It Chooses You – which could act as a companion piece to Miranda July’s recently released second film, The Future – is about as filmic as a book can be. A collection of transcribed interviews and photographs, it’s as eclectic as a short story collection and as unobtrusive as a good documentary.

The book details July’s struggle to progress with her screenplay for The Future, and her decision to embark on a series of meetings with people she finds through the PennySaver, a Los Angeles classified magazine that falls through her door every Tuesday – all of which eventually impact on her approach to the film. The advertisers, who vary in age, wealth and gender, sell items of questionable value - Care Bears, an old hair dryer or other people’s photograph albums. Each item reflects quietly on its owner, and all the items – and the people selling them – are sensitively captured by Brigitte Sire, the photographer who accompanies July on her excursions.

July’s films and short stories – characterised by whimsical, contemplative characters – have made her a love-or-hate figure of US indie. She briefly attempts to explain her intentions to one of the interviewees: “They’re usually about people trying to connect in one way or another and the importance of that. And the different ways people sort of make that harder than it needs to be.”  This book shows this more explicitly than her other work, drawing out a comparison between the online world that she had come to rely upon and the more localised, intimate links she forms through the PennySaver. She enters into cavernous private worlds too intricate to be contained in a website, meeting people whose paths would not have otherwise crossed with hers: middle-aged housewives, pensioners, teenage boys.

Quiet, old, or simply odd, most of the interviewees are keen to shape how their own story is told, and it’s fascinating seeing the push and pull between their need to do so and July’s efforts to create a coherent narrative arc. But she’s a patient interviewer, giving her subjects the space to digress while latching onto asides which open up more fascinating vaults of information. Whether quiet and unassuming, or the kind of people you’d give a wide birth on the street, they almost always confound expectations. When the project takes July into slightly disturbing territory, this just ensures that the sweetness of the rest of the book never feels too cloying.

It Chooses You is quick, and light; the transcribed dialogue and the photographs mean it feels much shorter than its 220 pages. As it follows the same quiet, quirky path trodden by July’s films and short stories, it won’t appease her detractors. But it’s still consistently surprising and visually stunning; a mesmerising, tactile book.

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