No One Belongs Here More Than You. Stories by Miranda July

Miranda July came to prominence after writing, directing and starring in the movie Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), recipient of the Camera d’Or at Cannes. In the most memorable of the film’s winningly weird exchanges a five-year-old boy woos a woman online with his vision of intimacy: pooping “back and forth” into each other’s butts forever, represented by the immortal eroticon, “))<>((.”

July’s debut book of stories depicts sixteen you’s and me’s in relationships just as odd. A daughter, for instance, inherits her dying father’s twelve “moves” for getting women off, and a small-town woman teaches octogenarians to swim on the floor of her apartment.


Other bizarre interactions play out entirely in the fertile imaginations July projects onto her speakers. Hopes and anxieties are elaborate but deeply felt, driving the characters to create superstitions to guide them in a world of overwhelming possibility: “People tend to stick to their own sized group because it’s easier on the neck.” That is, unless they’re romantically involved, in which case the height difference signals that, “I am willing to go the distance for you.”

Such earnestness is typical of July’s humour, which recalls that of fellow San Franciscan Dave Eggers and the journal he edits, McSweeney’s. Characters explicate the obvious, collapse similes and employ ridiculous superlatives. The small town woman casts herself as “the saddest swim coach in history.”

At their most generous, July’s characters instill quotidian acts with solace and salvation. In the book’s blacker moments, however, their optimism and ambition merely increase the height that they fall from: one concedes that people she thought were just her “starter friends” are all she has, and the sense of desert two young graduates share leads them to reject typical, mundane work, driving them to try prostitution.

Along with New Zealander Charlotte Grimshaw’s Opportunity, No One Belongs Here More Than You was recently shortlisted for the rich Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. It seems the book is finding the fame that its simple promotional website – snapshots of text written in marker on top of her kitchen appliances (noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com) – has already enjoyed.

One of July’s characters imagines a map of the solar system modified to depict, not stars and planets, but the relationships of everyone in the world. Miranda July, with her indefatigable attention to absurd but emotionally authentic moments of cruelty, miscommunication and great affection would make a fine interpersonal cartographer, discovering and drawing our attention to the most striking and unusual phenomena.