We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves is Karen Joy Fowler’s seventh novel. The book was first published in 2013. The following year, it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Fowler said that the book takes inspiration from a real 1930s experiment. In an interview with Carmen Maria Machado published in The American Reader, Fowler states that she believes that using animals for research purposes is wrong, and that humans should avoid doing the things that make us want to look away, as that feeling of repulsion is proof that they’re morally reprehensible.

This guide uses the 2014 G.P. Putnam’s Sons edition of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

Content 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.

Plot Summary

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. The story begins in media res, with Rosemary meandering through college, unsure of what to do with herself. She does not have a particularly close relationship with her parents, and both of her siblings have been gone for at least a decade.

Rosemary is in the cafeteria when a fight breaks out between a couple: Harlow and Reg. On a whim, Rosemary aligns herself with the aggressor, Harlow, and the two are sent to jail. This is deeply out of character for Rosemary. Vince, Rosemary’s father, helps get her out of jail and cajoles her into going home for Thanksgiving. At dinner, the extended family shows their distaste for Vince. Rosemary’s mother gives her some of her old journals, which Vince wanted to donate to a library. The subject of these journals is something that the family likes to keep silent about, so Rosemary feels nervous.

Her bag with the journals gets lost in transit. Returning to her apartment, which she shares with a friend named Todd, Rosemary finds that Harlow has been crashing there. The next day, the apartment manager tells Rosemary that a guy claiming to be her brother had come looking for her. Rosemary is shocked; she chose to attend UC Davis because Davis was the last place the FBI had traced her brother to a decade ago. Her brother’s name is Lowell, but she tells the apartment manager his name is Travers. He is wanted by the FBI for his work with the Animal Liberation Front. The airline delivers the wrong bag to Rosemary. At Harlow’s request, they open the bag and find a ventriloquist dummy.

Rosemary reveals to the reader that her missing sister is a chimpanzee named Fran. Her father, a psychologist, and mother decided to raise a chimp as Rosemary’s twin sister. Vince and a team of graduate students performed studies on the pair. This upbringing caused Rosemary to suffer from jealousy issues. Knowing that Lowell is in town, Rosemary’s repressed memories of her childhood start to surface. This process is accelerated by a lecture in which her teacher talks about the violence against females in chimp society.

After the lecture, Rosemary meets up with Harlow at a bar. Harlow has the dummy. The two take drugs and spend the night running around town. While high, Rosemary spirals into the past, thinking of an awful memory in which she stole a kitten from a stray cat and gave it to Fern, who then killed it. Rosemary told her mother that she was scared of Fern because of this incident, and she believes that this is why Fern was given away. Rosemary does not trust her memories, as her family’s silence has left her with no one to corroborate her beliefs. Briefly, Rosemary sees her brother at the bar. An officer brings the girls to jail to sober up.

The next day, Rosemary searches for the lost dummy, her bike, and her brother. When she gets home, Todd tells her that her brother came to find her, but when she was not there, he went to dinner with Harlow. Rosemary’s big reunion with her brother is unsatisfying as he spends much of it flirting with Harlow. Once the siblings get one-on-one time, he talks over her about animal ethics. She tells the reader that he seems unwell. He tells her that Fern has lived in a lab that treats her poorly ever since she was given away by their family. Before he goes, he informs her that he is going off the radar and needs her to keep an eye on Fern. She asks him why Fern had to leave in the first place, and he says that she had made their parents choose between her and Fern when she was five. Harlow falls madly in love with Lowell after their one-night stand and goes missing, likely to work with the Animal Liberation Front.

Over Christmas break, Rosemary and her parents finally talk about the past. She is absolved of some of her guilt and comes to a new understanding of the past. After Rosemary’s father dies, she and her mother move to South Dakota so they can be close to Fern. Lowell is finally arrested. Rosemary becomes a teacher and includes a unit on chimps in her curriculum. She brings her classes to visit the lab. Rosemary’s mother volunteers in the lab, feeding Fern her favorite foods. The two of them edit the mother’s old journals into children’s books. The profits from their publication go towards expanding the outside space for the chimps in the lab.