Love in this book is as complex as love should be it emerges in the most unexpected of places and does so rapidly, the kind of love that catches you unaware but on closer inspection you realize was bubbling under the surface all along. So when Cheryl inevitably finds love, it is only with its loss that she discovers the complexities of life that refuse to be controlled.
In her first novel July works on the oldest of tropes, that love is never a ‘smooth’ road. In this veiling her cravings are made remote, safely ‘smooth’ in her squeaky clean home. Her desires, however human, are suffocated in fantasy. With no real edges her life remains hollow she pines for a child she has never had and idolizes a man as a lover from a past life. What Cheryl comes to realize, of course, is that it is precisely these ‘snags and snafus’ that create a life worth living. Everything in Cheryl’s life is clean, every detail ordered with obsessive compulsion to create a ‘smoother living experience’ with ‘none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for’. Miranda July’s first fully-fledged non-screen female protagonist has a life organized so rigidly in The First Bad Man that it has ‘no edges anywhere’. Cheryl Glickman - isolated, alone and with no true friends to speak of - is an acute example of the lonesome modern narrator.
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