Miranda July’s characters often wonder what is real and what’s not. How far can our minds take us – dreaming, fantasising, making art – and when must we return to a shared reality? “Real comes and goes and isn’t very interesting,” a therapist advises in July’s 2015 debut novel, The First Bad Man. Most of the characters in her 2005 debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, throw themselves dizzyingly into dream and play. In the film, it’s fantasy that enables genuine connection; in the novel, the protagonist has to move beyond fantasy to discover that life’s core lies elsewhere – in the touch of a lover or a baby.
This breezy commitment to inwardness and strangeness has often led to July being described as kooky. I don’t like the word – why not honour strangeness rather than belittling it? – but I did find July’s own character in the film a little gratingly winsome, while the protagonist of The First Bad Man felt too wilfully imagined, or maybe just too dangerously deranged, for me to care deeply about her fate.
