book we are all completely beside ourselves

Rosemary is in her fifth year at the University of California, Davis, and not meeting her requirements.

The absence of these siblings and the loss implied seems to contradict the happy image presented in the prologue. Start in the middle then, he’d answer … (Rosemary, about her father) Prologue Part 1 Chapter 1įollowing the advice of her father to ‘start in the middle’, Rosemary begins her story in 1996, aged 22, recounting events contemporaneous to the time, and more intimately, introduces a brother she has not seen for ten years and a sister who has been missing since Rosemary was 5. … I have something to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway. When you think of two things to say, pick your favourite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behaviour, and the rule was later modified to one in three. This suggests a tension in the telling of the story that is to follow, in terms of how it will be communicated. She points out that as far as her parents were concerned, what was being said was not of value so much as the ‘extravagant abundance, their inexhaustible flow’, and that occasionally she was asked to start her stories ‘in the middle’ and ‘skip the beginning’. The story opens with the narrator, Rosemary Cooke, reflecting on a home video featuring her and her mother and how she cannot remember the actual words being said only their verbose quantity.

Book we are all completely beside ourselves