We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: A Novel
Karen Joy Fowler
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0142180823
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“A gripping, bighearted book.” —Khaled Hosseini
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014
Winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award
One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2013 and named by The Christian Science Monitor as one of the top 15 works of fiction
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family, ordinary in every way but one.
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.
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.
“Correctamundo,” he told me. “That you don’t think so just shows how little you know.” Two more days passed before he unlocked the broom closet—(there’s shit in there that could seriously fuck up the wells. You could poison the whole town if you wanted, Ezra had told me. It was his job to keep that shit out of the hands of the sort of terrorists who lived on the third floor)—and pulled the suitcase out. It was hard-shelled and powder-blue. “Oh, yeah,” Ezra said. “I forgot. This guy
become. It was bound to happen, they assured each other. Typical teenage sullenness; they’d been much the same themselves. I’d grow out of it. Hit some reasonable midpoint between the constant talking I’d done before and my current silence. Occasionally, we heard from Lowell. A postcard would come, sometimes with a message, sometimes without, always unsigned. I remember one with a picture of the Nashville Parthenon and a St. Louis postmark. “I hope you’re happy,” he’d written on the back,
Parker is a piker. “That’s enough of that,” the elderly woman told me and I was unsure if I’d spoken aloud or she was reading my mind. Both seemed equally possible. “Harlow. Harlow!” I whispered. There was no answer. I thought that Harlow might be asleep and how that would mean she hadn’t taken the same pills she’d given me. Maybe there weren’t enough and she’d meant to be nice, letting me have them and bravely going without. Or maybe she’d known better than to take them herself, and it
the driver was reading—a large book, Intro to Biology. He was stalking his girlfriend and studying for his finals at the same time. He was multitasking. “Good morning, Reg,” I said. “Why are you up so early?” “I’ve been off with my brother. Eating pie.” What could be more innocent, more rosily American than that? “What’re you doing here?” “Losing my self-respect.” I patted his arm. “You did well to keep that for as long as you did,” I told him. • • • OBVIOUSLY, THIS WAS
“Here’s the thing. He’s a wanted man. Like picture-in-the-post-office wanted. Wanted by the FBI as a domestic terrorist for the Animal Liberation Front. You can’t even tell anyone he was here or I’ll be arrested. Again. For real. “Before this weekend, I hadn’t seen him in ten years. I don’t have the first fucking clue what his favorite band is. Travers isn’t even his name. You really, really, really need to forget about him.” There I go again, not keeping my mouth shut. Because what