It chooses you

PENNYSAVER is a classified rag that arrives weekly in American mailboxes. It inspired the artist and filmmaker Miranda July's latest book, IT CHOOSES YOU (McSweeney's, $24), a revolving adventure that takes July and the photographer Brigitte Sire into strange Los Angeles homes and the sad, joyous, weird lives of the people who dwell in them - like Michael, a 60-something man in a magenta blouse who's going through a gender transformation and happens to be selling a large black leather jacket for $10. At the start of the book we find July, in 2009, trying to complete her next movie script while holed up in her old home, a "little cave" she keeps as an office now that she's married and lives elsewhere. She writes (or attempts to write) at her kitchen table or in her single-girl bed with the "thriftstore sheets." Instead of making progress, she bleeds time by surfing the Web and doing Google searches on her own name, "as if the answer to my problem might be secretly encoded in a blog post about how annoying I was." She finds herself looking forward to the arrival of the PennySaver and drawn to its random objects, used clothes and exotic pets, wondering about the people behind the names and phone numbers populating its pages. Soon she sets out on an illformed hipster quest, deciding to "drive all over Los Angeles like an untrained, unhelpful social worker. Why?" The book doesn't exactly answer this, and July admits she doesn't know what role she's playing in this self-induced drama - that of "a journalist or a detective"? But in a digital world, feeling increasingly isolated, she seems to think it's enough to offer her subjects $50 to share "your life and everything about you. Your hopes, your fears." A tale told in a series of character portraits emerges through off-kilter interview transcripts interspersed with July's observations about her personal troubles. The interviews aren't particularly deep; they come off as random conversations with strangers, or airings of someone else's dirty laundry. The glints of humanity that shine through are what July clings to, along with her somewhat twisted hope that the person in front of her will help to inform her work. Her travels lead her to a woman with a badly wounded face advertising Bengal leopard cubs for sale out of her kitchen, and to a proper Indian woman, Primila, offering saris for $5. Another woman is selling a suitcase, but July is more taken with her grandson, who delivers mannequins. She can't resist following him upstairs to his bedroom, where he lives with a dummy molded to resemble a soap-star actress he met in a line at Disneyland. During a sweet interlude, as July interviews a 17-year-old seller of bullfrog tadpoles about his challenges in school and dreams for the future, she tells him, "This is corny, but you're kind of like the tadpole about to transform." It all seems pretty self-serving, but July believes she's learned something, offering as an epiphany along the way: "It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves." In the end, she has done enough voyeuristic procrastinating to finish her film, "The Future," which was released last summer. One of the people cast in it is a PennySaver discovery named Joe, seller of Christmas cards and writer of dirty poems, who in the middle of filming informs July he has only two weeks to live. In fact, he holds on a bit longer - long enough to indulge July with a few more interviews and reminisce about his acting experience. "I don't know if there'd be a future in it for me," he says. "But I know I'm not going to be a big movie star." - LILY KOPPEL Behind the phone numbers: Miranda July with eggs from Beverly's aviary.