We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

You’d think less of him and thinking less of him is my job, not yours. The

weird on stilts).

whole way down, which no one seemed to notice. What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

chimped-up

strategy of saying nothing. The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but

Maybe sedulously making sure that no one really knew me was an impediment to friendship.

foot-stamping, middle-finger-thrusting, boy-shaped storm. I was used to that.

fury was my nostalgia.

Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.

steering the clown car between my ears?

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy.

These old photos reminded me of how happy she’d always looked back before we broke her.

If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.

wish I’d turned him in myself back in 1996, when the list

charges was smaller and the country more like a democracy. I expect he would still have gone

In 1996, even those citizens charged with terrorism had constitutional rights. Lowell’s...

I’m unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using.

Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.