Yes, I Liked: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

YWR #79

How do you recommend a book without explaining it? How do you review a book without revealing its secrets? How do you, actually, solve a problem like Maria?

Discussing this week’s book recommendation, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, may be like trying to hold a moonbeam in your head, but let’s give it a whirl.

This came to me by recommendation from my friend Danielle, who has excellent taste and who also said “but if you can avoid reading anything about it, you should.”

So, guess that stops us here! See you next week!

Okay, if you’re boldly barreling on, she’s not wrong - the reveal some 70 pages in will elevate the whole experience if you don’t know it in advance - but even if you do, this is a book worth reading. Let me attempt to dance nimbly around the elephant in the room (spoiler, it is not an elephant plot twist) while also telling you about this book’s excellence.

On its surface, this novel primarily addresses a few weeks in college student Rose’s life when her past and her present collide in jarring and unexpected ways, but told from the perspective of her older self looking back. Memory - which is to say, the unreliable and defining stories we tell about, and to, ourselves - is a deep theme in this novel and it’s a testament to the the author that the book can jump from the middle to the beginning to later and back to the middle of the protagonists’s life without losing the reader, and while maintaining the jagged, dreamlike, and slightly disorienting qualities of memory.

The author’s detachment from her family, and from her own true nature, is rendered unique by her storyline but will feel familiar to anyone who finds themselves at arm’s length or separated by metaphorical (or literal) walls from their loved ones, and who can’t quite understand where it went wrong or how to repair it. How we evolve ourselves, how we normalize whatever our experience is, and how we shave down the ragged edges and tame the unruly flyaways of our personalities to maintain peace, to be accepted, and to try to resolve and repent for traumas we maybe don’t even remember “correctly,” whatever that means. It’s tenderly rendered here in a way that feels like you’re experiencing it alongside Rose, rather than observing it.

A story about a dysfunctional family is, of course, no new walk in the meadow, but this novel feels confident and original not only because of its deeply imaginative plot but also because of the supremely skillful writing. At times, the voice feels removed, crossing its arms with flinty disappointment and weighty sadness throughout, but it also has a wry, self-aware humor with just enough love, bigheartedness, and oddness to magnetically draw you in. And not one word, sentence, or moment feels like a place where the author should have done another edit or consulted Monsieur Roget.

Above all, the most remarkable and beautiful piece of this book is how it considers what it means to be human, how we communicate, how we connect and most damningly, how we inflict damage and exact cruelty. When a mechanical puppet can play a moving, central role (this is not even the weirdest thing that happens in this book) and the story can have a clear bias without coming off like a polemic … well, I can’t say more but it’s the basis for powerful reflection.

Was all of this vague and formless enough for you? Geesh. Now I know why every review was like “spoiler! Here’s what happened.” Turns out, deliberately not talking about something at length is harder than it looks! How do you do it, Congresspeople?

Anyway, please read it so we can talk specifics but in summary - this is probably my favorite book of the year so far. It scores only two gentle lambies because there’s a lot of sadness but if you can stomach it, do not let that deter you. And it won the Pen/Faulkner, was a Booker Prize finalist, and Barbara Kingsolver liked it - a pretty impressive crew to fall in with!

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