give synonyms busy

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Synonyms of 'busy' in British English

Phrasal verb:  , additional synonyms, synonyms of 'busy' in american english.

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• busy yourself
• All ENGLISH synonyms that begin with 'B'

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What is another word for busy ?

Synonyms for busy ˈbɪz i busy, this thesaurus page includes all potential synonyms, words with the same meaning and similar terms for the word busy ., english synonyms and antonyms rate these synonyms: 5.0 / 1 vote.

Active refers to both quickness and constancy of action; in the former sense it is allied with agile , alert , brisk , etc.; in the latter, with busy , diligent , industrious . The active love employment, the busy are actually employed, the diligent and the industrious are habitually busy . The restless are active from inability to keep quiet; their activity may be without purpose, or out of all proportion to the purpose contemplated. The officious are undesirably active in the affairs of others. Compare ALERT; ALIVE; MEDDLESOME.

Synonyms: active , agile , alert , brisk , bustling , diligent , energetic , expeditious , industrious , lively , mobile , nimble , officious , prompt , quick , ready , restless , sprightly , spry , supple , vigorous , wide awake

Antonyms: dull , heavy , idle , inactive , indolent , inert , lazy , quiescent , quiet , slow , sluggish , stupid

Preposition: Active in work, in a cause; for an object, as for justice; with persons or instrumentalities; about something, as about other people's business.

Complete Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms Rate these synonyms: 0.0 / 0 votes

Synonyms: industrious , diligent , assiduous , engaged , occupied

Antonyms: idle , slothful , lazy , indolent , unoccupied

Princeton's WordNet Rate these synonyms: 3.3 / 3 votes

busy adjective

actively or fully engaged or occupied

"busy with her work"; "a busy man"; "too busy to eat lunch"

Synonyms: in use(p) , busybodied , meddling , meddlesome , interfering , engaged , officious , fussy

Antonyms: not intrusive , bone-idle , unoccupied , faineant , slothful , unintrusive , bone-lazy , lazy , work-shy , otiose , inactive , idle , unengaged , leisured , plain , lackadaisical , indolent

busy, fussy adjective

overcrowded or cluttered with detail

"a busy painting"; "a fussy design"

Synonyms: engaged , busybodied , particular , meddlesome , picky , in use(p) , interfering , meddling , finical , cross , bad-tempered , grumpy , grouchy , crabby , crabbed , finicky , fussy , officious , ill-tempered

Antonyms: lazy , plain , not intrusive , lackadaisical , idle , indolent , work-shy , slothful , leisured , unoccupied , bone-idle , bone-lazy , unengaged , faineant , otiose , unintrusive , inactive

interfering, meddlesome, meddling, officious, busy, busybodied adjective

intrusive in a meddling or offensive manner

"an interfering old woman"; "bustling about self-importantly making an officious nuisance of himself"; "busy about other people's business"

Synonyms: interfering , busybodied , meddling , meddlesome , fussy , engaged , officious , in use(p)

Antonyms: work-shy , not intrusive , unoccupied , otiose , slothful , lackadaisical , lazy , faineant , bone-idle , idle , plain , indolent , unengaged , leisured , unintrusive , bone-lazy , inactive

crowded with or characterized by much activity

"a very busy week"; "a busy life"; "a busy street"; "a busy seaport"

Antonyms: not intrusive , lackadaisical , leisured , lazy , faineant , slothful , inactive , work-shy , idle , unintrusive , plain , bone-idle , unoccupied , bone-lazy , unengaged , indolent , otiose

busy, engaged, in use(p) verb

(of facilities such as telephones or lavatories) unavailable for use by anyone else or indicating unavailability; (`engaged' is a British term for a busy telephone line)

"her line is busy"; "receptionists' telephones are always engaged"; "the lavatory is in use"; "kept getting a busy signal"

Antonyms: slothful , idle , unoccupied , work-shy , plain , inactive , not intrusive , unengaged , otiose , lackadaisical , bone-idle , indolent , faineant , lazy , bone-lazy , unintrusive , leisured

busy, occupy verb

keep busy with

"She busies herself with her butterfly collection"

