was continually surprising".

Besides desire, the narrator and the book consider subjects like ageing, ambition, creativity, mortality, motherhood and marriage, all the time questioning the expected path for women in the second half of their lives. If it sounds serious, it is – but it's funny, too.

On its release, All Fours received largely rave reviews. The New York Times called it "the first great perimenopause novel". New York Magazine said it was "a spectacularly horny story about pursuing sexual and creative freedom". The Washington Post's review was prophetic, saying: "something about All Fours – its outrageous sexuality, its quirky humour, its earnest search for change – could, who knows, rally a generation of women."

On her motivation for writing for book, July talked about the lack of art dedicated to this phase of life. "If men had this huge change, it would be considered monumental! There would be rituals. There'd be holidays. There'd be rights and religions,"

© BBC