We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Sisters And Other Creatures

For a change, Rosemary Cooke starts her extraordinary story in the middle and loops it around her memories. Perhaps because starting at the beginning would be too painful for her. Karen Jay Fowler’s award-winning book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is about the Cooke family, seen from the point of view of the daughter Rosemary or Rosie. Her life and that of her family—parents and brother—has been deeply scarred by the sudden disappearance of her ‘sister’ Fern.

Five-year-old Rosie is sent away to live with her grandparents, because, as she finds out later, her mother was having a nervous breakdown.  When she returns she finds that Fern is missing and no explanations are offered. Then her beloved brother Lowell leaves home in a rage and embarks on a path of self-destruction as an animal rights activist.

Somewhere along the way, the reader discovers that Fern was a baby chimpanzee, brought into the home by Rosie’s psychologist father, to conduct an animal-human behaviour experiment.  While the impact of human interaction on the primate is observed and recorded by her father and his students, nobody is too concerned on the impact of having a chimp sibling has on the girl child.

"Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did," Rosemary recalls. "What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion."

As she is left mourning the loss of her playmate, she finds that other children in school find her behavior bizarre and call her Monkey Girl.  Must later in college, she is befriended by the unruly Harlow, who is so weird herself that she does not even notice Rosie’s strangeness. When Rosie first encounters Harlow, she is breaking up with her boyfriend and smashing furniture in the college cafeteria—which leads to her and Rosie’s arrest. To Rosie’s still grieving and conflicted mind, she is a human version of the hell-raising Fern.

Both Rosie and Lowell’s lives are spent in trying to find Fern and undo the wrong done to her in the name of research. The book is as much about family loyalty as it is about animal rights. The question it raises over and over again is, can humans justify the horrific cruelty they inflict on animals, because the results of their experiments could help improve human lives? Does the end justify the means?

The book is deftly blends profundity and humour with Rosie’s emotions of pain, confusion and guilt. It also leaves the reader caring as much for the damaged Rosie, Lowell and Harlow as for the innocent Fern, who had no way of preventing what happened to her. A must-read book by the author of the highly regarded The Jane Austen Book Club.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

By: Karen Jay Fowler

Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam

Pages: 320