We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

#1017
Title: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Year: 2013
310 pages

Quite a lovely novel--poignant, funny, upsetting, redemptive. If possible, read this without reading any synopses or the jacket copy until you're about maybe 75 pages in (I listened to it, so I'm not sure) when you'll recognize the big reveal that, for some reason, everyone thinks it's fine to expose for you. I enjoyed the plot, as I think many psychology students would, and its narration by a smart and socially awkward young woman. I here disclose that I got in some trouble as a 4th grader in a way that this narrator would identify with: Asked by the teacher if anyone knew what made an animal a mammal, I shouted out, "Mammals breast-feed their young!" While accurate, this is evidently not how 9-year-olds are supposed to express this idea.

In addition, I would swear that Fowler sat at a cafe table behind me and my best friend one day as we were recapping events from our lives. In this fantasy, Fowler jotted notes like "Stanford" and "herb names for offspring" and "X dies in late 50s" and "cross-dressing Shakespeare??" and then appropriates these details for her novel. At some points it was uncanny. I've only had this experience with Maso's The Art Lover before, but Fowler manages to channel enough details about me and my friend that it's almost creepy.