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.

The epigraph is a quote from Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Report to an Academy,” which states that all humans are equally—not distantly—related to apes.

The prologue explains how the narrator, Rosemary Cooke, has been verbose since childhood. Her parents would discourage her endless talking with tips like, “when you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that,” and “skip the beginning. Start in the middle” (3).

Another quote from “A Report to an Academy” prefaces Part 1: “The storm which blew me out of my past eased off,” (4).

Referencing the tips that her parents gave her as a child, Rosemary starts the story in the middle, in 1996. Rosemary is 22 years old and shares context about the politics and pop culture of the time. She has not seen her brother for 10 years and her sister has been missing for 17 years. Rosemary’s sole goal in college is to be “either widely admired or stealthily influential” (6), and her grade are suffering. Her mother is depressed, and Rosemary is not talking to her father, Vince.

On this day, Rosemary is feeling a bit wild. In the dining hall, a theatrical fight breaks out between a couple. The girl is on a rampage, breaking everything in sight. As everyone watches, an onlooker tells the girl to take a “chill pill,” and chucks something at his head. Another flying object almost hits Rosemary, which makes her laugh. The boyfriend yells that they are breaking up, the girlfriend throws a cup at his head, and he leaves the cafeteria. A campus policeman arrives and falsely assumes that Rosemary is the perpetrator. An employee tries to correct him, but he is laser-focused on Rosemary until the girlfriend throws a chair. Rosemary accidentally drops her plate. Looking at the cup in her hand, the officer warns her not to drop it. She throws it at the ground.

In the police car, the girl introduces herself as Harlow Fielding, named after Jean Harlow, and tells Rosemary that she is glad she joined her. Rosemary wonders who Jean Harlow is and introduces herself. Harlow claims to be magic and maneuvers her handcuffed arms from behind her back to the front of her body. They arrive at the jail, and it does not seem like the first time that Harlow has been in this situation. Rosemary questions her choice and realizes that she will miss class. An officer, annoyed with Rosemary’s questions, sends her to a cell where there are two other women, one of whom needs medical care.

Hours later, the officers read Harlow her charges and her boyfriend picks her up. Rosemary gets the same charges as Harlow, with the add-on of assaulting an officer. She calls her parents, and her father admits that he would’ve expected a jail call from his son, not his daughter. It is rare for him to mention his son at all. Vince becomes less irritated after she starts sobbing and says “I suppose someone put you up to it […] You’ve always been a follower” (15). Her father calls the officer, Arnie Haddock, and they talk. The cafeteria employee comes to testify on Rosemary’s behalf, as well. All the charges get dropped. In the process, Rosemary is guilted into coming home for Thanksgiving.

Rosemary is home in Bloomington, Indiana, for the holidays. Her parents are acting as if they are a happy family and everything is copacetic, which isn’t true. Her father has a research grant and works alone for most of the holidays. This year, they spend the holiday at Rosemary’s maternal grandparents’ house. Her grandparents don’t approve of Vince’s career as a psychologist and make practiced, pointed remarks at him throughout the meal. Rosemary is hurt by her grandmother’s desire for her daughter to have not married her father, since Rosemary would not have been born if they never got together. She remembers the time many years ago when she bit into her grandmother’s good china; she has been served with a plastic cup ever since.

Rosemary does not remember exactly what they all talked about at dinner, but she knows that it was not her missing siblings, politics, or Rosemary’s arrest. Everyone knows that Rosemary’s cousin, Peter, has recently done terribly on the SAT. Aunt Vivi, Peter’s mother, asks Rosemary’s father what he thinks about the exam. He answers that it is an imprecise metric, which is the right thing to say, before proceeding to talk about how well Rosemary did when she took it. He talks about how smart Rosemary used to be and the high hopes they used to have for her. Rosemary’s mother tries to save the situation, saying that they still have high hopes for all of the cousins.

Rosemary’s parents moved into a new house when she left for college. The place is smaller and feels foreign to Rosemary; she grew up in a spacious farmhouse. As a child, she was younger than her brother and sister and could not do everything they did, so she made up an imaginary friend, Mary. When she entered kindergarten, she was not supposed to bring Mary and felt like she was compromising her true self. Eventually, Mary stopped coming home with Rosemary, and they never spoke of her again.