Synonyms: take , invade , reside , occupy , engage , lodge in , concern , worry , use up , engross , interest , fill , absorb

Antonyms: plain , otiose , indolent , unengaged , faineant , slothful , idle , work-shy , bone-idle , unintrusive , bone-lazy , inactive , unoccupied , lazy , leisured , lackadaisical , not intrusive

Matched Categories

Editors contribution rate these synonyms: 0.0 / 0 votes.

non-availability

free is an antonym of non-availability, so busy will be a synonym for non-availability.

Dictionary of English Synonymes Rate these synonyms: 0.0 / 0 votes

Synonyms: diligent , assiduous , industrious , sedulous , notable , active , working , hard-working , at work; diligently employed , engaged , or occupied

Synonyms: brisk , stirring , bustling , nimble , agile , SPRY , constantly in motion

Synonyms: meddling , officious , importunate

Synonyms: occupy , employ , make busy

Synonyms, Antonyms & Associated Words Rate these synonyms: 1.5 / 2 votes

Synonyms: occupied , engaged , employed , engrossed , diligent , industrious , sedulous , active , intrusive , officious , meddlesome

PPDB, the paraphrase database Rate these paraphrases: 0.0 / 0 votes

List of paraphrases for "busy":

occupied , crowded , heavy , peak , overcrowded , congested , congestion

Nicknames Rate these nicknames: 0.0 / 0 votes

List of known nicknames for "Busy":

Sascha Bühren

Suggested Resources

What does BUSY stand for? -- Explore the various meanings for the BUSY acronym on the Abbreviations.com website.

How to pronounce busy?

How to say busy in sign language, words popularity by usage frequency, how to use busy in a sentence.

We’re thrilled to have two unique breeds join the registry, the Mudi, a medium-sized herding dog, makes a great pet for an active family committed to keeping this worker busy, and the small, loving Russian Toy thrives on being close to its humans, making a wonderful companion for an owner who can be with the dog a great deal. As always, we encourage people to do their research to find the right breed for their lifestyle.

Cullen Murphy :

They not only look for things to do. They look for things to do that are work related, for me, it plays into a national characteristic of being busy, being productive and improving yourself.

Jessica Meir :

It will be difficult to not give hugs to family and friends after being up here for seven months, i think I will feel more isolated on Baby YodaOn Earth than here because Baby YodaOn Earth's expected up here. We're busy with amazing pursuits and tasks and don't feel the isolation. But it will be wonderful to see family and friends virtually and at a distance.

Newt Gingrichsaid :

We’re pretty busy, but we certainly could be lured into a new path.

Marcelene Cox :

Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.

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Are we missing a good synonym for busy ?

Image credit, the web's largest resource for, synonyms & antonyms, a member of the stands4 network, free, no signup required :, add to chrome, add to firefox, browse synonyms.com, are you a human thesaurus, a synonym of "dry", nearby & related entries:.

• bustle verb
• bustle about verb
• bustling adj
• busy bee noun
• Busy Bee Starski
• busybodied adj
• busybody noun
• busyness noun

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Synonyms and antonyms of give in English

• TO GIVE SOMETHING TO SOMEONE

Synonyms and examples

Antonym and example, see words related to give.

• TO TELL SOMEONE SOMETHING

give | American Thesaurus

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Definition of busy

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of busy  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

intransitive verb

• industrious
• enthral

busy , industrious , diligent , assiduous , sedulous mean actively engaged or occupied.

busy chiefly stresses activity as opposed to idleness or leisure.

industrious implies characteristic or habitual devotion to work.

diligent suggests earnest application to some specific object or pursuit.

assiduous stresses careful and unremitting application.

sedulous implies painstaking and persevering application.

