Miranda July can make you laugh and cringe in the same sentence, which is a talent I truly admire. Her characters are painfully relatable and endearing, and often when we search within them we see something of ourselves, and it's usually pathetic.
If reading the book from cover-to-cover, her characters feel monochromatic; they are similarly awkward, socially inept, and desperate for, but incapable of meaningful connections with others. Often, they're alone with no real friends, and it's safe to assume that in high school they were all the weird kid. What's really interesting here, though, is that even if we weren't the weird kid we could always relate to them on a secret level that held more meaning than some of the other friendships we had; a level that made us feel guilty for existing in a way that highlighted the weird kid as weird. This is the feeling often created by July's characters, intentional or not.
Standing as individual stories, her work is poignant, endearing, frank, and sexually frustrated. As a collection they blur into a mess of awkwardness and basketcases who never really find what they're looking for, and who generally don't even know what it is exactly they're looking for in the first place. I found this problem when I tried to read Joyce Carol Oates' collection of short stories (Dear Husband). After the third story I found it difficult to believe in the voice as the character's own and not simply Oates' manner of writing--which is exactly what it was.
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