Finished “All Fours” this morning. It is a remarkable book. I felt, at various moments, that it was an important book for me personally.

While reading the last chapter, I connected the room in “All Fours” to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”. I haven’t read Woolf’s book in a long while, but will reread it shortly. Woolf’s general concept is that to create art, one must have a space insulated from the pressures of the outside world. In “All Fours”, the narrator transforms a motel room into such a space. But in the narrative, the room does more than just free the narrator up artistically. It allows her to expand her identity. The room is a symbolic space which represents many things, including the aging body. The story is a beautiful exploration of how an artist engages with physical transformation and finds meaning in it.