Summer Reading Blog #1

Title Of Text: No One Belongs Here More Than You
Author: Miranda July

Plot Overview/ Description:
In Miranda July's collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, there are a series of mostly female main characters that deal primarily with issues of the heart. Many are confused about love, or relationships with others. Most feel isolated, and most communicate poorly with the people they come in contact with. In a story titled The Neighbor, the main character, a woman named Janice, is secretly in love with her married next door neighbor. She knows his wife, but is friends with neither. Her crush is merely a fantasy, based on nothing more than a figment of her imagination with the face of her neighbor. On her first true opportunity to speak with her neighbor on their shared apartment patio, her neighbor slips into a convulsive state; shaking and writhing on the patio floor. Janice can do nothing but hug him. When the neighbor's wife emerges on the scene, she is horrified to see her husband, in the middle of an epilleptic seizure, merely being hugged. She orders Janice to get the hospital phone number, but again, Janice is stupefied by the reality of his life. He is no longer a figment of her imagination. He is real. He has real friends. He has real problems (epillepsy and a demanding wife.) Her inability to deal realistically and logically to the tragic event symbolizes her inability to deal realisticaly with love, or any other emotional attachment for that matter. In the end, she is merely standing in the apartment of her neighbors, staring dumbly at their pictures on the refridgerator, while his wife works outside to revive her husband. Others are willing to do the work associated with love; not Janice.

Recommendation:
I was recommended this book by a girlfriend. I, too, would recommend this book. But it has a very distinctly "single-white-female" readership. I can't really imagine my older sister, who is married with children, really understanding the deeply sorrowful range of emotions the women in the stories experience. Not that everyone who enjoys a book must identify wholly with the main character. It's just that I don't think she would enjoy the stories unless she was forced to read the bpook for a class or something. I would recommend the book to one my single and emotionally inept friends. She would get the irrational decisions made by some of the characters, (like deciding to become a stripper after a rough break up) and sympathize with the character. She would understand the blue sorrow experienced by the character that loses her husband because she can't simply say, "I love you" and she would get the range of emotions felt when someone you can say "I love you" to chooses not to feel the same way about you. For this reason, I believe that No One Belongs Here More Than You is a book for the young, the sad, the single.

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