Examples of busy in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'busy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Adjective and Verb

Middle English bisy , from Old English bisig ; akin to Middle Dutch & Middle Low German besich busy

before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense

Phrases Containing busy

• as busy as a bee

busy as a bee

• busy oneself
• has a busy / hectic social life

Dictionary Entries Near busy

Cite this entry.

“Busy.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/busy. Accessed 10 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of busy.

Kids Definition of busy  (Entry 2 of 2)

More from Merriam-Webster on busy

Nglish: Translation of busy for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of busy for Arabic Speakers

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#194: 14 Better Ways to Say ‘I’m Busy’ [Advanced English Vocabulary]

Dec 16, 2020 | Advanced Vocabulary

Of course, at any time of year, we can feel busy or overwhelmed. An unexpected deadline at work. A last-minute meeting. A sick family member who needs extra help. A flat tire that holds up everything else in our day.

But as we get toward the end of the year, that feeling of being busy only increases. There are holiday gifts to shop for and meals to prepare. End of year deadlines and projects to finish. Right now, many of my students are using the word ‘busy.’ But there are better ways to say I’m busy in English.

My goal is always to help you express yourself precisely and effortlessly in English.

The best way to do that is to build your vocabulary strategically with powerful adjectives, collocations, idioms, and phrasal verbs in English.

In today’s lesson, you’ll learn 14 better ways to say “I’m busy” in English plus have the opportunity to practice.

14 Better Ways to Say “I’m Busy” in English

Lesson summary, powerful adjectives & collocations to say “i’m busy” in english.

• To be slammed (at work) – extremely busy/overwhelmed
• This week we’re slammed trying to meet the deadline.
• To be swamped/snowed under – extremely busy/overwhelmed
• I’m really swamped at work right now.
• Our office is snowed under with a mountain of paperwork during tax season.
• To keep someone/oneself busy – to keep someone (or yourself) occupied
• If you have some extra time, let me know. I’ve got plenty of tasks to keep you busy

Idioms to Say “I’m Busy” in English

• to burn the candle at both ends – to work extremely or excessively hard; to work too hard for good health or peace of mind
• I’ll be burning the candle at both ends this weekend to get this project finished.
• to have a full plate/to have a lot on one’s plate/to have one’s hands full – too much to do or a lot to deal with right now, which leads to feeling stressed; unable to take on more responsibility
• She’s got her hands full right now with 3 kids under the age of 5 and a sick husband at home.
• I’m at maximum capacity at work. I can’t handle one more to do request.
• Lara’s at full bandwidth right now so why don’t we ask Suzanne to do this.
• to be up to one’s eyeballs/neck in something – to have an excessive amount of work or too much of something
• Accountants are usually up to their eyeballs in paperwork during tax season.
• I said ‘yes’ to too many things this month and now I’m overwhelmed. I think I bit off more than I can chew.
• To have a lot of irons in the fire – to have multiple projects or multiple, unrelated tasks
• We have 3 major projects with deadlines coming soon, so I have a lot of irons in the fire at work right now. I have very little time to concentrate on just one thing.

Phrasal Verbs to Say “I’m Busy” in English

• To be tied up (at the moment) – to be too busy at the moment and unavailable or unable to do something else
• I’m sorry, I’m going to be late coming home because I’m tied up at work.

Related Lessons

If you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, learn how to say no politely in English .

Feeling overwhelmed? Learn how to simplify your life or create better work-from-home strategies .

Consider how to establish Well-Being at Work or How to Request Someone’s Time/Help .

Or try one of these strategies for Time Management .

As always, the best way to learn and remember new vocabulary is to get consistent, repeated practice. And here’s your chance!

Choose 2-3 of your favorite new expressions from today’s lesson.

Then use them in your own example sentences. Think of your life right now. What makes you feel busy? What is making you feel overwhelmed or stressed? 

As always, you can share with me in the comments below. It’s the best way to practice, get feedback, and learn from others in the Confident English Community.

~ Annemarie

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What about just say “I am disorganised” or even “I am poor at time management”.

All the lessons you share are really interesting, and very good examples to practice.

