I think the best we can do is understand the things that shape us, and try to use those things in a positive way. What does it mean to truly “be yourself”? I’m not sure such a thing really exists. She spends her life struggling to define herself in some way independent of her family, which I could identify with. She talks about how she’s inherently different from everyone around her, even calling herself the “uncanny valley.” Rosemary has come to define herself by what she isn’t - she isn’t her missing brother Lowell, or her sister Fern. She calls herself the “monkey girl”, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. Rosemary wrestles with who she is, and it was this that I found most moving.
How our memories aren’t fixed, but shift and change throughout our lives. How we’re influenced by our siblings and parents, and how we are torn apart when we lose them.
The value of research and the harm it does to animals. This book touches on so many important themes and issues. The one perspective we never fully get is Fern’s, although our narrator puts us into Fern’s mind as much as is humanly possible. While she’s always the narrator, during the course of the story she learns her brother’s perspective, her mother’s, and even uncovers her own forgotten childhood memories. I found everything about this story fascinating, from the way it’s told out of chronological order to the frequent adjustments in what we know about Rosemary’s life. Rosemary wants us to see her, and her sister Fern, as sisters, before you only think of them as a girl and a chimpanzee. Since this book was nominated for tons of awards a few years ago, and won the PEN/Faulkner Prize, you probably already know what this book is about.
As Rosemary tells us about her life in college, she seems like a pretty ordinary student, and I found myself wondering what was the point of the book. She begins her story with her college years - because as a child when she talked too much, her father would say “don’t start at the beginning, start in the middle.”Īs a result, the beginning of this book is a bit hard to get into. The main character and narrator is Rosemary. While the story itself is an unusual one, the themes – family, psychology, memory, and our relationship with animals – are common ones that touch us every day. I loved this book by Karen Joy Fowler, and found myself thinking about it quite a bit after finishing it.
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