book we are all completely beside ourselves

The book centers on a woman who, like Lowell, rejects her suburban upbringing in order to join the (real) violent radical group The Weather Underground. Meanwhile, Russell Banks’ The Darling is a novel that resembles We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in multiple ways. Other novels that explore the relationship between humans and primates include Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal, which features a Canadian senator who has a close relationship with a chimpanzee.

Fowler has noted that some of her novels have achieved enormous critical and commercial success (one of them, The Jane Austen Book Club, was adapted into a Hollywood movie) while others have done “very, very badly.” Fowler has two children and seven grandchildren and lives with her husband in Santa Cruz, California. Fowler went on to publish several more novels, of which We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the most recent. The novel plays with the genres of science fiction, historical fiction, and mainstream fiction, and received praise from critics. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, was published in 1991. Several years later, Fowler enrolled in a creative writing course at UC Davis and began publishing science fiction stories. She studied political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to do a master’s, during which she became pregnant with her first child. At the age of 11 she moved to Palo Alto, California. Karen Joy Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana.

Book we are all completely beside ourselves