Is Miranda July Getting Enough Protein?
On All Fours, weightlifting, and how to get swole
How to Get it Right is a newsletter about self-help advice, books, and how to live a life. It comes out once a month or whenever else I feel like it.
This week: Miranda July’s All Fours and Casey Johnston’s Liftoff: Couch to Barbell
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Like every other woman who covets Rachel Comey, I raced through Miranda July’s All Fours sometime in June. If you haven’t read it, the novel covers a period of upheaval in a 45-year-old woman’s life as she tries and fails to balance her marriage, motherhood, and her job (making art) with falling into perimenopause, courting a younger man who works at a nearby Hertz, and a crazed project to create a copy of a Parisian hotel room in a motel in Monrovia.
There’s way more to the novel - a meeting with a Beyonce-esque pop star; an elaborate sexual fantasy involving a photojournalist; PTSD-like flashbacks to an obscure pregnancy complication; descriptions of luxury-scented hand soaps. But much ink has been spilled on these already, and so I’d like to focus on another part of the novel entirely – the part where she gets fucking swole.
Weightlifting is kind of having a moment right now, exercise-wise. I would know - since I decided in my freshman-year dorm room that exercise was a worthwhile pursuit, and that figuring out the best way to do it was both fun and a good use of my time, I have engaged in and evangelized the following exercise trends: yoga, Tracy Anderson DVDs, the elliptical machine, hot yoga, long-distance running, CorePower yoga, Soulcycle, Couch to 5K (after injuring myself in the previous long-distance running phase), 5k to 10k, pole dancing, SolidCore (at home), SolidCore (in studio), Peloton, and Kayla Itsnie’s Sweat app, that last one recommended to me by one of my meanest and thinnest coworkers.
And yet, it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I moved to San Francisco and realized that the only exercise studio within walking distance of my home was a mid-tier local gym with a tiny weight room, that I bought Casey Johnston’s beginning weightlifting guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. I started lifting 10 lb dumbbells over my head, then 15, then 20, and all of a sudden I was the sort of person who drinks protein shakes1 and checks Strenghtlevelstandards.com.
I read every issue of Casey’s wonderful newsletter, She’s a Beast. I went to the Gym three times a week. I started carrying heavy packages up my stairs and offering to help strangers lift their bags into overhead bins on airplanes. I noticed my body changing, first slowly, and then seemingly all at once, the texture of the muscle under my skin becoming buoyant. I went from shaking when lifting thirty pounds to confidently loading 75 lbs on my barbell.
In All Fours, the narrator starts lifting because it just happens to be the most convenient place near her house - a basement gym in her neighborhood - to realize her dreams of a perfect butt, which she describes to her trainer as ‘rounded’ and ‘lifted.’
Soon, however, she realizes that a perfect butt requires Sisyphean struggle:
“In old sweatpants and a T-shirt I heaved black metal balls and barbells around, dumbly lifting and lowering however many times I was told to, my face bright pink with heat and embarrassment. Wasn’t this basically what Hell was? People forced to endlessly lift and lower heavy things for no reason…The phrase was ‘go till failure,’ which meant keep lifting until you couldn’t lift anymore and then lift a couple more times, ugly. Ugly was the actual term for the final lifts that were lopsided and incomplete because your muscles were failing. You succeed by reaching failure again and again.”
I love All Fours for being willing to admit this about weightlifting: it’s ugly, and in using it to attempt to get a bigger, higher butt, you subject yourself to wearing crappy clothes and making embarrassing grunts. The proper attire is whatever you’re willing to let get torn up by the rough patches of the barbell as it scratches up your shin in your deadlift. The necessary after-workout meal, the one you have to consume if you want your pain to lead to gain, is something so protein-rich it usually has to be an already protein-rich item fortified by more protein, like low-fat Greek yogurt or skim milk mixed with protein powder, a Frankenstein of protein that would, in internet parlance, kill a Victorian orphan. It’s not just unglamorous. It’s so unglamorous it looks ugly and commonplace even when Hollywood starlets do it.
By the end of All Fours, the narrator’s original motivation to weightlift - getting a high butt - fades, as does a lot of the fury and intensity that accompanies her initial descent into perimenopause-slash-insanity.
“Obviously I would keep training,” July’s narrator says. “I needed my strength, my bones, for the ten million things I would do in the next half of my life.”
I started weightlifting in the last year of my 20s, expecting it to fade like most exercise trends. Instead, it’s stuck. One of my favorite facts about weightlifting is that your muscles, once strengthened, take to strength training more easily in the future.
For this reason, I’ve come to view weightlifting like the Roth IRA of exercise: you pay a penalty upfront - in the form of scraped shins, genuine effort, and unappealing protein shakes - but get that strength back later with minimal penalty, maybe when you need it even more.
July confirmed to W magazine that, like her narrator, she lifts:
“Your mind starts freaking out, going, ‘I can’t do this. I’m going to die,’” she says. Often, the reality was that her body was actually capable of one more set or rep. “I’d go straight from that to writing and be like, ‘Oh, it’s the same thing. I have a capacity that’s different from the anxiety and fear of death that the brain has.’”
Eventually, I got my 68-year-old mother to pick up weightlifting. She was recovering from a mastectomy, but still, within a few months, she was able to deadlift her body weight. Her doctor reported that she’d begun to reverse her osteoporosis. I was so proud of her that I told everyone I knew about it for the next four weeks - a different type of exercise evangelizing.
It is really, really hard to overstate how much of building strength is just eating more protein than you ever thought possible. The first week of tracking my protein intake, I found myself making and eating 2lbs of Salmon at 10 PM at night, having failed to ingest even a small fraction of the protein I was supposed to in the 12 hours prior. I choked it down in abject misery and now I stir protein powder into my morning coffee.