We Are Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

This books is one of the titles on the Booker longlist this year.  I read a previous bestseller by this author, The Jane Austen Book Club.  As I recall it was okay.... not great.

This book is about a young girl who as a child had a baby monkey being raised as a sibling and being studied by her father, a scientist and his grad students.

They are studying how the monkey learns, if it learns from the child, and vice versa.

We learn that the girl used to have a sister, but we don't learn that the sister was a monkey until well into the book.  It turns out that the monkey was removed from the family when the girl was approximately five years of age, after the girl tells the family that the monkey killed a kitten.

At the same time as the monkey is removed from the family, the girl is sent to stay with her grandparents.  She thinks she has done something wrong.  She acts out and is returned home to find that her sister is gone.  The family is told that the monkey has been sent to a sanctuary.  The family falls apart with the removal of the monkey.  The girl remembers playing with the monkey, being read to by their mother, she misses her desperately even though she was taunted at school, called a Monkey Girl.   She thinks of herself as having monkey behaviours she learned from the baby monkey, Fern.

After the monkey is taken away from the family the family falls apart.  The mother becomes depressed, the fathers academic career falters, the son's relationship with the family deteriorates and he eventually runs away to become an animal rights activist/terroist.  The family don't know where he is and the FBI are looking for him.

As the story starts the girl is in university, she has a girlfriend who is very self-centred and explosive.  The girl's brother shows up and tells her the truth about Fern. She is in a laboratory.  He is trying to figure out how to get her out but doesn't succeed.
Eventually the girl and her mother become volunteers at the facility and have some contact with Fern, but it is of course very sad for them know what has happened to her.

As with Annabel, I was dissatisfied with this book.  I can understand being distraught at the loss of the monkey, they thought of her as family.  However, I have lost two dogs, both of whom we loved as members of our family.  It hurts a lot when you lose them but gradually the pain lessons, but you never forget them.  Perhaps because we tell ourselves they have "gone to a better place" or "are no longer suffering".  I could understand the son's response -- to become an animal activist, but I really couldn't buy the long drawn out grief of the mother and daughter.  The girl did eventually remember that she is likely responsible for the monkey being taken away from the family, I can see her having some guilt from that.  The parents probably had guilt or realized how unethical it was to subject the baby monkey to experimentation.  But overall, it just seemed way over the top emotionally.

I suppose you could consider the book in terms of a family losing a child, a child losing a twin or sibling and the grief that would ensue.  I think I would be less critical of the story.