Books like
All Fours

Jen Beagin's Big Swiss matches All Fours' willingness to let its protagonist do outrageous things and then sit with the fallout. Greta, a woman with a traumatic past, works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist in Hudson, New York, and begins an affair with one of the patients she has been secretly listening to. Like July, Beagin writes about female desire without judgment or sentimentality, treating her character's choices as logical even when they look reckless from the outside.

Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation takes a different approach to the same question All Fours asks: what happens when a woman opts out of the life she is supposed to want? The unnamed narrator, a beautiful, wealthy young woman in early-2000s Manhattan, decides to sleep for an entire year with the help of a dubious psychiatrist and an escalating cocktail of medications. Where July's protagonist channels her restlessness into a secret affair, Moshfegh's character channels hers into total withdrawal.

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation uses a fragmented, aphoristic structure to tell the story of a marriage strained by parenthood, ambition, and infidelity. The unnamed narrator, a writer and new mother, discovers her husband's affair and must decide what kind of life she wants to build from the wreckage.

Kimberly King Parsons' We Were the Universe follows Kit, a young mother in Texas struggling with grief over her sister's death, a faltering marriage, and a creative life she has set aside. The novel moves between Kit's present-day responsibilities and memories of her wild, devoted relationship with her sister, creating 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, refusing to separate physical experience from emotional truth.

Rufi Thorpe's Margo's Got Money Troubles follows a twenty-one-year-old community college student who gets pregnant by her English professor, keeps the baby, and turns to OnlyFans to pay the bills when her ex-professional-wrestler father moves in to help with childcare. The novel shares All Fours' refusal to moralize about women's sexual choices, treating Margo's decision to commodify her body as a practical response to impossible economic conditions rather than a moral failing.

Leslie Jamison's Splinters is a memoir about the dissolution of her marriage and the first years of single motherhood, written with the same unflinching honesty that All Fours brings to fiction. Jamison tracks the overlap between her creative life and her personal collapse, showing how writing about pain becomes its own form of survival and sometimes its own form of evasion. Like July, Jamison refuses to cast herself as either villain or victim in the story of her marriage's end, instead sitting with the ambiguity of being someone who wanted more than her life was offering.

Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen predates All Fours by several years but anticipates many of its concerns about women who feel trapped by the roles assigned to them. Set in 1960s New England, the novel follows Eileen Dunlop, a young woman who works at a juvenile prison and cares for her alcoholic father, whose life is upended by the arrival of a glamorous new colleague. Eileen's internal monologue is filled with the same dark, taboo thoughts that July's protagonist entertains, the difference being that Eileen has never been allowed to act on any of them.

Miranda July's The First Bad Man is the obvious first stop for All Fours readers, because it is 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 install their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee in her house.

Melissa Broder's The Pisces is the All Fours readalike for anyone who wants the same hunger pushed one step into the surreal. Lucy is a stalled academic in her late thirties, wrecked by a breakup and parked in her sister's Venice Beach house with a love-addiction therapy group she half ignores.

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying is the ancestor every All Fours review eventually names, the 1973 novel that put unapologetic female desire on the bestseller list and 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 and then runs off with a charming, careless man, chasing a fantasy of pure freedom she calls the zipless encounter.