The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.
Or if that's impossible, to at least understand what happened and come to peace with it. This novel is her attempt to pick up the pieces, put them back together into something recognizable and reasonably whole. One singular family tragedy that happened when she was only 5 years old, half-remembered and never discussed, that sent shock waves through the lives of everyone she loves and shattered all of them irrevocably. Her life has been fairly average - parents, brother and sister, high school and college and so forth - except for one thing. It's mostly about her Midwestern childhood in the 1970's and her California college days in the mid-90's, but she's telling it to us from the vantage point of 2012 or so. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is, as I said above, Rosemary's story. not really spoiled, but conceptually informed. Don't even read the back cover, folks!īut at the same time, I have about a million things I want to say about it, so. I'm somewhat conflicted in talking about this book at all, because I want everyone to read it, and I also want everyone to go in completely cold.
This is the simplest of the many beginnings to Rosemary Cooke's story in the extraordinary, the exquisite, the thoroughly wrecking We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. They live together in a big house in the country.
0 kommentar(er)
