No One Belongs Here More Than You

As an artist, Miranda July defines eclectic. In 2005 she won the Camera d'Or prize at Cannes for her film Me and You and Everyone You Know. She is a performance artist, a musician, and a writer of short fiction, and she has met with success in all of these ventures. In 2002, she collaborated with artist Harrell Fletcher on learningtoloveyoumore.com, an ingenious participatory web site. No One Belongs Here More Than You is July's award-winning debut collection of short fiction, some of which has appeared before in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, and other publications.

My two favorite stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are two in which nothing much at all happens. The first is a very short third person story entitled "This Person," which first appeared in Bridge.

We all at one time or another have had the suspicion that life, all of this, is a big joke, a play, an act, that there is a curtain somewhere and if we could just find it and pull it aside we would see what was really going on, see everyone behind it, nodding and smiling and congratulating us on figuring it all out. That's what made The Truman Show such a great movie and why the Talking Heads, in two different songs ("Heaven" and "New Feeling"), sang about meeting everyone at exactly the same time. In Miranda July's "This Person," the story's subject meets everyone she has ever known. Everyone is gathered together in a park, waiting to hug "this person" and to tell her "it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that."

These universal feelings that we all have shared but yet go somehow unvoiced are at the root of Miranda July's stories. Nothing much actually happens in these stories, but July finds those spaces in between, the real lives that we are living while we are waiting for things to happen to us.

My other favorite, "The Swim Team," is similar in this regard. The narrator recounts an uneventful year in a city where she is mistakenly known as Maria. Though the city is landlocked and devoid of swimming pools, "Maria" reinvents herself as a swim coach and gives "swimming lessons" to three enthusiastic octogenarians in her living room, with bowls of water placed strategically beneath the swimmers' faces. It is a story that she tells to an absent ex-boyfriend, and it is all about the tales we tell ourselves and others about who we are:

"I know it's hard for you to imagine me as someone called 'Coach.' I had a very different identity in Belvedere, that's why it was so difficult to talk about it with you. I never had a boyfriend there; I didn't make art, I wasn't artistic at all. I was kind of a jock. I was totally a jock - I was the coach of a swim team. If I had thought this would be at all interesting to you I would have told you earlier, and maybe we would still be going out."

Most of the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are first person narratives, and the mainly female narrators are often awkward and to some extent emotionally or sexually dysfunctional. July renders these characters extremely vulnerable, and in some way, their vulnerability makes the vulnerability inside each of us tangible and acceptable.

In "Majesty," a prudish narrator has a recurring sexual dream about Prince William and plots to win his love by cornering him in a pub and playing "All I Need is a Miracle" on the jukebox. What actually happens involves the demise of a dog named Potato. "The Shared Patio" is told by a woman who falls for her married and epileptic neighbor and shares a "nap" with him while he's in the midst of an epileptic seizure on the patio at their apartment complex. The teenage narrator of "Something That Needs Nothing" is rejected by her closest childhood friend and the love of her life. She finds solace and perhaps even power in a new identity as a girl in a peep-show window.

Miranda July's characters are so unafraid to be human, it hurts. But from the pain, magic emerges, and in that magic is the essence of what it means to be human.