We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler was recommended to my by some friends who said it was good and that they didn't want to say anything more, in order not to spoil it. They even recommended that I not look at the cover of the book, in order not to spoil it.

It turned out to be a good book!

I appreciated the various literary, linguistic, and scientific references, including the surprising Ozymandias deep-cut. The twist/secret/spoilable content wasn't what I expected but wasn't unreasonable, either.

Spoilers below the break.

The book's narrator, Rosemary, comes across as flighty and unreliable (as a person and narrator both). She starts by telling things specifically out-of-order and with a circumlocutory haze over descriptions that raised my reader-hackles and made me suspect she had somehow been responsible for her lost sister and brother, both phantoms that edge in and out of her recounted childhood memories. Or maybe they were twins, and she replaced one? I had strong reminiscence about Jo Walton's Among Others, especially since there was an ambiguously older/same-age sister as the narrator and the line

"He warned me, though, to remember that real people didn’t really behave like this, as if I might go home thinking it was okay to switch places with your twin brother so as to fake your own death" (p.69)

Along with nuggets like the extended DO-NOT-TRUST-ME flashing lights of passages like:

My father would surely want me to point out that, at five, I was still in Jean Piaget’s preoperational phase with regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you to understand that I am undoubtedly, from my more mature perspective, imposing a logical framework on my understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time. Emotions in the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme.

Consider it said. (p.50)

And "language does this to our memories---simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies." (p.48), in light of which, the narrator's self-professed lifelong reluctance to examine her memories and explain them in words makes a bit of sense.

The book was satisfying, though all the way to the end I kept looking for clues for a second twist, for a secret behind the secret that the narrator openly confesses about 1/3 of the way through the book. I kept expecting for one or the other of her siblings to be imaginary (she had an imaginary friend in childhood, so this would fit with her ongoing narrative), or for her college-age associates to vanish into imaginary-land, or for one or the other of them to actually be her, projecting and dissociating her actions onto someone else in order to be judgmental and distant from them.

Alas! Not every book warrants the fully suspicious readerly attention I lavish. But this one was interesting. I thought that the final bits where the story got brought up to the "present" and some loose ends were tied up was sort of hurried, but maybe I was looking for a twist where the author had actually written emotional closure, and it caught me wrong-footed.


This post's theme word is analeptic (adj), "restorative or stimulating". Her irritated mother had "araleptic doses of righteous aggravation."