This is familiar territory for July, who wrote and directed the independent feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know along with numerous shorts, all populated by similar misfits. She also believes she is destined to be united with a boy she calls Kubelko Bondy, whose spirit briefly appears in various infants she has encountered over the decades – all of them, sadly, belonging to other women.Ĭheryl practises a forlorn, austere domestic economy that involves using as few items as possible: “Before you move an object far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place – is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t even read it.” She thinks of herself as having a full-time servant, “because the servant is me”. She pines for Phillip, a board member more than 20 years her senior, who, she is convinced, has been her companion in several past lives, during prehistory, the “medieval times” and the 1940s. Eccentricities, as uncountable as the sands of the Sahara, drift and blow through this book, piling up in dunes that must be scaled by characters and readers alike.Ī plain, gawky woman in her early 40s, Cheryl works at a nonprofit women’s self-defence studio that survives by selling DVDs of martial-arts-influenced fitness routines.

So it comes as little surprise when she finds herself saddled with a house guest who is also rather odd. C heryl Glickman, the narrator of Miranda July’s strenuously quirky first novel, is a peculiar woman of peculiar habits who works at a business with peculiar customs.

The first bad man by miranda july