We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a novel by the American writer Karen Joy Fowler, published in 2013. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 2014.

Rosemary Cooke is in her early twenties, a student in California, and the story she tells about her family begins in the middle and circles back. Her father is a professor of behavioural psychology, and she and her brother Lowell grew up with a chimpanzee named Fern whom their parents raised as a third child as part of a long-term study. Rosemary refers to Fern as her sister throughout, and the reader is well into the novel before the full shape of the arrangement becomes clear. When Fern is sent away, Lowell leaves home to look for her, and the family that was the experiment comes apart in a way that only becomes visible from the distance of years.

Fowler's novel was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Nebula Award, and it is told in a deliberately out-of-order way that leaves the reader where the narrator was.