What I mean when I say this was like performance art was that it felt like she was literally there, while I was reading, though I mean obviously she wasn't.

Then, when she is awoken and sent to retrieve his medicine, a photograph of a whale on the refrigerator door sends her into a reverie. However, in the course of the day where reality seems as surreal as her dreams, she meets a woman who loses her dog, and she in some way becomes indirectly connected to its death. And the man who paid this person two thousand dollars to have sex with him three times when this person was very broke.This is where July’s stories take a darker turn, where girlish or adolescent fantasies veer toward the perverse. And in that way, no one in the book is anything like a real person: Instead, the characters here are all a bundle of quirks and damages that we’re supposed to find adorable and funny. You can read most short stories without thinking about who wrote them, and usually if they're good they're distinct from the other short stories standing around them. In “Majesty”, a woman who teaches earthquake survival classes to children has erotic dreams about Prince William, and “carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so [she] would not lose any of it”.

July’s short fiction is quirky and self-consciously postmodern in style … The best of her stories adds a depth of emotional truth which can persuade you to believe in her most oddball worlds.There is a marked new maturity in these stories--a determination not just to chronicle her characters' obsessions and idiosyncrasies, but also to understand the purpose they serve. Everybody gets lonely sometimes, and Miranda July crams as many forms of loneliness she can think of in her first collection of stories.