All Fours: A Novel

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’

I’m not a household name. I won’t go into the tedious specifics of what I do, but picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age and has continued very steadily, always circling her central concerns in a sort of ecstatic fugue state with the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path—her whole life will be this sin

She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.

I wasn't fatter or thinner; I'd incarnated. Of course I had always been in here, but so gingerly, like a person never wanting to unpack even though they're obviously going to be staying awhile. Now my brain was spread out over my whole body, not just in my head.

If you didn't know about recovery and exercise you were out of touch with the human plight. There were only so many ways to lift yourself back up—and fallng down, well, it's what we do.

you couldn't think your way to a physical place, you had to go there.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do that,” Jordi said. “Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn’t have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn’t we be normalizing change?”

I would often whisper, Let's dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn't understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting p

I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.