Miranda July. Ingenuity and oddity.
The line between ingenuity and oddity is a thin one that is hard to traverse successfully. Miranda July has crafted an entire career doing just this, imbuing her work with the kind of pathos and whip-smart wit that would render anyone envious.
Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger in 1974, she soon changed her surname to July and has gone on to become one of the hottest properties in most of the major art disciplines, including film-making, art, literature and performance.
Her first full-length film, ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’ was a major critical darling, garnering prizes at both Cannes and Sundance. She followed up this achievement with a best-selling collection of short stories entitled, ‘No One Belongs Here More Than You.’ The book shifted more than 100,000 copies within a few months and was recently awarded the prestigious Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize.
Speaking on the phone from her Los Angeles home, July says, “I was writing these stories at the same time as I was writing my last movie. What was interesting about that was writing from an unconscious, uncensored place. I was in my twenties for a lot of it. This was the first decade that I was an adult. I could think of sex from both points of view; as a child and as an adult; often using sexual themes as a metaphor for the unconscious or for mystery, as opposed to mere eroticism.”
All her work filters experiences through the sieve of child-like perceptions, so was she creative as a child? “I was an imaginative child,” she says in a gentle voice, “I wrote lots of stories, some of which I still have. I have one from when I was seven that was a trilogy called ‘Lost Child.’ I read a lot of classic stuff when I was younger because I discovered that my parents had some books that I liked. So on my own, I would read Dostoyevsky and James Baldwin.”
Some might say that her work is treacly sweet, but July downplays this by anchoring her ideas in surprising acts of strength. In a sense, her work is about the difficult business of living and building connections out of the most random situations. In fact, her aesthetic vision is so distinctive that the American short story writer, George Saunders coined an adjective for it; Julyesque.
As a result of her success, does she feel pressure to constantly create? “I do feel outside pressure,” she says, “It’s only surpassed by my internal pressure to create, which is really different. When I haven’t made something for a while, it’s like I haven’t eaten. It’s how you make sense of the world. I feel out of it like I’m carrying something inside that has to be released. The external pressure is the total opposite of that. It’s about fear and self-consciousness. It’s not a help in any way, but I guess its part of being a working artist.”
Being a female film-maker in Hollywood is an incredibly thankless job, but July insists that headway has been made. She also states that having a set of ideals makes the job easier. Does that mean she’s a feminist?
“I consider myself one,” she states, “To say I’m not a feminist, I’m not sure how that would serve me at all. The movie industry is so sexist that you have to be a feminist to get anything done. It’s very hidden somehow, so yeah I still feel that there is a lot to be done. At the same time, I’m keeping pride in all the progress that has been made. I think to say that you’re not a feminist is a matter of going out of your way. I think it’s a fear of what the label might mean. I never think for a second that being a feminist means not loving men. It’s an insecure point of view that you couldn’t actually be pro-woman, without being against men.”
Her most recent project was a groundbreaking website called ‘Learning to Love You More’ which was created with artist Harrell Fletcher as a way of inspiring ordinary people to come up with extraordinary ways of self-expression. Each week, both July and Fletcher issued assignments and the results were so incredible that they have been published as a book.
“Harrell Fletcher and I had both done a lot of projects that engaged the public,” says July, “In different ways, we sort of gave out assignments. I had already done a project called ‘Joanie4Jackie’ with women filmmakers. So this was the first time I had really used the internet to fulfill our interests. The website is successful but we never publicised it. We let it grow very organically, so in some ways it was kind of slow. It’s a kind of underground thing.”
Despite being so immersed in art, July has a pretty low estimation of the art world in general.
“I think some of my favourite art has been made by people who might not even be considered as artists for one reason or another. And the art world is so uninteresting to me. I don’t even care about it. It’s just the art itself that matters.”
Within the space of a few years, July has gone from cult-favourite to highly lauded multi-threat. So what next? What are her future plans? “I always have loose plans pretty far into the future. I know what projects I would like to do. I want to write a novel and also larger art projects. A lot of my plans are also just personal ones.”
Somehow, one gets the feeling that whatever Miranda July does next, it will be a crazy/ beautiful experience for her admirers.
‘Learning to Love You More’ is published by Prestel.
Words: Diriye Osmand
