Our book choice for September 2014 is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a novel by Karen Joy Fowler that tells the story of Rosemary Cooke, a young woman who was raised alongside a chimpanzee named Fern. The novel explores the complex relationship between humans and animals, and the ways in which our understanding of ourselves is shaped by our interactions with other creatures.
The Early Years
Rosemary’s family lives in a small town in Illinois in the 1970s. Her father, a psychologist, is involved in a research project that involves raising a chimpanzee as a human family member. Rosemary’s mother is initially hesitant about the project, but she eventually comes to accept Fern as part of the family.
Fern and Rosemary are inseparable during their early years. They learn to communicate with each other through sign language, and they share many of the same interests. However, as Rosemary grows older, she begins to feel increasingly isolated from Fern. She starts to notice the differences between them, and she begins to question her place in the family.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves explores a number of themes, including the relationship between humans and animals, the nature of family, and the power of memory. The novel also challenges our assumptions about what it means to be human.
Discussion Questions for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
- ‘Start in the middle,’ Rosemary’s father says at the beginning of the book. How does the order that Rosemary tells her story affect how we get to know her?
- It’s not until page 77 that we discover Rosemary’s sister Fern is a chimpanzee. Rosemary’s keen to control the way the reader is introduced to certain ideas, in this case so that she can establish Fern as her sister and not an animal. Did that work for you? And how do these deliberate omissions relate to those things Rosemary can’t bring herself to remember, such as the reason for Fern being sent away?
- There are hints to Fern’s true nature in the book before you’re told: did you sense there was something different about her?
- ‘An oft-told story is like a photograph in an album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.’ How we experience the past is central to the book. Rosemary’s memories of her childhood are sometimes sharp, and sometimes cloudy. Many of her memories rely on her senses. And often we are aware that how she remembers experiencing something isn’t necessarily the way it actually happened. How true to your own experience does the presentation of memory seem?
- Rosemary combines being fiercely intellectually engaged and engaging with being – she says – a lazy scholar. She says ‘To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.’ How does Rosemary’s intellect relate to the structured academic environment she was raised in?
- My father made a crude joke … If the joke were witty, I’d include it, but it wasn’t. You’d think less of him and thinking less of him is my job, not yours.’ How do these moments where Rosemary is talking straight to the reader affect our relationship to her and to her family?
- Rosemary says more than once that unfairness bothers children and chimps greatly. Do you agree?
- Many people will have known that Fern is a chimpanzee before beginning the book. Some people say this makes it more compelling, others wish they hadn’t known. There is a study that suggests that knowing the end – or the middle – of a plot doesn’t actually decrease our enjoyment of it. What do you think, does knowing a plot point spoil the story or enhance it?
- Does the ending mean Rosemary has atoned for her earlier sins? Did she need to?
- ‘Maybe it was useful, when plotting books, to imagine that someone’s life could be shaped by a single early trauma, maybe even one inaccessible in memory. But where were the blind studies, the control groups? The reproducible data?’ To what extent does this book reject scientific ideas in favour of emotion and lived experience?
- ‘This, then, is the me I know – the human half of the fabulous, the fascinating, the phantasmagorical Cooke sisters.’ To what extent does Rosemary still define herself against, and alongside, Fern? And what exactly is it that makes them different? Using tools and language have both been suggested as the line between being a human and an animal, but we now know that some animals use tools and language too. So what are the qualities that distinguish Fern and Rosemary?
- ‘It’s hard to overstate how lonely I was. Let me just repeat that I’d once gone, in a matter of days, from a childhood where I was never alone to this prolonged, silent only-ness.’ When Rosemary meets Harlow, she finds her fascinating, despite knowing intuitively that she’s untrustworthy. What is it about Harlow that Rosemary finds so irresistible?
- ‘It seemed to Lowell that psychological studies of nonhuman animals were mostly cumbersome, convoluted, and downright peculiar. They taught us little about the animals but lots about the researchers who designed and ran them … “We need a sort of reverse mirror text. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else.”’ How does this idea relate to the characters in the book?
- ‘I’ve tried so hard to rescue her. Years and years of trying and what does Fern have to show for it? What a miserable excuse for a brother I turned out to be.’ How do feelings of responsibility colour the Cooke family’s interactions with each other?
- “The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”’ Has reading this book changed the way you feel about animals and humans? In what context?
- The non-human rights movement, which seeks legal rights for great apes, cetaceans, and elephants, is rapidly expanding. In India, dolphins have been awarded non-human personhood status, and keeping them for entertainment is banned. Others argue they should be granted rights as ‘living property’, thus protecting their best interests but not bestowing independent rights. What legal status do you believe animals should have? Should it vary according to the relative intelligence of a species? Should animals that are demonstrably self-aware, such as chimps, be granted the right to life and freedom from captivity?
- ‘It’s hard enough here to forgive myself for the things I did and felt when I was five, hopeless for the way I behaved at fifteen. Lowell heard that Fern was in a cage in South Dakota and he took off that very night. I heard the same thing and my response was to pretend I hadn’t heard it.’ In the book, Lowell takes action and Rosemary finds herself paralysed. How does this relate to the themes of scientific experiment vs lived experience?
- ‘The Davis primate center is today credited with significant advances in our understanding and treatment of SIV, Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s. Nobody’s arguing these issues are easy.’ If you draw a line between useful and not useful animal experiment, where do you place it?
- ‘So the studies don’t back me up. There’ll always be more studies. We’ll change our minds and I’ll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong.’ Is this a fair description of the scientific process?
- ‘Next time, I’ll put things right between my father and me. Next time, I’ll give Mom the fair share of blame for Fern … Next time, I’ll take the share that’s mine, no more, no less.’ How does Rosemary’s wish to relive and correct the past reflect her acceptance of what really happened?
- Rosemary’s mother says to her, ‘”I wanted you to have an extraordinary life.”’ To what extent is that a legitimate desire of a parent for a child? To what extent is it fair to a child to enact it?
- When Lowell is arrested, Rosemary says, ‘I’ve read that since his arrest he hasn’t said a single word. Everyone else is mystified by this silence, but his reasons couldn’t be more obvious to me. He was halfway there when I last saw him sixteen years ago. Lowell has decided to be tried as an animal. The nonhuman kind.’ Does this best serve Lowell’s purpose and that of the animals he has always sought to defend?