Miranda July is good at plot. Stories will come to her fully formed, like a gift from the gods; all she has to do is unwrap them. In her Los Angeles office, a little house where she keeps more than three decades’ worth of papers, photographs, awards, cassette tapes, and costumes, is a notebook that she filled in a single feverish train ride with the bones of her first feature film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005). Something similar happened with her first novel, “The First Bad Man” (2015), and with her latest movie, “Kajillionaire” (2020): a sudden vision, a pause to ponder, then a rush to get it all down. July is a director, a performer, and an artist who likes to work in media that do not seem to be media at all until she shows up to exploit their latent possibilities. She has opened an interfaith charity shop in a fancy London department store and created an app that allows strangers to deliver intimate messages and narrated the inner monologues of models during an Hermès fashion show. But she thinks of herself, first and foremost, as a writer. Sometimes, on a film set, an actor will improvise a line and she will have to tell him, No, please stick to the script. She knows what she means to say.
In the fall of 2017, July started to feel a second novel coming on. This time, though, she wanted to do things differently, to embrace the mystery of not knowing—what the writer Grace Paley called “the open destiny of life”—for as long as she could. “I felt like there was a way in which one’s anxiety is very calmed by having a plot,” she told me recently. “You feel safe. And there’s a way in which working like that can limit things if you have what you think of as a good idea too early.”
Denne historien er fra May 20, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra May 20, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.