The paradoxical and perplexing work of writer and filmmaker Miranda July honours the struggle to communicate and to belong while also making it strange again. Her non-fiction book It Chooses You, an account of her quest for meaning while struggling to finish the screenplay for her film The Future , is testament to her ardent commitment to intimacy and connection, as she strives to feel the reality of the lives with which she comes into contact.
The second person address of the title to her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You is characteristically inclusive, as is the play on interpersonal pronouns in the title of her first feature film, You, Me and Everyone We Know. She is difficult to bear, but not because of her unrelenting sincerity. She is sincere but she is also ironical; her work both consoles and abrades. Wary of the uncritical consolation of the therapeutic β arguably one of the most dominant contemporary ideologies β her work critiques the culture of self help and the solipsistic pursuit of self-improvement and authenticity, which privileges the suffering self, and creates an alternative space of perplexing strangeness that dislodges complacency and interrupts conditioned responses.
The same space that acknowledges and affirms the struggle of existence also feels deeply dangerous, a kind of ground-zero of razed conventions and preconceptions. July looks to meet and acknowledge the fear and paranoia rife in the contemporary world, without privileging it. There are patio chairs and couches, and people work in offices and go to shops: these are familiar things but July renders them unfamiliar.
The ambivalence of the context is troubling; it makes the ground unstable, leaving the reader with little by which to navigate. She is intent upon working against the paranoid hunger for classification, and the fearful and salacious determination to categorise and define. July engenders identification with her narrators and then complicates the attachment.
Her submissions are offbeat, vivid. Yet while the optimism and affirmation and lack of moral judgment within these short self-help pieces is easy to like, there is also a suggestion that the universality and inclusivity of the language are mistaken, operating as sentimental padding that obliterates particularity. For this reason it is my favourite magazine. In its avoidance of negativity while asserting the appearance of happiness at all costs, the magazine ignores the troubling reality of the disease.
