In the plethora of artists out there, Miranda July stands out as an original. A woman whose repertoire includes music, fiction- and screen- writing, acting, performance art, and directing, July has created her very own empire, a world where simple events take on extraordinary meaning, where people are as equally concerned with conforming to societal roles as they are breaking them. Her two most notable pieces, the 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, and her recent book of short stories, No one belongs here more than you, present an artist whose strengths lie in her ability to communicate our idiosyncrasies understandably, to convey our patheticalness without making us feel sorry for ourselves.

Her characters are flawed, and often embody the extreme — excess zeal or shyness, sexual promiscuity or deprivation — speaking at the wrong moments about the right things, excessively self-aware but too distant from their own selves to connect with others, but wanting desperately that bond. “And although I was genuinely scared about this epileptic seizure I was in charge of, I slept… I slept and dreamed that Vincent was slowly sliding his hands up my shirt and we kissed,” the protagonist explains in “The Shared Patio”, unable to do the thing that logic and sense requires, succumbing instead to fantasy, even when it is the logical move that may give her the results she desires.