It is very useful lessons to make the conversion more fun and interesting. Here are my examples using the expression I learned from this session.

• I have been tied up at this important project lately, which run out of all my capacity.
• She burns the candle at the both end and tries to balance her business and family life taking care of her children and ill husband.
• He has a lot of irons in fire at the work with the deadline tomorrow, and he must have to stay up late in the office tonight.

Nicely done, Chih Yeu! I like the examples you’ve shared!!

One little note, the specific words we use for example 2 are “to burn the candle at both ends.” I removed the word ‘the’ in front of both and includes the -s on the word ends. So your sentence would read, “She burns the candle at both ends and tries…”

Thanks so much for sharing here.

I really love your lessons, thank you:)

Thank you. 😊

Nowadays I have many, many situations to be extremely busy.

Let´s me give you some examples

Last week I was really slammed in the hospital because due to snow, many, many people got injured. If you allow me, we were snowed under the consequences of snow.

During 2020 year, doctors and nurses have been burning the candle at both ends

I could share many many more feelings about how busy I was last year and on the other hand how I going to be tied up in 2021.

Thanks for your help At this time they are useful expressions.

Dear Annemarie,

It would be great if I could have watched this video one week before, but I got my hands full.

I would love, when my brother-in-law and his wife have told us that they are always who are coming to visit us, to reply: I would love to come and visit you but I’am tied up at work;)!

I hope I’ll remember it for next time.

Thank you for useful lessons.

Dear Annemarie, I choose these expressions : Excuse me Claire could you call me later ? I am slammed at work In this period I am snowed under my paper works …lessons , courses …. We are following at work 3 projects at the same time … I have a lot of irons in the fire ,

Well done, Luisa. Thanks for sharing your examples.

Hello Annemarie. Happy New Year! It was a very helpful lesson, like always

• I would like to go to a party, but I am tied up with my little sister tonight.
• I have to cook for 50 people, we invited for our anniversary next Saturday. I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew.
• Due to 3 new projects upcoming next week,I will be slammed at wort.

Thank you a lot

Nicely done, Olga. These are great examples of how to use some of the idioms from this lesson.

Hi Annemarie, happy New Year! Wish you peace, happiness and health in 2021. Thank you for all your lessons!

I’m so sorry. I have got my hands full around the New Year so these video lessons were not completed until today. These lessons are very useful to me. Thank you for your energy and time.

I’m so glad to know that these lessons are helpful to you, Liping!

Hi Annemarie,

Thank you for the lesson. It was really helpful!

• I would love to join you for lunch, but I’m really slammed at work right now.
• I’d love to help you, but I have my hand’s full right now.
• I’m up to my eyeballs with this project.

Regards, Karen

Great examples here, Karen!

1. Last year a day like today we were swamped at work preparing the last presentation of the year.

2. Sorry you can’t count on me today, I have a lot of things on my plate.

Hello, Annemarie

This lesson is very beneficial .

• This week I am snowed under in my sister’s marriage preparation.
• If you have some extra time,let me know here is a lot of work to keep you busy.
• My sister’marriage, my half yearly exams and Happy Christmas–all are in the next week so I have a lot of irons in the fire now.

With Regards Indra

Well done, Indra! You’ve got some great examples with idioms from this lesson.

excellent as usual!

Being a doctor, I was requisitioned to ensure guards at Covid-19 department, I am really feeling swamped. When I am at home, my two kids are keeping me up to my eyeballs. ( please I am not feeling that the noun guards is correct but I didn’t find a better translation from French :/)

Hey Annemarie, Thank’s a lot for your very helpful lesson with many interesting examples 🙂 Here are my sentences:

• I’m sorry, I couldn’t help you with shopping, my hands are full right now.
• I bite off more than I can chew when I say “yes” to too many things. I feel overwhelmed.
• I’m really snowed under with a mountain clothes to be ironed during pre-holiday period.

Have a wonderful weekend 🙂 Best Agnieszka

Love these examples, Agnieszka! Nicely done.

