Desire and Aging in All Fours: Perimenopause as Transformation

Thematic Claim

In All Fours, the narrator’s experience of desire during perimenopause is not a straightforward decline but a radical transformation that challenges both internal expectations and cultural narratives about aging and female sexuality. The novel argues that the fear of losing desire can itself be a generative force—one that pushes a woman to renegotiate her relationship to her body, her marriage, and her future. Desire does not disappear; it shifts form, becomes more self-aware, and ultimately opens the door to a freer, more expansive way of living.

The story traces this arc from the narrator’s initial sense of sexual deadness inside her marriage, through the volcanic, “mind-rooted” arousal of her affair with a younger man, to a post-crisis acceptance that aging brings its own strange, powerful pleasures. Along the way, the novel refuses a simple before/after binary. Instead, it treats perimenopause as what the narrator’s doctor calls “the shock of this squeezing” that prepares a woman for the next phase—a messy, contradictory, and deeply alive process.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

Part 1: The Stale Marriage and the Hunger for Surveillance

The novel opens with the narrator’s emotional and sexual distance from her husband, Harris. Their sex life, as she later confides to her friend Jordi, follows a structured, fantasy-driven routine that leaves her feeling defeated. Harris’s casual division of people into “Drivers” and “Parkers” stings because it labels her as needy and dissatisfied. Her longing is displaced onto the telephotographer who photographs her house—a stranger who, by surveilling her, makes her feel seen. She masturbates imagining him, and later shares a profound silent phone call with the neighbor Brian. This early desire is not sexual in the traditional sense; it is a hunger for attention, for being the object of someone’s unwavering gaze. The narrator’s desire is already “mind-rooted,” as she later terms it, long before her body’s hormonal shifts become apparent. Her plan to drive across the country—a performative attempt to become a “Driver”—is itself a flight from the humiliation of wanting too much.

Part 2: The Affair and the Discovery of Perimenopause

The affair with Davey erupts with a force that surprises the narrator. After glimpsing his chest on a hike, she experiences a “bottomless fuck” of fantasy that feels involuntary, happening to her. This is the first time desire has felt so urgent and physical—yet it is immediately shadowed by the realization that she is “too old for him.” The affair becomes a crucible in which she confronts her own aging body. In Chapter 14, a routine gynecological visit leads to a diagnosis of perimenopause. The narrator is staggered by the WebMD list of symptoms, especially “reduced libido.” She fixates on the graph showing estrogen dropping “like a cliff,” and mourns the loss of the body-rooted lust she has only just discovered. Yet her friend Mary offers a different frame: perimenopause is a “Rumspringa,” a dangerous but precious window before desire changes forever. The narrator decides to stop trying to suppress her desire and instead embrace it as a “last surge.”

The affair continues in the Excelsior Motel room, which the narrator renovates into a private sanctuary. Here, desire is both heightened and thwarted: she and Davey touch for hours but do not have intercourse. This withholding becomes a form of sacred intimacy. The narrator’s obsession is intertwined with her fear of becoming like her grandmother and aunt, who both jumped from a window in midlife. She sees their suicides as one possible response to the “cliff”—an alternative to brave submission. The motel room, decorated by Davey’s wife Claire without knowing its purpose, paradoxically becomes a space where the narrator can explore desire outside the reproductive script.

Part 3: Resolution and Reinterpretation

By the novel’s end, the narrator has moved beyond the affair. In Chapter 26, she asks older women about the best thing about postmenopause and receives a cascade of replies: chronic migraines stop, mental health improves, and many feel like their “true selves” for the first time. Her doctor confirms that postmenopausal women often enjoy better mental health than at any other stage. The narrator begins to reimagine what comes after desire-as-urgency. The “fork in the road” Mary mentioned is not between having sex with Davey or not, but between a life spent in longing and a life that remains surprising.

In Chapter 29, after suffering vertigo on a plane, the narrator performs the Epley maneuver—a chaotic, vomiting-inducing ritual that connects her to her ancestral line. The physical crisis becomes a rite of passage. Finally, in Chapter 30, she watches Davey dance. The performance, with its golden orange light, evokes the motel room. The narrator realizes that “the room is everywhere” and that every day can be sacred. She stops wanting to possess Davey and feels profound gratitude. Her desire has transformed into a broader capacity for aliveness—a kind of “weirder” elation that she can carry forward.

Character and Symbol Connections

The narrator’s desire is entangled with several key figures. Harris represents the safety of the known, but also the deadening repetition that makes her crave escape. Davey is the object of her final surge of lust—a younger man whose very youth forces her to confront age. Jordi serves as a mirror: her frank, embodied sexuality makes the narrator feel inadequate, but their friendship also provides crucial sounding boards. Claire, Davey’s wife, unknowingly facilitates the affair by decorating the motel room, and her presence underscores the narrator’s deception and the cost of her freedom.

