we are all completely beside ourselves summary

Fern’s identity is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.” She’s right, of course. “I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. In my defense, I had my reasons,” she adds. “It’s never going to be the first thing I share. “I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact,” she says. In a witty, conversational voice, Rosemary reluctantly parcels out the details of her “chimped-up household.” She doesn’t mention her sister’s body hair issue until page 77. But their parents have “promised to love them both exactly the same.” So far, so normal. Rosemary never stops talking Fern never starts. They have a son named Lowell and two new daughters, Rosemary and Fern.

Cooke live in a farmhouse with a gaggle of graduate students in Bloomington, Ind. $26.95) (Marian Wood)īut there’s nothing fantastical about Fowler’s new novel with its drawing-room title, “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.” In fact, the plot is inspired by several real experiments, including the work of Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, scientists at Indiana University who raised their baby son alongside a chimp for almost a year in the early 1930s.įowler places her story in the 1970s and extends the experiment to five years. ’We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ by Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood/Putnam. In fact, just as most of us have decided that we should probably stop torturing chimps to death in the name of science, an outrageous community of simian novels has been congregating in the branches of the library, from the “autobiography” of Tarzan’s sidekick, “ Me Cheeta,” by James Lever, to “ The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore,” by Benjamin Hale.

Her new novel, for instance, involves an ordinary Midwestern family: two parents and three children.Īnd why not? If Gregor Samsa can turn into a cockroach and Edward Albee can ask, “ Who is Sylvia?”, a chimp for a sibling doesn’t seem so far down the evolutionary tree. Award, a prize “for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.” In 1991, she co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Her stories have won the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. But aside from that domesticated crowd-pleaser, Fowler is also the author of genre-blending works of historical fiction and fantasy.

You know Karen Joy Fowler, though probably only for her least representative novel - that charming bestseller “The Jane Austen Book Club.” It landed with perfectly calibrated Janite wit in 2004 during a wave of renewed enthusiasm for Austen and book clubs.

We are all completely beside ourselves summary