No One Belongs Here More Than You

It would be easy to simply dismiss this collection of short stories as just "quirky" or maybe "unconventional." Miranda July, most famous for her movie You Me and Everyone We Know, presents characters buried in struggle with abandonment and personal disappointment. The narrators take everything in stride, emoting capriciously and living largely in their own aloof world of personal relationships.

From "The Shared Patio":
"It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person."

"If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him or her. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first."

"These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing."

"Finally he paused and squinted up at the sky, and I guessed he was constructing the perfect question for me, a fantastic question that I would have to rise up to, drawing from everything I knew about myself and mythology and this black earth."

From "The Swim Team":
"And in time I realized that if the truth felt empty, then I probably would not be your girlfriend much longer."

From "Majesty":
"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren's children would get to him. But they wouldn't know what to do; they wouldn't know how to hold him."

"We come from long lines of people destined never to meet."

"People meet in bars every day, and they often have sex with people they meet in bars. My sister does this all the time, or she did when she was in college."

"I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much."

"This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else."

From "The Man on the Stairs":
"I was going to die and it was taking forever."

"I didn't want the man on the stairs knowing these things about us. But he would know. The second he threw on the lights and pulled out his gun, or his knife, or his heavy rock, the second he held the gun to my head, or the knife at my heart, or the heavy rock over my chest, he would know. He would see it in my boyfriend's eyes: You can have her, just let me live. And in my eyes, he would see the words: I never really knew true love. Would he empathize with us? Does he know what it's like? Most people do. You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. Sometimes I lie in bed and try to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.

From "The Sister":
"We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love."

"Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I've never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I will ask myself: Is it worth it? And it just isn't."

"I had a joint once and I didn't feel right for a whole year."

From "This Person":
"This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everything this person has ever known."

"This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seem to bear down upon this person's chest."

From "It Was Romance":
"Humans make their own worlds in the small area in front of their face."

"We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond."

From "Something That Needs Nothing":
"In truth, I had not yet learned to hate anyone but my parents."

"There was no way I could ever be in love with her because she was just as pathetic as me."

"From the start, one is trained not to take off your clothes in front of complete strangers. Keeping one's clothes on is actually the number one rule for civilization."

From "The Boy From Lam Kien":
"If I was going to bring something new into my life, it would be a big starving thing. But I could not do that."

"The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up. I was getting depressed and this was my own fault."

"I understood completely about needing to hurt someone at the same time that you are giving them something."

"He picked up a book that was lying on the floor and held it in the air between his two fingers. The subtitle of the book was Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships. I was working through it, word by word. So far I had done Keeping and was just starting on Love."

From "Making Love in 2003":
"When you reach a certain saturation point, lovemaking becomes one endless vibration."

"It doesn't really feel like you're driving when you don't know where you're going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean."

"I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself."

"When I began to write, it was out of fear. I thought I might forget, or pretend to forget, or pretend to pretend, or grow up."

"I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street."

"Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love."

"We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren't killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a breakthrough in their relationship with themselves."

"I wept and curled and uncurled myself in a way I couldn't control. I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn."

"I don't believe in psychology, which says everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't."

From "Mon Plaisir":
"On the eighth day of the rest of my life, I began to wonder if this was really the rest of my life or just a continuation of the same one."

"She didn't need this like I did; she lived alone, she had a webcam, she had many, many options."

From "Birthmark":
"Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery."

From "How to Tell Stories to Children":
"He didn't call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it."

"They were a wilderness that was too wild for me, they were living with bears, they were bears, their words flew past deadly animal teeth."

"Something in the way he said this gave me the feeling that the dynamic was moving on, perhaps down the block, where it would serve some other confused family. And we would be left dynamic-less, four people alone with all the wrong feelings for one another."

"I turned out the light, and we did not take off each other's clothes, but we took off our own clothes."

"Well, I have a theory that men don't actually cry less than women, they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry, we are each forced to invent our own unique method."

"Inelegantly and without my concern, time passed."