we are all completely beside ourselves meaning

Rosemary Cooke’s sister Fern disappeared from her life when she was just five years old. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the eighth novel by prize-winning American author, Karen Joy Fowler. “You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. How much do we allow in the progress of the sciences? Does one remember the event or just the retelling of the event? Also family, what does it mean to be a family and exactly what do we owe other family members?Īnyway one wants to read this, it is well done, interesting, and animal lovers will surely be appalled but maybe it is something we all need to think about. Rosemary now a young adult looking back at her childhood and childhood self, a story about the reliability of memory. So this can be a condemnation of the animal experiments, a warning to us perhaps about overreaching, and at times it almost bordered on the preachy, but just when I thought that the author would pull back. It is really too bad that in the book's synopsis it gives away so much because it was not until the second part of the book that the reader is made aware of exactly who this family was comprised of, a feat I found amazing. This is a story that covers many complex issues, 1970's was a time of experimental animal psychology which of course led to many animal abuses and stories, that at times are very difficult to read. It was humorous at times but always at the core there was an element of seriousness. This was a very different type of novel for this author, a novel that was not easy to write because at any time it could have easily crossed over into the absurd and it did not.

We are all completely beside ourselves meaning