Her Annemarie, I love this lesson, so I ‘m moving to a new city and I ‘m tied up packing. That why I have a lot of iron in the fire 🔥 Thank you for your time

Good luck in your move, Paola! I’m glad you enjoyed the lesson.

Good morning Anne Firstly I would like to thank you for the lesson it was powerful and fruitfull.

Examples: I think I ‘ll be burning the candle at both sides this coming weekend ,we are expecting many guest for this wedding. I was stressed that I couldn’t help my colleague, my hands were full .

I am regretting that I didn’t type my reports for last two days now I have to bite off more than I can chew and today is the submission day.

My helper is off today I m tied up ,I m all by myself.

I loved this lesson! So many alternative way to express the amount of work. Here’s my practice: The last 3 years I used to have a lot of irons in the fire handling several complex projects at the same time. Now, with my new role, my plate has been cleared up. Since we are working from home, the experience have vary from being swapped transforming our services to make them fully digital to have some free capacity, nevertheless we always find ways to keep ourselves at full capacity whether it could be taking some online training or implementing new practices …  Read more »

I’m so glad you enjoyed it, Xeni!

Sounds like a lot of work switching your company’s services to be fully digital!

Hey Annemarie, Happy new year. Thanks for this great lesson. I needed it. I am looking forward to joining your fluency school next year. Here’re my examples I’ve got my hands full with finishing my projects and writing my goals for 2021. I’d love to go shopping in sales but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. I am going to hang out at Christmas with my family, I hope no one will be tied up at work this time. I am working on myself to be able to say no so that I no longer bite off …  Read more »

Oh, wonderful examples here, Nada! Nicely down.

I hope 2021 is starting the way you had hoped. And we’d certainly love to have you join us for Fluency School!

Good morning Dear Annemarie, thanks again for your excellent and motivated lesson. * By exercising, walking and biking, I burn the candles at both ends to keep myself healthy and let the energy flow into my body.

* Educating myself through Toastmasters club and excellent Speak Confident English lessons, I am at maximum capacity to handle unnecessary promotion and social emails.

* Although I am retired I have a lot of irons in the fire at home with my daily chores, so I barely find time to answer to my friend’s phone calls or to their emails.

You’ve got some great examples here, Nasrin!

One note about the idiom ‘to burn the candle at both ends.’ We use this idiom to say that we work or do other things from early in the morning until late at night and so get very little rest.

For example, if you’re trying to get a project finished on time, you might work 12 hours (from morning to night) to get it finished.

The example provided gives me the picture that you’re exercising nonstop from sun up to sun down. Is that accurate?

Thanks a lot, Annemarie! My favorites: burning the candle at both ends, be at full bandwidth, and as a proverb “Don’t bite more than you can chew” There is a similar idiom in Bulgarian “This is not a spoon fitted yo your mouth”

Thanks for sharing a similar idiom you have in Bulgarian! I love that. Now that you’ve got some new idioms in English, how would you use one of them in your own sentence?

• Sorry dear Annemarie I´ve been away for a while even leaving my muse alone by biting off more than a can chew. But I´m back as I´ll always be if you permit

Thank you for sharing with me.

I can’t come to the party, I’ll be tied up at this moment My coworker is on leave, I’m slammed at awork Sorry ! I can’t call you, I’m swamed doing my homework

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Synonyms and Antonyms of GIVE

Learn more about.

• give (verb)
• give-and-take (noun)
• give away (verb)
• give in (verb)
• give out (verb)
• give over (verb)
• give up (verb)
• hang (noun)

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[ biz -ee ]

busy with her work.

Synonyms: hardworking , assiduous

Antonyms: indolent

He couldn't see any visitors because he was busy.

Synonyms: working , occupied

Antonyms: unoccupied

a busy life.

• (of a telephone line) in use by a party or parties and not immediately accessible.
• officious; meddlesome; prying.

The rug is too busy for this room.

verb (used with object)

In summer, he busied himself keeping the lawn in order.

