Books like All Fours

Jen Beagin's Big Swiss matches All Fours' willingness to let its protagonist do outrageous things and then sit with the fallout. Greta, a woman with a traumatic past, works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist in Hudson, New York, and begins an affair with one of the patients she has been secretly listening to. Like July, Beagin writes about female desire without judgment or sentimentality, treating her character's choices as logical even when they look reckless from the outside.

The dark humor runs through every scene, with Beagin deploying the same kind of precise, surprising observations that make July's prose feel electric. Both novels feature women who have arranged their lives around other people's needs and finally decide to prioritize their own wants, regardless of the cost. The small-town setting in Big Swiss carries a claustrophobic energy similar to July's motel room, a place where reinvention and self-destruction look almost identical.

Readers who loved All Fours' frank treatment of sex and its consequences will find a kindred spirit in Beagin's unflinching voice.

Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation takes a different approach to the same question All Fours asks: what happens when a woman opts out of the life she is supposed to want? The unnamed narrator, a beautiful, wealthy young woman in early-2000s Manhattan, decides to sleep for an entire year with the help of a dubious psychiatrist and an escalating cocktail of medications. Where July's protagonist channels her restlessness into a secret affair, Moshfegh's character channels hers into total withdrawal.

Both novels use dark comedy to examine how women perform normalcy and what happens when they stop. Moshfegh's prose is blunt and unsentimental in a way that complements July's more lyrical style, and both writers refuse to make their protagonists likeable in conventional terms. The novel's treatment of female passivity as a form of protest resonates with All Fours' argument that women's needs deserve more space than domestic life typically allows them.

This is the pick for readers who want their fiction about female rebellion served cold.

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation uses a fragmented, aphoristic structure to tell the story of a marriage strained by parenthood, ambition, and infidelity. The unnamed narrator, a writer and new mother, discovers her husband's affair and must decide what kind of life she wants to build from the wreckage.

Like All Fours, the novel refuses to treat marriage and motherhood as the end of a woman's story, instead showing how these roles coexist with intellectual ambition and unfulfilled desire. Offill writes in short, punchy paragraphs that land with the force of poetry, a structural choice that mirrors the interrupted attention of a mind split between creative work and childcare. Both novels understand that the domestic sphere contains as much drama as any war novel, and both treat the small betrayals of long-term relationships with the weight they deserve.

The New York academic setting adds a class dimension that recalls how July positions her protagonist within the LA art world. Readers drawn to All Fours' smart, self-aware narration will find Offill's voice equally sharp.

Kimberly King Parsons' We Were the Universe follows Kit, a young mother in Texas struggling with grief over her sister's death, a faltering marriage, and a creative life she has set aside. The novel moves between Kit's present-day responsibilities and memories of her wild, devoted relationship with her sister, creating a portrait of a woman who feels she is living the wrong life. Like July, Parsons writes about the body with an intimacy that can feel confrontational, refusing to separate physical experience from emotional truth.

Both novels position motherhood not as fulfillment but as one of many competing forces in a woman's identity, and both allow their protagonists to be angry about the compromises they have made. The Texas setting gives the novel a different texture than July's Los Angeles, but both authors use place to reflect their characters' sense of confinement. Parsons' prose has a hallucinatory quality that recalls July's strangest moments, where reality bends under the pressure of desire and grief.

This is the pick for readers who connect with All Fours' raw honesty about what motherhood costs.

Rufi Thorpe's Margo's Got Money Troubles follows a twenty-one-year-old community college student who gets pregnant by her English professor, keeps the baby, and turns to OnlyFans to pay the bills when her ex-professional-wrestler father moves in to help with childcare. The novel shares All Fours' refusal to moralize about women's sexual choices, treating Margo's decision to commodify her body as a practical response to impossible economic conditions rather than a moral failing.

Both novels feature women who find power in spaces that society dismisses or stigmatizes, and both use humor to cut through the shame that surrounds female sexuality and money. Thorpe writes with a warmth and energy that makes Margo's chaotic life feel vivid rather than pitiful, and the father-daughter dynamic adds an intergenerational dimension that recalls how July explores relationships across age gaps.

The novel's interest in performance and authenticity, what is real when you are always performing, connects directly to All Fours' questions about the masks women wear. A lighter read than July but no less smart about its subject.

Leslie Jamison's Splinters is a memoir about the dissolution of her marriage and the first years of single motherhood, written with the same unflinching honesty that All Fours brings to fiction. Jamison tracks the overlap between her creative life and her personal collapse, showing how writing about pain becomes its own form of survival and sometimes its own form of evasion. Like July, Jamison refuses to cast herself as either villain or victim in the story of her marriage's end, instead sitting with the ambiguity of being someone who wanted more than her life was offering.

The memoir's attention to the physical realities of new motherhood, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the moments of unexpected joy, resonates with All Fours' frank treatment of women's bodies as sites of both pleasure and frustration. Jamison writes about desire and ambition as twin forces that cannot be separated, a position July shares. Readers who want All Fours' emotional register translated into nonfiction will find Splinters the closest match.

The writing is precise and self-questioning in exactly the way July's best work is.

Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen predates All Fours by several years but anticipates many of its concerns about women who feel trapped by the roles assigned to them. Set in 1960s New England, the novel follows Eileen Dunlop, a young woman who works at a juvenile prison and cares for her alcoholic father, whose life is upended by the arrival of a glamorous new colleague. Eileen's internal monologue is filled with the same dark, taboo thoughts that July's protagonist entertains, the difference being that Eileen has never been allowed to act on any of them.

