Prologue

The story opens with the narrator, Rosemary Cooke, reflecting on a home video featuring her and her mother and how she cannot remember the actual words being said only their verbose quantity. She points out that as far as her parents were concerned, what was being said was not of value so much as the ‘extravagant abundance, their inexhaustible flow’, and that occasionally she was asked to start her stories ‘in the middle’ and ‘skip the beginning’. This suggests a tension in the telling of the story that is to follow, in terms of how it will be communicated.

Prologue Quotes

When you think of two things to say, pick your favourite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behaviour, and the rule was later modified to one in three. (Rosemary, about her mother) Prologue

… I have something to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway.
Start in the middle then, he’d answer … (Rosemary, about her father) Prologue

Part 1 Chapter 1

Following the advice of her father to ‘start in the middle’, Rosemary begins her story in 1996, aged 22, recounting events contemporaneous to the time, and more intimately, introduces a brother she has not seen for ten years and a sister who has been missing since Rosemary was 5. The absence of these siblings and the loss implied seems to contradict the happy image presented in the prologue.

Rosemary is in her fifth year at the University of California, Davis, and not meeting her requirements. This is an aggravating point with her parents, who are still providing for her financially, and especially for her father, a college professor who values education and knowledge, and who uses every exchange with her as a teaching moment.

On the way to the college cafeteria, Rosemary sees a flock of geese fly overhead and contemplates how she feels a ‘little migratory’ and a ‘little wild’. She witnesses a breakup between a girl (Harlow) and her boyfriend (Reg) in which dishes smash to the floor and coarse words are exchanged. Rosemary describes Harlow’s appearance and behaviour with wild connotations that seem to resonate with her, and she appears entertained by the performance. Campus police arrive and mistake Rosemary as the instigator, despite the lunch lady telling them otherwise, and proceed to speak with her. Rosemary accidentally drops her plate of food, then, on seeing Harlow throw a chair, imitates this defiance by deliberately dropping her glass of milk in front of the officers.

Part 1 Chapter 1 Quotes

So the middle of my store comes in the winter of 1996. By then, we’d long since dwindled to the family that old home movie foreshadowed – me, my mother, and, unseen but evident behind the camera, my father. Part 1 Chapter 1

The middle of my story is all about their absence, though if I hadn’t told you that, you might not have known. (Rosemary, about her brother and sister) Part 1 Chapter 1

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep. He said this often. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 1

My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone. Part 1 Chapter 1

I felt … a little migratory myself, just a little wild. (Rosemary, viewing crows) Part 1 Chapter 1

Part 1 Chapter 2

Rosemary and Harlow are arrested and taken to the county police station. Acquainting themselves on the way, Rosemary learns Harlow is a drama student and, witnessing Harlow’s being able to rearrange her handcuffs so her hands were in front, presumes this may not be her first arrest. No longer feeling the wildness that preceded her arrest, Rosemary berates herself, unable to make sense of her actions. Harlow is charged with destruction of property and creating a public nuisance, Rosemary with the same charges and, additionally, assaulting a police officer.

Harlow calls Reg to come and collect her and Rosemary calls her parents, the girls’ rebellion having given way to cooperation and submission. Rosemary had hoped her mother would answer, but instead it was her father, exasperated, saying that he’d expected it would be Lowell (the first rare mention of Rosemary’s brother) who would be the child to call from jail. More mystery is glimpsed into the Lowell character as Rosemary ponders how Lowell may indeed go to jail one day, and equally sure that he would never call.

Rosemary’s father manages to get the arresting officer to drop all the charges against Rosemary. In exchange, Rosemary promises to return home for Thanksgiving so the matter can be thoroughly discussed, which she views as a ‘heavy price to pay’.

Part 1 Chapter 2 Quotes

She gave every indication of being an old pro at this. I was not. The wildness I’d felt that morning had long since vanished and left something squeezed into its place, something like grief or maybe homesickness. (Rosemary, about Harlow and herself when they are arrested) Part 1 Chapter 2

I was made to remove my watch, shoes, and belt, and taken barefoot into a cage with bars and a sticky floor. (Rosemary at the county police station) Part 1 Chapter 2

The bars went all the way to the top of the cell. I checked to be sure; I’m a pretty good climber, for a girl. (Rosemary at the police station) Part 1 Chapter 2

I felt my worries slipping from me like skin from snake. My father often had this effect on me. The more irritated he was, the more I became smooth and amused, which, of course, irritated him all the more. It would anyone, let’s be fair. (Rosemary speaking to her father from the police station) Part 2 Chapter 2

‘I always thought your brother would be the one to call from jail,’ he added. It startled me, this rare mention of my brother. My father was usually more circumspect, especially on the home phone, which he believed was bugged. (Rosemary’s father) Part 1 Chapter 2

Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never ever call. Part 1 Chapter 2

Part 1 Chapter 3

Rosemary visits her family for Thanksgiving in Bloomington. She tells of how the close-knit family image that her parents persist in presenting, in light of two missing siblings and the omission of such teaching moments as feminine hygiene and sex education, means it is almost guaranteed that her family will not discuss her arrest. And, they do not. Except for Thanksgiving dinner Rosemary hardly sees her father, who spends most of his time in his study working on a project funded by the National Institute of Health. It was family knowledge that her father drank alcohol, however when he worked, he drank less, though Rosemary knew he had become a secret drinker.

