All Fours by Miranda July

This is a mid-life crisis book, female style. A modestly well known artist is grappling with all sorts of things: he child nearly being still born, and her own struggles, which leads her to set off on a great adventure of a road trip from LA to New York. But it all goes off the rails right from the get go. Just outside of Los Angeles, not a day into the journey, she locks eyes across her windscreen with Davey, a devilishly handsome attendant who knows his sexual attraction at a smalltown garage. She squanders thousands of dollars commissioning Davey’s wife Claire to exquisitely redesign the room she takes in an ugly hotel, and there she remains for three weeks, joined every afternoon by Davey himself, with whom she discovers an astonishing mutual but unconsummated passion. He turns out to be foremost an incandescent, preternaturally airborne dancer, and through dancing they find forms of intimacy that finally make life seem real. Returning home she must somehow make sense of the rest of her life. She’s aware that her agonizing descent from ecstasy to misery coincides with symptoms of the menopause; a foisting of reality whose deathly overtones have had literal consequences in her family – her grandmother and aunt both killed themselves in their 50s when "the change" is upon them. Two things very clearly scare her. The first is the acceptance of mortality. Then there is sexuality. There is some very unique grappling with both of these in a way that is both gendered and ungendered and wholly fresh and different, which turn this explicitly into a novel about the menopause like none you have read before.