• actively or fully engaged; occupied
• (of a room, telephone line, etc) in use; engaged

a busy painting

• meddlesome; inquisitive; prying
• tr to make or keep (someone, esp oneself) busy; occupy

Discover More

Derived forms.

• ˈbusyness , noun

Other Words From

• non·busy adjective
• over·busy adjective
• super·busy adjective
• un·busy adjective
• well-busied adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of busy 1

Idioms and Phrases

Synonym study, example sentences.

A full swivel ability makes it one of the best desk chairs for a busy office setting.

We’ve put together regional road trip suggestions in various parts of the country to help you explore some of your area’s lesser-known national parks during the least busy time of the year.

When her son had his fill of piano lessons, Ellen Zavian began looking for some other activity to keep him busy.

Sorry to all my work today but I am busy with this Gorilla Glue girl.

We’re trying to recover from an administration that recklessly played down the pandemic and a Congress that’s perpetually in fight mode, too busy bickering to pass a relief bill that will fund a nationwide vaccine effort.

Bush busy engaging constituents on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate ahead of the 2004 presidential election.

At some point during his busy schedule, Israel found the time to write a book, titled The Global War on Morris.

If the world is going to end, why are evangelicals so busy trying to save it?

He said it was okay, that he had been busy too… busy fighting serious intestinal problems.

I finally called Lee a couple of times and we talked but he was busy with guests at the house.

I was busy loading the piece when an exclamation of surprise from one of the men made me look up.

It will be a busy session; and I want to see if I can't become a useful public man.

In cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, the small wits are wont to be busy discovering exculpations.

And since he was too busy catching angleworms for himself to help her and her husband, she wished he would keep out of sight.

People are busy ballooning or driving; shooting like stars along railroads; or migrating like swallows or wild-geese.

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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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Definition of busy adjective from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

doing something

• Are you busy tonight?
• I'm afraid the doctor is busy at the moment. Can he call you back?
• The principal is a very busy woman.
• I'll be too busy to come to the meeting.
• She was always too busy to listen.
• I've got enough work to keep you busy .

Take your English to the next level

The Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus explains the difference between groups of similar words. Try it for free as part of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app

B ack when the word weird (or, in the spelling of the day, wyrd  ) was first commonly used in English, it was not an adjective but a noun, and it functioned as a synonym for fate . A person wasn’t weird; instead a person had a weird, which was theirs alone, determined by forces beyond control and understanding. Shakespeare’s “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth helped transform the word, linking its supernatural connotations with an aesthetic quality. Those three crones know the future—they seem to know everything, standing astride the temporal and the miraculous as they do. In them, the old and the new weird s meet: They are creatures in touch with the workings of fate, but they are also inexplicable, creepy, queer, spooky, deviant from the norm.

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I have been thinking about this word and its overtones since reading All Fours , the second novel by the idiosyncratic interdisciplinary artist Miranda July, probably best known for her work as a filmmaker . As I made my way through the book, I kept remarking to myself, and writing in the margins, “This is so weird.” That’s not a bad thing, in my personal lexicon, though in this instance I was registering a persistent feeling of bafflement. July’s middle-aged protagonist—a “semi-famous” artist known for her early multi-genre success (who, like July, has worked across film, writing, and performance)—consistently acted on instincts I didn’t understand and made choices I couldn’t imagine anyone making. As a narrator, she was not just unreliable but unpredictable, unsettling, shimmeringly strange.

Read: Miranda July on ‘Kajillionaire’ and nice people in Hollywood

This unnamed narrator—who, being a wry Los Angeles creative type, enjoys half-mockingly noting that she is a minor celebrity—is perplexing even to herself. Stalled out in her art practice and dissatisfied in her marriage (stable, loving, stale) to a music producer, she decides to drive to New York, leaving him and their young child behind for three weeks. She conceives the trip ostensibly to prove a point. At a party, her husband offhandedly suggests that people fall into two personality types: Drivers and Parkers. Drivers can immerse themselves in the ongoingness of life; they enjoy time with their children and pets; they’re good on road trips because they’re present and steady. Parkers “need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause,” or they lapse into boredom and disappointment. The artist feels that she is being pegged as a Parker, and undertakes this road trip, she tells herself, to “finally become the sort of chill, grounded woman I’d always wanted to be.” That this is overly literal and somewhat illogical—leaving your family for three weeks doesn’t suggest a willingness to be present in daily ongoingness and child-rearing—doesn’t occur to her.

