We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Dad’s tone changed. ‘I suppose someone put you put to it,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been a follower. Well, sit tight there’—as if I had a choice—’and I’ll see what I can do.’”

This early line of dialogue reveals an important familial dynamic and a possible explanation for the protagonist’s choice to align herself with Harlow. It has become clear by the time this quote appears that Rosemary lacks a level of self-confidence and direction. This quote shows that this lack of direction may be a life-long penchant and/or a parental expectation that Rosemary thusly fulfills.

“‘Pass the turkey, Mother […] the poor birds can hardly walk. Miserable freaks.’ This, too, was intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.”

This quote exemplifies how the Cooke family approaches conflict passive-aggressively and sets up the fact that Rosemary’s father is an especially contentious figure in the family. The quote also introduces the concept of animal ethics in the realm of science, suggesting that the family takes issue with science as a whole and perhaps more specifically, scientific procedures done on animals.

“So I told Harlow about a summer when I was little, the summer we moved from the farmhouse. It’s a story I’ve told often, my go-to story when I’m being asked about my family. It’s meant to look intimate, meant to look like me opening up and digging deep… It starts in the middle.”

This quote is a callback to the opening line of the book, in which Rosemary tells the reader that the middle of her story begins in 1996. This quote provides explanation for Rosemary’s repetitive action of starting in the middle of stories: the middle is a safe place to start. The middle is not a real, findable, place, but rather the part of the story that Rosemary can tell without revealing compromising details about herself.