We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.

“Ordinary powers in one world are superpowers in another.

An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

I was still in Jean Piaget’s preoperational phase with regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you to understand that I am undoubtedly, from my more mature perspective, imposing a logical framework on my understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time. Emotions in the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme.

because conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes.

Language is more than just words, he said. Language is also the order of words and the way one word inflects another.

When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s, the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well.

Here is the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?

Surrounded as she was by humans, Fern believed she was human. This wasn’t unexpected. Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile.

the neural system of a young brain develops partly by mirroring the brains around it. As much time as Fern and I spent together, that mirror went both ways.

that, contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes.

uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people.

I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals. Extend that scale awhile and eventually you’ll get to Fern and me.

Except that now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable.

In the comments section of my kindergarten report card I’d been described as impulsive, possessive, and demanding. These are classic chimp traits and I’ve worked hard over the years to eradicate them. I felt that Harlow was maybe demonstrating the same tendencies without the same commitment to reform. In her company, I might fall back into bad old ways.

When a portent repeats itself three times, like something out of Julius Caesar, even Caliban, a couple of plays over, is bound to notice.

He repeated a thing he’d said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d’être. He described the sexual herding done by male chimpanzees. “The only difference,” he said, “is that no chimp has ever claimed he was following God’s orders.”

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ is our highest, most developed morality,” Dr. Sosa said. “And really the only one necessary; all the others flow from that; you don’t need Ten Commandments. But

About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.

It became a personal catchphrase for him—whenever things were not to his liking, he’d say that—I’m seeing so much of America today.

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”

Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are.