Book Review: No One Belongs Here More Than You
Filmmaker Miranda July's Award-Winning Short Story Collection
Sep 16, 2008
If you're not yet familiar with artist Miranda July's work, chances are you will be soon. The 34 year-old Berkeley native has already done a little bit of everything in the artistic realm, and done it successfully. A performance artist since the mid 1990's, her work is both critically and popularly acclaimed. Her performance pieces led to several indie short films, which July wrote, directed and starred in herself.
Miranda July's Artistic Resume is Packed
In 2005 Miranda July's first feature length film, You and Me and Everyone We Know, took both a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the prestigious Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. During this period, she also recorded and performed with the indie rock band Kill Rock Stars and continued to maintain the interactive/artistic/educational website Learning To Love You More, started in 2002 and still running full bore today.
Somewhere in that schedule, July found the time to write 16 superb short stories, published by Scribner in 2007 as her literary debut collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You.
Comparisons to Short Story Genius Raymond Carver
Ranging in length from two to thirty pages, the stories included in No One Belongs Here More Than You are frank but empathetic, sexual not "sexy", quirky and even just plain odd. But more than anything, each of these tales is written with an honest eye on the everyday moment. July's stories have been compared to those of Raymond Carver, in their ability to transform the mundane into the profound.
In "The Swim Team" a young woman gives swimming lessons to the local elderly on her kitchen floor, their faces in bowls of water, because there is no pool in town. "The Moves" tells of a dying father teaching his adult daughter the moves he has successfully used on women. What sounds disturbing here, even gross, becomes a life lesson for the narrator, and possibly the reader. The story "Birthmark" is a young woman's description of life with (and worse, without) a facial birthmark. Here is where Miranda July's sense of empathy and contradiction shine through:
"Have you ever wanted something very badly, then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be. Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery. She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly." Observations like these are made by characters throughout this collection, in a writing style that is both accessible and deep at once. These are stories the reader will not only relate to, but want to read again.
In the year since its publication, No One Belongs Here More Than You has won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and garnered much critical praise, well-deserved honors for Miranda July who, despite a boatload of credentials, is a young artist who seems to be just getting started.
July, Miranda. No One Belongs Here More Than You. 2007, Scribner. (isbn: 13: 978-0-7432-9939-8)
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