Books like
All Fours

Start with this one if you loved watching July's narrator do something outrageous and then sit with the fallout. In Jen Beagin's Big Swiss, Greta is a woman with a traumatic past who transcribes sessions for a sex therapist in Hudson, New York. She begins an affair with one of the patients she has been secretly listening to.

Like July, Beagin writes about female desire without judgment or sentiment, and Greta's choices make sense to her even when they look reckless from the outside. The dark humor runs through every scene, with the kind of precise, surprising observations that make July's prose feel electric. Both books follow women who have arranged their lives around other people's needs and finally put their own wants first, whatever it costs.

The small town feels as tight and airless as July's motel room, a place where starting over and wrecking yourself look almost the same. If you loved how frankly All Fours handles sex and what follows it, Beagin's unflinching voice will feel like a kindred spirit's.

Like your stories of female rebellion served cold? This is your pick. Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation asks the same question as All Fours: what happens when a woman opts out of the life she is supposed to want? Its unnamed narrator is a beautiful, wealthy young woman in early-2000s Manhattan.

She decides to sleep for an entire year, with help from a dubious psychiatrist and a growing cocktail of medications. July's narrator turns her restlessness into a secret affair, while Moshfegh's turns hers into total withdrawal. Both books use dark comedy to show how women perform normal life, and what happens when they stop. Moshfegh's prose is blunt and unsentimental, a good contrast to July's more lyrical style, and neither writer makes her heroine likable in the usual way.

Here, checking out becomes a kind of protest. That fits All Fours' argument that women's needs deserve more space than home life usually allows them.

Sharp, self-aware narration is the draw here, and Jenny Offill's voice is every bit as sharp as July's. Dept. of Speculation tells the story of a marriage strained by parenthood, ambition, and infidelity, in a fragmented, aphoristic form. Its unnamed narrator is a writer and new mother who finds out about her husband's affair.

Now she has to decide what kind of life to build from the wreckage. Like All Fours, the book refuses to treat marriage and motherhood as the end of a woman's story, and it lets those roles sit right beside her ambition and unmet desire. Offill writes in short, punchy paragraphs that land with the force of poetry. The form matches the interrupted attention of a mind split between creative work and childcare.

Both books know that home holds as much drama as any war novel, and they give the small betrayals of a long relationship the weight they deserve. The New York academic setting adds a class angle, much like July's place for her heroine in the LA art world.

Read this one for its raw honesty about what motherhood costs. In Kimberly King Parsons' We Were the Universe, Kit is a young mother in Texas who is grieving her sister's death. Her marriage is faltering, and she has set her creative life aside.

The novel moves between Kit's daily responsibilities and memories of her wild, devoted bond with her sister. What builds is a portrait of a woman who feels she is living the wrong life. Like July, Parsons writes about the body with an intimacy that can feel confrontational, and she never separates physical experience from emotional truth.

Neither book treats motherhood as fulfillment; it is one of many forces pulling at a woman, and both heroines get to be angry about the compromises they have made. Texas gives the novel a different texture than July's Los Angeles, but both writers use place to show how confined their women feel. Parsons' prose has a hallucinatory quality that recalls July's strangest moments, when reality bends under the pressure of desire and grief.

For a lighter read that is no less smart about its subject, go to Rufi Thorpe's Margo's Got Money Troubles. Margo is a twenty-one-year-old community college student who gets pregnant by her English professor and keeps the baby. When her father, a former pro wrestler, moves in to help with childcare, she turns to OnlyFans to pay the bills.

Like All Fours, the book refuses to moralize about a woman's sexual choices. Margo's decision to make money from her body is a practical answer to impossible economic conditions, not a moral failing. Both books find power in places society dismisses, and both use humor to cut through the shame around sex and money.

Thorpe writes with so much warmth and energy that Margo's chaotic life feels vivid rather than pitiful. The push and pull between father and daughter adds a cross-generational thread, a bit like July's interest in relationships across age gaps. Thorpe also keeps asking what is real when you are always performing, which ties straight back to All Fours and the masks women wear.

Want the feeling of All Fours in a true story? Leslie Jamison's Splinters is the closest match. It is a memoir about the end of her marriage and her first years as a single mother, told with the same unflinching honesty All Fours brings to fiction. Jamison tracks where her creative life and her personal collapse overlap.

Writing about pain becomes a way to survive, and sometimes a way to hide. Like July, she refuses to cast herself as villain or victim in the end of her marriage, and she sits with the murky truth of wanting more than her life was offering. The memoir is frank about the physical side of new motherhood: the exhaustion, the loneliness, the moments of unexpected joy. That echoes All Fours, where a woman's body brings both pleasure and frustration.

Jamison treats desire and ambition as twin forces that cannot be pulled apart, and July sees them the same way. The writing is precise and self-questioning in exactly the way July's best work is.

Ottessa Moshfegh was writing about women trapped by the roles handed to them several years before All Fours. Her novel Eileen is set in 1960s New England. Eileen Dunlop is a young woman who works at a juvenile prison and looks after her alcoholic father, and her life is upended when a glamorous new colleague arrives. Eileen's inner monologue is full of the same dark, taboo thoughts that July's narrator has.

The difference is that Eileen has never been allowed to act on any of them. Both books treat a woman's dissatisfaction as a reasonable response to a life with too little freedom, not as a character flaw. Moshfegh writes Eileen's body with the same discomfort and detail July brings to her narrator's experience of aging. That physical self-consciousness shapes every interaction.

The period setting adds another layer of constraint, so Eileen's eventual rebellion feels even more charged. Read it if you want to trace the literary family tree of women characters who refuse to be good.

The obvious first stop is Miranda July's own The First Bad Man, the same writer working the same nerve nine years earlier. Cheryl is a tightly wound woman in her forties with private rituals and a fantasy life she narrates in flat, funny detail. Her tidy world breaks open when her bosses move their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Clee, into her house.

What follows is a strange love story that runs through staged fights, role-play, and a pregnancy nobody expected. July writes desire here the way she writes it in All Fours. It is embarrassing, specific, and impossible to talk yourself out of.

The comic voice is the same, and so is the willingness to follow a woman into the parts of herself she would not say out loud. If you want to go straight back to the source, this is the book.

Push All Fours' hunger one step into the surreal, and you get Melissa Broder's The Pisces. Lucy is a stalled academic in her late thirties. Wrecked by a breakup, she is parked in her sister's Venice Beach house with a love-addiction therapy group she half ignores.

Then she meets Theo, a swimmer on the beach who turns out to be a merman, and her desire becomes the whole story. Broder writes appetite the way July does, as something funny, humiliating, and bottomless. She is just as willing to put the body on the page without flinching.

The fantasy gives the book its own flavor, but the engine is the same: a woman pulled apart by wanting more than her life has allowed her. Pick it up if you like your desire stories raw, comic, and a little unhinged.

Nearly every review of All Fours eventually names this book as its ancestor. Erica Jong's Fear of Flying is the 1973 novel that put unapologetic female desire on the bestseller list, and it made the argument July is still making fifty years later. Isadora Wing is a married poet who follows her psychoanalyst husband to a conference in Vienna.

Then she runs off with a charming, careless man, chasing a fantasy of pure freedom she calls the zipless encounter. The book is funny and frank. It runs on the same tension as All Fours, the pull between the safety of a marriage and the wildness of wanting something else.

Jong wrote it when this voice was scandalous, and reading it now shows how directly July inherits the line. This is where to look if you want to see where the frank novel of female desire started.