Both novels treat women's dissatisfaction not as a character flaw but as a reasonable response to lives that offer too little freedom. Moshfegh writes Eileen's body with the same discomfort and specificity that July brings to her protagonist's experience of aging, showing how physical self-consciousness shapes every interaction. The period setting adds a layer of constraint that makes Eileen's eventual rebellion feel even more charged.

This is the right pick for readers who want to trace the literary lineage of women characters who refuse to be good.

Miranda July's The First Bad Man is the obvious first stop for All Fours readers, because it is the same writer working the same nerve nine years earlier. Cheryl is a tightly wound woman in her forties with private rituals and a fantasy life she narrates in flat, funny detail. Her tidy world breaks open when her bosses install their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee in her house.

What follows is a strange love story that runs through staged fights, role-play, and a pregnancy nobody expected. July writes desire the way she writes it in All Fours, as something embarrassing, specific, and impossible to talk yourself out of. The comic voice is the same, and so is the willingness to follow a woman into the parts of herself she would not say out loud.

Recommended for All Fours readers who want to go straight back to the source.

Melissa Broder's The Pisces is the All Fours readalike for anyone who wants the same hunger pushed one step into the surreal. Lucy is a stalled academic in her late thirties, wrecked by a breakup and parked in her sister's Venice Beach house with a love-addiction therapy group she half ignores.

Then she meets Theo, a swimmer on the beach who turns out to be a merman, and her desire becomes the whole story. Broder writes appetite the way July does, as something funny and humiliating and bottomless, and she is just as willing to put the body on the page without flinching.

The fantasy element gives the book its own register, but the engine is the same, a woman pulled apart by wanting more than her life has allowed her. Recommended for All Fours readers who like their desire stories raw, comic, and a little unhinged.

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying is the ancestor every All Fours review eventually names, the 1973 novel that put unapologetic female desire on the bestseller list and made the argument July is still making fifty years later. Isadora Wing is a married poet who follows her psychoanalyst husband to a conference in Vienna and then runs off with a charming, careless man, chasing a fantasy of pure freedom she calls the zipless encounter.

The book is funny, frank, and full of the same tension All Fours runs on, the pull between the safety of a marriage and the wildness of wanting something else. Jong wrote it when this voice was scandalous, and reading it now shows how directly July inherits the lineage.

Recommended for All Fours readers who want to see where the frank-female-desire novel started.

Lisa Taddeo's Animal is the All Fours readalike for the darker end of female desire, the version where wanting curdles into rage. Joan flees New York after a man kills himself in front of her and drives to Los Angeles to track down a woman from her past who holds the key to her history.

Taddeo writes the body and its hungers with the same unflinching attention July brings, but where July finds comedy, Taddeo finds menace. Joan is furious, self-aware, and willing to narrate the worst of herself, which puts her in the same uncomfortable-female-narrator lineage as the books All Fours readers already love.

The novel got buried a little under the shadow of Taddeo's nonfiction blockbuster Three Women, which makes it the hidden gem here. Recommended for All Fours readers who want the desire turned feral.

Meg Wolitzer's The Wife is the All Fours readalike about the long game, the marriage examined from the far side of decades rather than the middle. Joan Castleman is flying to Helsinki so her famous novelist husband can collect a major prize, and somewhere over the Atlantic she decides she is going to leave him. The book unspools the bargain she made with her own ambition and the cost of standing behind a man's career instead of building her own.

Wolitzer writes with the same dry intelligence and the same willingness to question what a wife owes a marriage that runs through All Fours. The midlife reckoning is quieter here, but the anger underneath is just as real. The novel found a wider audience after the 2017 film, yet the book itself stays underread.

Recommended for All Fours readers who want the marriage question taken to its endpoint.

Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark is the half-forgotten ancestor of All Fours, a 1973 novel about a woman who steps out of her own life for one season to see what is left of her. Kate Brown is a forty-five-year-old wife and mother whose family scatters for the summer, leaving her to take a translating job, drift into an affair with a younger man, and then let everything fall away, including her health and her appearance, in a London hotel room.

Lessing writes the midlife crisis decades before the phrase became a marketing category, and she gives it the same unsparing interior attention July brings to perimenopause. The body, aging, and the question of who a woman is once her usefulness to others ends are all here.

Recommended for All Fours readers who want the literary roots of the midlife-awakening novel.

Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep, released in 2024, is the recent All Fours readalike for the slow-burn awakening, the kind where a tightly controlled woman is undone by a desire she did not know she had. Isabel lives alone and rigid in her late mother's house in the Dutch countryside in 1961, until her brother's girlfriend Eva arrives to stay for a summer and disrupts everything.

What begins as suspicion and irritation turns into an obsession and then a charged, explicit affair that cracks Isabel open and unearths the buried history of the house itself. Van der Wouden writes desire with the same heat and the same attention to the body that All Fours runs on, wrapped inside a tense historical mystery.

The novel won the 2024 Booker Prize, which makes it the buzziest recent pick here. Recommended for All Fours readers who want awakening with a literary edge.

Kate Folk's Sky Daddy, released in 2025, is the recent All Fours readalike for readers who loved the comedy of a woman following her strangest want all the way down. Linda is romantically and sexually obsessed with airplanes, and she structures her whole life around flying, convinced she is meant to find love by going down in a crash.

Folk writes this premise completely straight, in the same deadpan register July uses, which is exactly what makes it work as both a joke and a real portrait of longing. Underneath the absurd hook is a sincere story about a woman whose desire does not fit any available shape, which is the same territory All Fours mines.

The novel earned strong reviews on release in 2025 as one of the boldest debuts of the year. Recommended for All Fours readers who want desire at its most unhinged and most committed.