Beside Ourselves with Longing, Love and Heart-breaking Consequences

Title: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Author: Karen Joy Fowler

Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, this big-hearted novel by the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club tells the story of a middle class family, typical in every way but one. From the publisher: "Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. 'I was raised with a chimpanzee,' she explains. 'I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern's expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister.'  As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence."

Insights and Opinions

The Indomitable Five -- Margy, Shirley, Blanche, Chris, and Vicky -- couldn’t hold themselves back from discussing this novel. They jumped right in at 7:30, which is our designated time for social catching up, and talked non-stop (as narrator Rosemary Cooke might have done had she been a part of our group) for the next hour and a half.  

+ Blanche posed the first question, asking Chris to say more about why she was “completely beside herself” about this novel.  Chris talked about how reading the novel was fascinating, yet she felt somewhat anxious as she read. We talked about how Rose herself was off kilter because she spent the first five years of her life as the sister of a chimp. Her instability is reflected in the telling of her story, thus partially explaining the edgy tone of the narration. 

+ The novel starts in the middle of the story as Rose does not want to let anyone (including us, the readers) in on the truth about her past. As the truth is revealed, we see how Rose herself comes to terms (sort of) with her upbringing. “I’m sobbing and sobbing,” she says, as she lets herself recall her part in losing her sister, Fern. It was “a thing I’ve never let myself imagine before.” By the end of the novel, as Rose finds solid ground, we the readers also feel calmer and more grounded. Ultimately Rose finds Fern and acknowledges her sister: “My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.” 

Other Discussion Topics (just a few of many)

+ Role of the two suitcases: Rose loses the one that contains her mother’s story of her real past, just as she has lost or buried her memory of her sister, Fern. She ends up with a second suitcase containing Madame Defarge, a ventriloquist’s dummy, or someone who speaks for another, the way she must now learn to speak for Fern and for her true self, as sister to Fern. By the end of the novel, Rose and her mother have used the stories to create something useful and redemptive: a children’s book.

+ Rose’s monkey behavior: She acts out with Harlow, a chimp-like friend. They both (and also Rose’s brother, Lowell) end up behind bars or in cages, just like Fern. Rose exhibits certain bonobo (pygmy chimp) sexual behaviors in one scene with Harlow, Reg and two other young men. “I wonder if I had sex with all of them, would they calm down?” she thinks (p. 168). “I’d have bitten him by now,” she says in the bar scene.

  

+ Our kinship with the animals in our world: We talked about how this book makes us even more aware of the world we share with animals: our kinship, our shared environment. “It was always her (Fern’s) failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her,” says Rose.

+ During our discussion, Shirley dropped in quotes that she had marked while reading the novel. We talked about each one as she read them. 

“My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry.  To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.” (p. 6).

“Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.” (p. 19).

“His mother, my aunt Vivi, fit into our family about as well as my father—we’re a hard club to join, it seems.” (p. 22).

“I know from Grandma Fredericka, and not our parents, that I once went missing for long enough that the police were called, and it turned out I’d tailed Santa Claus out of a department store and into a tobacco shop where he was buying cigars, and he gave me the ring off one, so the police being called was just an added bonus on what must have already been a pretty good day.” (p. 57).

“The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study.” (p. 92).

“’The secret to a good life,’ he told me once, ‘is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.’” (pp. 271 – 272).

“But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.” (p. 274).

“I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.” (p. 297).

“I’m unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.” (pp. 304 – 305).