But even the artist is aware that this classic plot—a combination of the American road trip and the midlife crisis , both clichéd subgenres of the quest narrative—is the kind of trope that she typically wouldn’t bother with. Naturally, the road trip, and by extension the novel, goes sideways immediately. July herself has never been given to making chill, grounded art.

The narrator hasn’t gotten an hour away from her house before she makes eye contact with a young man at a gas station in Monrovia. A few minutes later, they run into each other at a nearby restaurant, and as they talk, he mentions that he works at Hertz and that he and his interior-decorator wife are trying to save $20,000 as a “nest egg.” For no discernible reason, the narrator proceeds to drive first to one of his Hertz locations and then to a dingy motel, where she rents a room. Soon after, she commissions the wife (without mentioning her encounter with the husband) to redecorate the motel room to look like a room at Le Bristol hotel, in Paris, for a fee of $20,000.

Is she stalking the Hertz guy, nearly 15 years her junior? Is this an art project? Whether July is presenting this as an earnest hero’s journey or as a self-skewering satire of the free spirit who does erratic things upon hitting her mid-40s and calls it art isn’t clear. That may sound like a huge flaw in the novel, and it does sometimes feel like a glitch, yet the ambiguity about what July and her narrator are up to makes the novel as intriguing as it is frustrating. July thwarts the reader’s instinct to decipher whether this is a narrative about miraculous fate or one about an odd character’s mundane sexual and hormonal odyssey. Instead, she writes as though there’s no difference.

I ’m not the first to be cheerfully confounded by July’s oeuvre, which amounts to a multipronged investigation of alienation from what the world sees as “normal.” Critics have often dismissively described her enterprise as “twee,” likely because she is fashionable and somewhat affectless, and her work features West Coast oddballs who blend quirkiness and borderline erotic perversity. Stylistically, she rides the line between deadpan humor and earnest absurdity. To take a representative example, in the first of her three feature-length films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), a young video artist (played by July) fixates on a man whose wife has left him, and who recently set one of his hands on fire in an ill-conceived stunt to impress their children; secondary plotlines involve a middle-aged man leaving sexually explicit messages for two teen girls, and a woman planning to meet an internet stranger in the park after being titillated by his suggestion that they “poop back and forth” forever.

All of her projects, which revolve around a sort of randomness and mystery, probe shame and estrangement, but with a tonal lightness. “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” the narrator of All Fours remarks before she embarks on her zany motel-redecoration project. “Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.” This aimlessness, her attunement to randomness, is entwined with her creativity. Yet as she keeps riffing, the narrator drifts toward a formulation of her experiment that’s more specific and ennobled, borrowing from feminist politics.

What kind of monster makes a big show of going away and then hides out right nearby? But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.

The appearance of the word monster comes as no surprise here. The female artist who does battle with what Virginia Woolf called “the Angel in the House” and leaves home to accomplish something inscrutable to her family and society at large still seems obligated to reckon with whether this act is horrific. As the critic Lauren Elkin observes in her recent book, Art Monsters , the impulse to demonize women who refuse domesticity in favor of creative exploration goes back hundreds of years (at least). So does the female artist’s own willingness to wonder whether her impulses are reprehensible .

July’s artist is consciously pushing back against this legacy here—she will not be kept from her greatness!—while July herself seems also to be lightly ridiculing the way her character’s politically enlightened logic is leading her into a foolish, perhaps unjustifiable set of actions. Her ghost self travels onward—she keeps track of where she should be, dutifully reporting home about the sights she isn’t seeing—while she remains installed in a Louis XIV–style motel room, where she is not busy making great art. Instead, she is masturbating furiously, overwhelmed with desire for a married stranger. This behavior is not monstrous, but it is wayward— weyward being an early spelling of weird .

