First Impressions: No one belongs here more than you by Miranda July

This book costs the same amount as a plate of scrambled tofu and cortado at Boojee cafe. The experience was also pretty similar. Tepid, slightly wannabe, a little infuriating with so many different things trying to play together – and then just as you’ve wearily accepted that this is as good as it gets and your money may have been better spent elsewhere – it happens. A perfect forkful of creamy tofu, sauteed microgreens, some candied walnuts, and a sliver of the toast.

It’s like that with July’s work as well.

Of the 16 short stories, so many I found were clumsily stuffed with pointless sexual descriptions, clumsy surrealism, and exasperatingly clueless characters. And then – a story comes by that is a wholesome emotional postcard of a woman clinging to loneliness, not dealing with it. Or a twist in a plot that makes it clear how brutal friends and friendships can be. Or even this - a turn of phrase like ‘Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.’ or ‘Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.” Or my favorite: ‘“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”

That’s when this compendium of tedium sparkles. The way kindness does.

The stories themselves are whimsical.

One of them features a woman who teaches swimming on her kitchen floor. Another has an ordinary woman with a fixation on Prince William. The first one has a woman sharing her patio with her neighbors. One day her neighbor has an epileptic fit but she dozes off in the middle of that. The last story (How to Tell Stories to Children) is my favorite. It is about a woman who unwittingly becomes a kind of a godmother to her ex-boyfriend’s child. Then the child grows up and, in the way, grown-up kids do, crushes her heart. It is tender and reminded me of a line in the show ‘Wonder Years’: “We don’t blame ourselves for getting older. We forgive ourselves for growing up.”

Only with the last story does Miranda July become a flesh and blood person for me – only someone deeply flawed can feel deeply as well.

Otherwise, it’s just not possible.