The strangest things happen in Miranda July’s tales—the kind of strange things that are actually quite mundane but, having gone unexpressed for so long, seem absurd. Creepy-absurd. Loser-absurd. The kind of absurd that might do better behind closed doors.

But July pulls back the curtains and whips out binoculars to report back on the fictional lives of eccentric others. And she just might be peering into your very own apartment.

In the short story compilation “No one belongs here more than you.,” there’s an otherwise-gorgeous woman with a port-wine stain on her face, a lonely old man in love with an imaginary teenage girl, a couple that has one go-to exchange of intimacy that they drive into the ground until it can no longer hold all the weight of their disintegrating relationship.

There’s epilepsy, unrequited love with royalty, teenage lesbianism, therapist idolatry and a motley assortment of other complicated life conditions. On the surface it reads like the emptying of a clown car or the literary equivalent of a Diane Arbus photograph.

But then the awkward truth hits: That could be you with the port-wine stain. That could be you in love with an epileptic or lusting after your best friend. Embarrassing, maybe, but loads more real than the pretty things you’d rather talk about.

As the narrator says in the story “Birthmark,” originally published in The Paris Review, “It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.”

Every plot in the book pivots on a small thing that is still a thing—the offbeat longings and secrets that fester inside every normal person.

Tell me about the title, “No one belongs here more than you.”

I wanted a title that wasn’t just a title of one of the stories. And I guess I feel like, it obviously can go either way. It can be a reassuring thing, and I definitely feel like the characters in the book could use that reassurance, that the world is a place where they belong. But also it could flip around and become kind of a shameful thing, like no one belongs in an insane asylum more than you.

Do you see your characters on the fringe of society or as everyday people?

I guess I usually think everyone has this side, and partly what’s inspiring to me is that you don’t see it, that you don’t see your neighbor’s strangeness and that you imagine it. But I do believe it’s there. There’s at least one thing like that for everyone—one sort of extra thing they’re doing that they don’t need to be doing.

Tell me about your writing process and your background as a writer.

I had quite a long time of just writing movies, short movies and longer movies and performances and so didn’t really have the pressure of the writing itself to have to take center stage, but I think at the same time that I’d learned a lot in those other forms. I’d learned especially about dialogue and characters and then more and more I got interested in narrative and the more traditional story arc, but pretty late.

Were you always drawn to writing?

Both my parents are writers, they run a publishing company. I grew up with books being the main thing. And I have the first book I ever wrote, which was when I was about 6. It’s called “Lost Child,” but it’s really complicated—it’s a trilogy; there’s dialogue and quotes. I clutch it as evidence.

Do you write with a plan in mind? A lot of it seems like you surprised yourself in the writing?

The first stories I wrote...definitely I had no idea where I was going ever and it was pretty easy and fun. And post-being published a little bit in the Paris Review and making the movie, it got a little self-conscious and I started planning out a little more. I’d have a vague idea of what I was headed toward. But yeah, for the most part I like to know as little as I can.

Do you write in an office or are you one of these people that write on napkins everywhere?

I have little notebooks that I write ideas in, but I have a writing house. A little house. It’s not where I live, although I used to live here. But to be honest, I have to keep changing where I’m writing; it has to feel new. So sometimes I’ll not come here and I’ll just stay in bed and write in bed. There’s no secret way.

Are there differences that you’ve been discovering comparing writing for film and writing for published stories or books?

It’s a different process. A script, you know that even your best lines there’s no guarantee they’ll end up being best for the movie, whereas with a short story you have that total control right then and there. So it’s harder but more satisfying. There’s nothing quite as great as having just written a story.

What’s next?

I’m working on the script (for another movie), and another book, an art book, coming out in the fall. I have a Web site, Learning to Love You More (http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com), and it’s a book kind of based on that site.

© 2007 The Associated Press

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