Rosemary is studying when her mother comes in and starts talking about her old journals. This is a subject they do not normally broach. Her father wants her mother to give the journals to a library, but she has decided to give them to Rosemary. Later, Rosemary’s father gives her a message from a fortune cookie, which reads “don’t forget, you are always on our minds” (28). For a second, she thinks they feel like a healed family.

Although she feels guilty for it, Rosemary does not want these journals because they are portals into a past they have all tried to forget. The checked bag she puts the journals in gets lost, and she is happy about it. Returning to her apartment, she hears music and is confused because Todd, her roommate, was not supposed to be back yet. Inside, Rosemary finds Harlow. As a child, Rosemary was told she did not have appropriate boundaries, yet she is not sure how to respond to this breach of boundaries. Harlow says that her boyfriend kicked her out and she thought Rosemary did not get back until the next day. After asking some questions, Rosemary finds out that Harlow read address on the police report and asked the apartment manager to let her in.

The next morning, the airline calls to say that the lost bag is being delivered. Rosemary’s toilet overflows, and she has to call the apartment manager, Ezra. He wants to know where Harlow is and is upset that she went back to her boyfriend; he is convinced that her boyfriend will kill her and he could have saved her. Ezra believes many farfetched conspiracies. Rosemary can see traces of Harlow all over her apartment. Todd returns to the apartment angry, and his anger worsens when he learns that a relative stranger lived in their apartment while they were away. The suitcase never arrives. Rosemary tries to contact the airline; her mother calls to say that she feels relieved to have given Rosemary the journals.

The airline claims that they will leave the bag with Ezra, but Rosemary doesn’t run into Ezra again for several days. In the meantime, Harlow shows up at Rosemary’s door, apologizes for breaking in, and asks her out for a beer. They go to a local bar where all the men seem to know Harlow, and all their drinks are paid for. Rosemary learns that Harlow is from Fresno and dreams of being a set designer for Shakespearean plays. Harlow asks Rosemary a series of silly questions, including her favorite superhero, followed by increasingly deep questions. When Harlow starts to ask about Rosemary’s family, Rosemary becomes nervous and performs intimacy, telling a practiced story about a summer she spent with her grandparents.

It was a boring summer and eventually, Rosemary decided to try to walk all the way home to Bloomington. After walking for a few hours, it grew dark and she decided to knock on the door of a blue house. A man invited her in and gave her some reasons why her plan to walk home might not work. He found her grandparents in the phone book and called them. Her grandparents sent Rosemary home to Indiana the next day. Harlow asks why Rosemary’s parents had sent her away in the first place, and Rosemary does not tell her that it was because her mother was experiencing a nervous breakdown. Rosemary continues the story. At the blue house, she asked to use the bathroom and accidentally opened the bedroom door instead. A woman was tied up and gagged in the room. Rosemary felt like something was very wrong, but the woman winked at her.

Harlow’s boyfriend, Reg, enters the bar. The couple starts to quarrel. Harlow tells Reg that Rosemary’s favorite superhero is Tarzan. This is not true; it was just the only thing Rosemary could think of when asked. Reg and Harlow agree that Tarzan is not a superhero.

Reg starts to lecture Rosemary on Tarzan being racist. She does not want to admit that she has not read the book and says she needs to go home. Looking for empathy, Rosemary tells Todd about Reg, but Todd just goes on a tangent about the manga version of Tarzan. Two days later, Ezra opens the broom closet for Rosemary to get her bag, only for Rosemary to find that it’s the wrong bag. He also mentions that a guy claiming to be Rosemary’s brother, named Travers, stopped by. Ezra told Travers he could not wait around because he thought Rosemary would be mad if she found him there.

Rosemary is in shock. She thinks this story sounds legitimate because her brother would never give someone his real name, and Travers is not his real name. She hasn’t heard from him since she graduated high school, when he sent her a card. Ezra claims that Travers might come back in a couple of days. Rosemary’s brother was her favorite person when she was a child. Once, when a boy in her class hurt her, he came to her classroom and forced the boy to apologize. In 1987, the FBI told her parents that her brother was in Davis, California. This is why Rosemary decided to go to school here and likely why her parents agreed to pay for it. She often dreamed of him coming to her door. He hated her when he left all those years ago.

Rosemary acknowledges to the reader that the story she told Harlow is not from the middle of the current story she is telling. She also acknowledges that she is not sure if the story really happened that way or if she has simply learned to tell it that way, as often happens with memories. Now that her brother has arrived, she must tell the part of the story that she does not normally tell.