No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You (2005) is a collection of contemporary short stories about ordinary people living extraordinary lives, and for whom a single moment may change everything. One of the most acclaimed short story collections, it was awarded the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. July is the screenwriter, director, and star of the critically acclaimed film Me You and Everyone We Know. Her parents founded the alternative health and spiritual well-being publishing house, North Atlantic Books.

Sixteen short stories comprise No One Belongs Here More Than You. Common themes include loneliness, loss, and a search for meaning. The characters are often worried about finding lasting love and companionship. Throughout the collection, there is a strong emphasis on female sexuality, romantic love, and the desire to be accepted.

It is significant that the characters, for the most part, fail to realize their dreams or achieve more than fleeting happiness. Any relationships they do forge end quickly and dramatically. The stories are, in many ways, an exploration of July’s own fears and obsessions, and the fears and obsessions of women more generally.



For example, the first story, “The Shared Patio,” follows a woman who writes for the magazine Positive. The magazine is designed for people suffering from HIV. The story takes place on a patio shared between upstairs and downstairs neighbors. The narrator, the upstairs neighbor, slowly builds the confidence to start using the patio. Her fears about human nature are confirmed when her neighbors don’t live up to her expectations.

“Swim Team” is also about failed expectations. The narrator, a woman living alone, teaches elderly people how to swim by teaching them to hold their faces underwater in a bowl; she never takes them to a pool. She reflects on how most of her students died over the years without ever knowing how to swim.

Many of the stories are concerned with odd and improper sexual intrigue and impulses. “Majesty,” for example, is a woman’s rumination on her old fantasies about Prince William. A middle-aged woman, she expresses her fantasies in explicit detail. In “Ten True Things,” a young female secretary has an erotic night with her boss’s wife. This explosive encounter is never repeated. The young woman ends up alone while her boss stays with his wife.



One sexual story, “Making Love in 2003,” challenges what is acceptable in mainstream literature. The narrator, a failed author with an inferiority complex, takes out her sexual and career frustrations on a special-needs high school student. The stories “I Kiss a Door” and “The Boy from Lam Kien” center on incest and pedophilia respectively. “The Moves” features a father who teaches his daughter sexual acts. These stories may be triggering to some readers.

Stories such as “The Sister” combine loneliness and isolation with family and close friendships. In this story, the narrator reaches sexual climax while she is on the telephone to her sister, listening to her wild sexual conquests. Having had no such experiences, the narrator lives vicariously through her sister, which leaves her feeling guilty and satisfied simultaneously. There is no suggestion that she will find her own relationship. It seems as if she will stay in the background while her sister lives life to its fullest for them both.

Other stories involve non-romantic failed connections. “How to Tell Stories to Children,” for example, centers on a woman bonding with someone else’s daughter because she has no children of her own. Spending time with this child is the one spot of happiness and fulfillment she has in her life. “Something That Needs Nothing” is about a woman who moves into an apartment with an unrequited love, her childhood sweetheart. She hopes that the arrangement will make him fall in love with her, but she is left feeling lonelier than ever.



The characters in these stories also struggle with fractured identity. Looking back at “Ten True Things,” a secretary redecorates her apartment whenever she takes a lover because she wants him to decide what he sees when he looks at her, and her home. She has no sense of identity, leaving her always feeling lost and looking for love in the wrong places.

In “This Person,” an unidentified person is trying to find him or herself in a park, spending a long time looking for a gathering of friends that don’t materialize. In “Birthmark,” a woman has a wine stain removed from her skin, changing her whole opinion on herself. She has no idea who she is, and the story ends on the suggestion that she will be lost forever. In “The Man on the Stairwell,” a chance encounter takes on an almost mythical tone that leads the narrator to question everything he or she knows.