Here is Cheryl, a tightly wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other peoples' babies.
Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense nonprofit organisation where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate it in this one.
When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl's eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee - the selfish, cruel blond bombshell - who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.
Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual obsession and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic, and important voice today.
Read Caroline Baum's Review
Miranda July is a shape-shifting high priestess of indie art cool as a film maker and performer.
In this, her first novel (she's written two collections of short stories), she slips from satirical comedy of manners into darker fantasy through the story of Cheryl, a middle aged woman who finds herself entangled with a feral twenty something called Clee who moves into her apartment and turns her life upside down.
About the Author
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist and writer. Her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's and The New Yorker; It Chooses You was her first book of non-fiction. She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know - winner of the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. July's participatory art includes the website Learning to Love You More (with artist Harrell Fletcher), Eleven Heavy Things (a sculpture garden created for the 2009 Venice Biennale), New Society (a performance), and Somebody (a messaging app.) Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.
Industry Reviews
Astounding ... she will make you laugh, cringe and recognise yourself in a woman you never planned to be ... Never has a novel spoken so deeply to my sexuality, my spirituality, my secret self. I know I am not alone -- Lena Dunham
I am in awe of Miranda July ... The First Bad Man brings together all of July's talents - it's a book that must be read, a book that must be purchased - in duplicate - one for you, one for a friend. Don't think you can loan this book - you'll never get it back -- A.M> Homes author of This Book Will Save Your Life and May We Be Forgiven
If I ever start to doubt the power of language and intelligence, I only have to read a few lines of July to have my faith restored -- George Saunders author of The Tenth December
Miranda July's heroine in this unforgettable novel is one of the most original, most confounding and strangely sympathetic characters ... This novel is almost impossible to put down, and confirms July as a novelist of the first order -- Dave Eggers
The "yes, that's really the way it is!" moments in this book came so fast and furious that I found myself page-turningly propelled into a story that, despite its subtly off-kilter course, somehow - I don't know how - ended up revealing the invisible and depthless emotional reality that roils and tugs beneath us all. Miranda July's protagonist inhabits this uncharted world of unspeakable desires, embarrassing hopes and shifting conquests more fully than any in contemporary fiction I can recall, and you will inhabit it right along with her. You will also inhabit her. And she, you. The First Bad Man is a strange miracle of a book, and despite the opinion of its main character, a truly great American love story for our time -- Chris Ware author of Building Stories
Miranda July's exciting and wild novel The First Bad Man begins deeply, absurdly funny, gets increasingly twisted and strange, and then ends quietly, urgently heartfelt. It is a novel about aging, about motherhood, about sex, about weird wounded women - yes - but it is really a novel about the desperate possibility in all of us to love and be loved. The First Bad Man is like no other novel you will read this year (or any other year) -- Dana Spiotta
With The First Bad Man , Miranda July provides an audaciously original, often hilarious map of the ever-expanding reach of unhinged imagination in America. With IMAX-scale emotional projections and a post-gay regimen of sexual fantasies, July takes us on a picaresque journey in which the heroine's ultimate challenge turns out to be a stunningly ordinary circumstance more transfixing than all the virtual caprices a twenty-first-century mind can muster -- Andrew Solomon
