We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

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 is a chimp, and, already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister…Until Fern’s expulsion…she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half…I loved her as a sister.” As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence. In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.