‘My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn’t there, and I can’t tell you that part. I’ve stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that’s mine, and still everything I’ve said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story.’
Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, decides to take her father’s advice and skip the beginning of her story and instead start in the middle. As such, the story begins in 1996. Rosemary Cooke is twenty-two years old and is in her fifth year of studying at the University of California, Davis. Ten years have passed since she has seen her brother and it has been seventeen years since her sister disappeared. The loss of Rosemary’s sister, Fern, utterly destroyed her family. Her mother suffered a nervous breakdown, her father started drinking heavily, and her brother left home and his whereabouts have been largely unknown ever since. As the narrative progresses, we are gradually able to piece together what happened all those years ago on the day Rosemary’s sister went missing.
To experience this novel to the fullest, a reader should go in completely blind. Writing a review about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves without giving away any spoilers is a challenging task, but I will try my best to do so. Personally, I appreciated going into the book with no prior knowledge and I think the overall effect of the book would be lessened by knowing a certain spoiler beforehand.
I have various positive things to say about this book. I liked the structure of the narrative and the first half of the book established a solid tension. I was drawn in by the premise of the mysterious disappearances of Rosemary’s siblings, and how the family was still dealing with the aftermath. I liked Rosemary’s narrative voice, as she is funny and fairly compelling. I was particularly impressed by the book’s focus on the nature of memory and its examination of how we experience the past. Fowler highlights how memories are not fixed but instead change, develop, and can are re-imagined over time. This novel also offers an interesting look into the importance of the authorial voice – how it shapes how readers interpret events and characters, and the importance of what the narrator chooses to omit.
Now onto the things I didn’t like as much. Given that there is a lot of hype surrounding this book, I was expecting to be blown away. And I just wasn’t…Don’t get me wrong, this is a good book but I didn’t find it anywhere nearly as moving as I wanted it to be. I wasn’t massively invested in the characters so my emotional response to the narrative was fairly muted. I knew that there was going to be a plot twist at some point in the narrative. I had expected it to come at the end of the book whereas, in fact, the plot twist occurs on page seventy-seven of this over three-hundred-page novel. And yes, I did find the plot twist surprising. However, everything fell a bit flat after that for me. I read the book expecting there to be many more twists and turns but nothing really surprised me. Once it is revealed to us why Fern and Lowell vanished, I had difficulty believing that the family would be affected so devastatingly. Given that Rosemary was only five at the time of Fern’s disappearance, I was unconvinced that the repercussions of Fern’s absence would have been so severe for her. I just didn’t buy the fact that she became a complete shell of her former self as a result and was essentially friendless until university. I have virtually no memories from when I was five, so I think Rosemary’s response to her sister’s disappearance would have been more believable had Rosemary been a little older when Fern went missing. Her family’s reaction as a whole baffled me, especially the fact that they never discuss Fern’s disappearance together, choosing instead to act as if she had never existed.
Another slightly petty gripe I have with this book is I felt like it was trying way too hard to be ‘quirky.’ Rosemary is somewhat of a cliché; she gets arrested multiple times for petty acts of rebellion, manages to sweet-talk her professor out of failing her on her final exams, and forms a fairly unbelievable friendship with a wild, erratic, and ditsy drama student. Other bizarre details include minor characters incessantly referencing famous films, Rosemary’s missing brother communicating with his family only through cryptic unsigned postcards, Rosemary’s best friend Harlow taking a ventriloquist’s dummy on nights out, not to mention all of the characters’ unconventional names and equally off-the-wall characterisation and dialogue. Hopefully, you get the idea. It was all quite surreal. And I don’t particularly mean that as a compliment.
In conclusion, I liked the book’s treatment of memory, its innovative narrative style, and the trajectory of the first one-hundred pages or so. However, I had quite a lot of issues with the novel’s execution as a whole, which prevented me from really loving it (and believe me, I wanted to love it!). I would rate Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves three out of five stars. You’re better off reading a really good thriller instead in my opinion.