Except that in a sense, it isn’t weyward at all: The narrator’s behavior (her erraticism, even her eroticism) is right on schedule. She has entered perimenopause , when estrogen levels begin to zigzag. This Rumspringa of hers is less about artistic evolution than the bewilderments of hormonal flux and (in her case) the problem of fitting wild, outsize desire into a life of monogamy, heterosexuality, and parenthood. Her yearnings converge: She wants to become more embodied, more honest and self-accepting, and creatively free—a state that she doesn’t entirely believe is possible. Her sexual awakening, experienced just as she’s learning that she’s likely nearing the end of her high-libido years, is baffling, transcendent, and abject. “This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing.”

From the December 2014 issue: The real roots of midlife crisis

Continuing her old life now seems unbearable; leaving it behind is unthinkable. Whether as a woman, a wife, or an artist, July’s narrator has never, as yet, been an integrated person, believing instead in selectively presenting others with different selves, “each real, each with different needs.” For her, “the only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand.” And yet she still dreams of intimacy, of having a self that can be wholly expressed and held by another. “One fine day I would tell him all about me,” she fantasizes, thinking of her husband, “and this trip would be one of my stories. We would be holding each other in bed, saying everything, laughing and crying and being amazed at all the things we didn’t know about each other, the Great Reveal.”

The perimenopausal plotline—easily dismissed as niche and sentimental, unlike its cousin, the plotline of male midlife crisis—may in fact be the perfect form for July, who turns it into something appropriately whimsical and stark. She writes this hormonal crucible so well in part because she seems already positioned to capture precisely how heightened, bizarre, off-putting, confusing, absurd it is; these elements are the hallmarks of her style. In this context, the tone that might have been dismissed as irony or caprice in earlier work takes on a kind of embodied, material plausibility: “I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form,” the narrator reports with true desperation after returning home. What she has found in Monrovia may be weird, but it is also her weird—transgressiveness in search of honest intimacy, performative selfhood in search of authentic freedom. If this truest, weirdest self cannot be contained in the family structure or the social world that she occupies, perhaps breaking that structure counts as creative liberation.

Perimenopause, as the narrator experiences it, is a profound betrayal in that it begins transporting her into crone-hood without her consent, before she is ready. At the same time, the crone, the weird sister, is afforded proximity to the transporting, the repugnant, the queer, the prophetic. This is good for art, or it can be. In one climactic scene of the book—a sort of symbolic consummation with her future self—the artist has sex with an older woman with a connection to the Hertz attendant. “Her skin was beginning to thin with age, like a banana’s, but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water. Well, knock me over with a feather , I thought.” After the encounter, in an epiphanic haze, she feels certain that promiscuity is the secret to life. This mania, as July renders it, is both completely earnest and totally laughable—a trademark tension in July’s work since her 20s.

Later, her narrator mulls:

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

Here, finally, she arrives at something that looks like a viable future, though after her return home from Monrovia, the book loses the fevered outlandishness that July achieves at its apex. The back half of the novel depends largely on an experiment with polyamory, presented as edgy, but an angsty middle-aged artist curing her ennui with an escapist lesbian affair is hardly radical. This delivers its share of tragicomic setbacks—and a banal, if true, realization that “the point was to keep going without a comprehensible end in sight.”

In Art Monsters , Elkin quotes an essay in which Woolf characterizes the two primary obstacles in her writing life: “The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.” July frantically disassembles Woolf’s Angel in All Fours , without quite solving Woolf’s second challenge. (Has anyone?) Yet her entry into the canon of attempts to capture that truth, in all its flagrant specificity, is one only she could have produced: fascinating, jarringly funny, sometimes repellent, and strangely powerful.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “Miranda July’s Weird Road Trip.”

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