We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; now that she's started college, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover.

Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone—vanished from her life, and her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, and her clever and imperious father is now a distant, brooding man.