“Skip the beginning. Start in the middle”, Rosemary Cooke, the narrator in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves declares in the prologue. It is ten years since she has last seen her brother Lowell who has not been heard of since he suddenly left their home in Indiana. And it is 17 years since the unexplained disappearance of her sister, Fern. Both events haunt her, shaping the semi-solitary life she has chosen. Rosemary is at University, a distracted student, destined for ordinariness but wistful for a future being “either widely admired or stealthily influential”.
Starting in the middle gives any reader who has somehow managed to miss the reviews, or the blurb on the book jacket cover, a fighting chance of surprise when the secret to Rosemary’s past and to the novel’s main thread, is revealed: Fern, her beloved sibling,