“I liked it, but then I wear a lot of eyeliner.” That sort of thing. Framing my conversation about a film or book with facts about myself. It pisses me off particularly because I find myself being wary of giving an opinion. It is the “Calm down, dear” of the ageing critic, the patronising wink. It dismisses the thing, the film, book, woman (quirkiness, I think, has become a gendered trait) as frivolous. Quirky suggests a description of appearance, of colourful tights, beads, and people singing where they’re not meant to sing, but it quietly nods at something deeper. It defines a character by her eccentricities rather than inviting you to see them as a whole. To have disproportionately large eyes and a faraway gaze. To be frivolous, naive, awkward, self-conscious. Every time she unpicks tiny humiliations, exploring people’s inner lives, and every time critics say she’s quirky. Miranda July has written books, and feature films, and made records, and her art projects have involved things like shared emails and phone apps that connected strangers. And what that word does, as it falls on the work like a piano from a great height, is crush it. It is heartbreakingly sad, and thoughtful, and disgusting and hilarious, but it’s Miranda July’s first novel, so the word most regularly being used to describe it in reviews is “quirky”.
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