Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, tackles animal-behavior experiments and their devastating effect on one family in her new novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
The family falls apart after the loss of Fern, who was introduced into their lives as an infant and raised beside daughter Rosemary as a twin. Fowler deftly explores memory, identity, language and other rich topics with grace, humor and compassion.
Windy City Times: In the '90s you helped launch a literary prize, the Tiptree, for writers who expand or explore our understanding of gender. Last year's winner, The Drowning Girl, recognizes the complexity of human beings through its characters—lesbian, straight and transgender, old and young. Why does understanding gender interest you?
Karen Joy Fowler: I am a product of the second wave of feminism. A lot of my attachment to science fiction in particular, and to literature in general, was through the very brilliant, exploratory work being done by fiction writers in that period. … Those books made me see the world as a much more complicated and interesting and potentially freer place beyond the sort of sexuality I had grown up with.
WCT: But what made you decide to set up this prize?
KJF: It seemed to me that kind of thinking about the possibilities of our social lives, of our romantic lives, of our sexual lives was fading away—at least at that time from the literature I was most attached to, which was science fiction. … And so Pat Murphy [U.S. science-fiction writer] and I set up this award to encourage the kind of work that continues to mean so much to us.
WCT: You are the daughter of an animal behaviorist. Did you have close contact with any of the animals your father worked with?
KJF: There was a time when I hung out in the rat lab playing with the rats. This would have ended about the time I was 11.
WCT: In what ways did that kind of background inform your work in this novel?
KJF: As I was growing up, issues of behavior modification and learning processes and a very scientific approach to social interactions was part of the dinner-table conversation. …
WCT: There are a lot of obvious parallels between you and Rosemary, your main character.
KJF: And there are obvious parallels between the father in the book and my father. But my father would not have been so stupid as to engage the family in that kind of experiment that Rosemary's father does.
WCT: So why would you say that was stupid, that experiment?
KJF: The most famous case in which this experiment was performed was Winthrop Kellogg in the 1930s. What he does not seem to have anticipated is that the experiment had a profound effect on the child as well as on the chimpanzee. [Kellogg raised an infant chimpanzee for nine months with his own infant son Donald.]
WCT: What does the title of the book mean?
KJF: By the time you finish the book, I hope the title means … that we are an inextricable part of nature, that any attempts to suggest that we hold some sort of special outsider role in the natural world is a mistaken one. Everything we see around us is part of us, partly because we are seeing it and therefore translating it through our own brains into part of us, and partly because we all spring from the same sources and are connected.
WCT: So what do you make of it all—the possible connections between humans and chimps and other apes? And the use of animals in research and the abandonment of same?
KJF: Our behavior towards animals in general has been and continues to be so horrific. … There's been some really happy news that our government has changed the rules in terms of what is permissible over the rights of animals. They've tried to retire almost all chimps from lab research. These are enormously positive steps. Although, of course, they create another problem of where the chimps who have been living in these labs will now go. It's expensive to find a happy place for a chimp to be.
WCT: There are many ways you emphasize speech—the projected voice in the ventriloquist dummy, sign language that Fern uses, Rosemary's constant talking as a child, replaced by reticence to speak as an adult. What was your intent here?
KJF: My own vision of the book is that it's all about speech. The experiments done with chimpanzees were largely focused on the issue of whether chimps could learn to use language. And so every character in the book I have thought about in terms of their relationship to language and how they use it, how good they are at it.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, retails for $26.95.
Fowler will appear at Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark St., Wed., Sept. 25, at 7:30 p.m.