Symbols reinforce the theme. The telephotographer embodies the narrator’s longing to be seen and desired from a distance—a desire that precedes her physical affair. The Excelsior Motel room starts as a place of illicit encounter but becomes, after renovation, a “sacred cave” where the narrator can be fully herself, free from the gaze of her family. The dance and strobe light in the final chapter transforms public performance into a private revelation, melting the boundaries between inside and outside, young and old. The motel painting of the old woman before a sealed cave serves as a cautionary portrait: the narrator refuses to let her own cave close.

Complexity and Contradiction

All Fours does not offer a tidy message about aging gracefully. The narrator’s desire is contradictory throughout: it is both liberating and destructive, both a gift and a curse. She pursues Davey obsessively while knowing the affair is unsustainable. She feels simultaneously more alive and more ashamed than ever before. The novel also questions whether the “last hurrah” narrative is itself a trap. The narrator’s fear that menopause will erase her sexuality is not entirely wrong—her friend Mary reports feeling “numb down there”—but the text complicates this by showing that desire can shift from body-rooted to mind-rooted without losing its power.

The narrator’s grandmother and aunt both jumped to their deaths at the same age, creating a dark inheritance. The novel resists the idea that midlife desire pathology leads to either a happy liberation or a tragic end; instead, it presents the narrator’s journey as a halting, messy negotiation. She lies, manipulates, and spends $20,000 to create a secret room—actions that are neither admirable nor condemnable but deeply human. By the end, she has not “solved” aging, but she has learned to live inside its contradictions.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the narrator’s view of perimenopause change from the middle of the novel to the end?

Question: How does the narrator’s view of perimenopause change from the middle of the novel to the end?

Answer: Initially, the narrator sees perimenopause as a “cliff” that will rob her of libido and identity. She fears becoming like her grandmother and aunt, who died by suicide. However, after consulting with other postmenopausal women and her doctor, she learns that the “next phase” can bring better mental health and a sense of autonomy. By the final chapter, she no longer mourns the loss of her old desire but instead embraces a broader, weirder sense of aliveness—one that does not depend on being desired by men.

2. Why does the narrator spend $20,000 to renovate a motel room for her affair, and what does this reveal about her desire?

Question: Why does the narrator spend $20,000 to renovate a motel room for her affair, and what does this reveal about her desire?

Answer: The renovation is an attempt to create a space that belongs only to her—a sanctuary where she can experience desire on her own terms. Hiring Claire, Davey’s wife, to do the work adds a layer of irony: the affair is literally built by the woman it betrays. The act of redecorating reveals that the narrator’s desire is not simply for sex but for a controlled environment in which she can feel powerful and free. The room becomes a “cave” where she can separate her sexual self from her domestic self.

3. How do the stories of the narrator’s grandmother and aunt influence her response to aging?

Question: How do the stories of the narrator’s grandmother and aunt influence her response to aging?

Answer: The suicides of Esther and Ruthie loom as a ghostly inheritance. The narrator initially sees jumping as one of two options: either “brave submission” or “making a scene.” The family pattern makes her feel doomed, but also gives her a category for her own despair. By the end, she does not jump; instead, she accepts vertigo and disorientation as part of the passage. She reinterprets the motel painting of an old woman before a sealed cave as a caution, not a prophecy—she will not let her own cave close.

4. In what ways does the novel challenge the idea that desire inevitably declines with age?

Question: In what ways does the novel challenge the idea that desire inevitably declines with age?

Answer: The novel challenges this idea by showing that desire changes form rather than ending. The narrator’s lust for Davey is more intense than anything she felt in her thirties, even as she recognizes its unsustainability. Moreover, the testimonies of older women in Chapter 26 describe postmenopause as a time of heightened freedom, reduced anxiety, and a rediscovery of the self. The doctor’s comment that mental health often improves after menopause suggests that desire may shift from a reproductive drive to an existential one.

5. What does the narrator mean when she says “the room is everywhere” at the end of the novel?

Question: What does the narrator mean when she says “the room is everywhere” at the end of the novel?

Answer: The “room” refers to the Excelsior Motel room—the space she created for her affair. When she realizes the room is everywhere, she means that the sacred, heightened quality of that space can be accessed anywhere, at any time, without needing a secret affair. Her desire no longer requires an external object (Davey) or a hidden place; it has become an internal capacity to find meaning and aliveness in everyday life. This insight allows her to feel gratitude and connection, even as she lets go of her obsession.