Returning to her apartment, which she shares with a friend named Todd, Rosemary finds that Harlow has been crashing there. Her bag with the journals gets lost in transit. The subject of these journals is something that the family likes to keep silent about, so Rosemary feels nervous.

Rosemary’s mother gives her some of her old journals, which Vince wanted to donate to a library. At dinner, the extended family shows their distaste for Vince. Vince, Rosemary’s father, helps get her out of jail and cajoles her into going home for Thanksgiving. This is deeply out of character for Rosemary. On a whim, Rosemary aligns herself with the aggressor, Harlow, and the two are sent to jail. Rosemary is in the cafeteria when a fight breaks out between a couple: Harlow and Reg. She does not have a particularly close relationship with her parents, and both of her siblings have been gone for at least a decade. The story begins in media res, with Rosemary meandering through college, unsure of what to do with herself. In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, narrator Rosemary Cooke uses a looping and weaving narrative that utilizes flashbacks to tell the story of her and her siblings’ lives. Putnam’s Sons edition of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.Ĭontent Warning: The Part 4 Chapter 1 Summary of this guide contains a reference to child suicide, which is referred to in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Focusing all the attention on the twist threatens to obscure Fowler's other more considerable talents.This guide uses the 2014 G.P.

Some might say I'm spoiling the twist, but given what plays out (as Rosemary pieces together the real story behind Fern's removal from her family, Lowell's estrangement, and the unwitting role Rosemary herself played in events), a novel that is both one giant moral compass and a harrowing depiction of a family's implosion, the prose of which zings on the pages – a grandmother, for example, for whom 'conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes' – deserves to be acclaimed for the right reasons. They conducted experiments around the breakfast table, made freak shows of their own families, and all to answer questions nice people wouldn't even think to ask.' Think Project Nim and you get the idea. 'Psychologists,' she tells us, 'didn't leave their work at the office. You have to wait until page 77 for the explanation for their disappearance, but it's not too hard to work it out for yourself – Rosemary grew up in the 1970s, and her father was a psychology professor at Indiana University. Both, however, have long since vanished from her and their parents' lives. R osemary Cooke, a quiet college student, grew up with her sister Fern and her older brother Lowell.

We are all completely beside ourselves