book we are all completely beside ourselves

I see this, looking up from the shoulder I am leaning against.' A few drops of water still cling to the sparse white hair of her chin. She's had a bubble bath and smells of strawberry soap and wet towels. Rosemary's very earliest memory: 'lying against Fern. It is 1996 and Rosemary has not seen him for ten years.įor both Rosemary and Lowell, growing up with Fern was a constant delight. A few years later their older, human brother Lowell, angered and unable to get answers from his parents, left home to find out what had become of Fern. Having been the child who never stopped talking, she is now immured in a self-imposed silence lest anyone find out that she was once the 'monkey girl.' Fern, the chimp, who was a sister in every sense, joined the family when she and Rosemary were just a few months old and was sent away when they were six. Rosemary Cooke is a fifth year college student who can't settle on a major because she is leading a most unsettled life. Loosely based on an experiment conducted in the 1930s by married scientists who attempted to raise a baby chimp along with their infant daughter, Fowler examines what it would be like for the human children who were part of such a family. While that is not an unusual occurrence in novels about families, never have I read one in which the lost member was a chimpanzee. Karen Joy Fowler's novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a story about a family torn apart by the loss of one member.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one.

Book we are all completely beside ourselves