Grandma Donna, Rosemary’s maternal grandmother, was hosting Thanksgiving this year, with Rosemary’s Uncle Bob, his wife Vivi, and their two children also in attendance. Thanksgivings alternately took place between Rosemary’s grandparents’ homes. Grandma Fredericka’s (Rosemary’s paternal grandmother) Thanksgivings are portrayed as less pleasant than Grandma Donna’s; the latter allowing guests to eat how much they wanted, the former bullying guests into extra portions.

When Grandma Donna observes Rosemary’s father in his own thoughts and asks him about his work, it is meant as a reprimand. Bob makes a traditional rant about turkey breeding and how the birds can hardly walk, a dig at Rosemary’s father’s profession and the excesses of science. Rosemary’s father responds in kind, using words Rosemary does not divulge for fear the reader will think less of him. Rosemary makes clear that Grandma Donna wishes her daughter had married someone else. The word ‘psychologist’ evokes for Grandma Donna unpleasant thoughts of ‘preposterous experiments conducted’ on one’s ‘own families’.

Thanksgiving concludes with Rosemary not remembering most of what was talked about but that it definitely did not include missing siblings or her recent arrest. Peter’s (Rosemary’s cousin) tragic SAT scores, in light of his otherwise good grades, are discussed and to his mother’s relief, Rosemary’s father refers to them as ‘very imprecise’. Her joy is soon spoiled though when he speaks of Rosemary’s good SAT scores, to which Rosemary’s mother qualifies that she has been tested so often that ‘she learned to take tests, is all’. Rosemary likes her cousin Peter, her observations of his kind treatment of his sister speak to Rosemary’s longing for her absent brother.

More of Rosemary’s childhood is revealed. She has lived in three different houses, empty rooms making her mother feel sad as the family got smaller. An imaginary friend, Mary, came into Rosemary’s life at age 4, and they were inseparable until Rosemary started school and her mother said Mary would have to stay home. Initially alarmed, Rosemary thought separating the Mary part of herself would mean she could not be ‘my whole self’ at school. Rosemary also feared that Mary would cunningly charm her mother into liking her more than Rosemary however her fears were allayed when, after spending her days sleeping, one day Mary left the family and never returned. The contradiction that Rosemary had control over Mary, having created her, yet Mary was able to act independently seems to escape Rosemary who tends to attribute human characteristics to non-human things (anthropomorphism).

Rosemary’s mother shares that Rosemary’s father feels hurt when Rosemary doesn’t talk to him, and that she and her father had been talking about donating her journals to the library but then decided, due to their private nature, that they should go to Rosemary. The gesture takes Rosemary by surprise as she knows the journals contain those things the family never talked about.

The chapter closes with Rosemary’s father presenting her with a fortune cookie message he had saved: ‘Don’t forget, you are always on our minds.’ In the moment, Rosemary suspends her reality and imagines her family happy and loving.

Part 1 Chapter 3 Quotes

The idea that we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. Part 1 Chapter 3

When he worked like this, he didn’t drink, which we all appreciated. He’d been diagnosed with diabetes a few years back and shouldn’t have been drinking at any time. Instead he’d become a secret drinker. (about Rosemary’s father) Part 1 Chapter 3

Grandma Fredericka was the sort of hostess who believed that bullying guests into second and third helpings was only being polite. Yet we all ate more at Grandma Donna’s, where we were left alone to fill our plates or not, where the piecrusts were flaky and the orange-cranberry muffins light as clouds … Part 1 Chapter 3

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asking my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. Part 1 Chapter 3

I don’t remember most of what we talked about that year. But I can, with confidence, provide a partial list of things not talked about:
Missing family members. Gone was gone. Part 1 Chapter 3

I loved him because of the way he treated his sister … He was so nice, it hurt to watch. (Rosemary about Peter, her cousin) Part 1 Chapter 3

‘It comes of being tested so often when she was little.’ My mother spoke directly to Bob. ‘She’s a good test-taker. She learned how to take a test, is all.’ (Rosemary’s mother to Rosemary’s uncle about Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 3

We spent a lot of time together, Mary and I, until the day I went off to school and Mother told me Mary couldn’t go. This was alarming. I felt I was being told I mustn’t be myself at school, not my whole self. (Rosemary, about Mary) Part 1 Chapter 3

Part 1 Chapter 4

Rosemary’s suitcase, with the journals inside, is lost by the airline on her journey home, an occurrence for which she is somewhat relieved since now she doesn’t have to read them. Rosemary is surprised to find her roommate Todd home early and, to her greater surprise, Harlow, who had obtained Rosemary’s address from the police report and persuaded the apartment manager, Ezra Metzger, to let her in.

While fixing Rosemary’s toilet the following day, Ezra asks as to the whereabouts of Harlow and Rosemary lets him know she did not appreciate him letting her into the flat. Ezra justifies his actions by stating that a large number of boyfriends kill their girlfriends and that he may have been saving her life. Rosemary feels no need to soften the news and tells Ezra that Harlow is with Reg; there is a sense that Rosemary is revising her feelings about Harlow in light of Harlow’s breaching her privacy and the manipulation she seemed to have over men.

Todd is the child of divorced parents and perceives Rosemary’s family situation as normal. Furious with Harlow’s breaking in he initially suggests the locks be changed then calms down and brings home a pizza for himself, girlfriend Kimmy, and Rosemary.

Rosemary reads Mosquito Coast and remarks on the ‘insane things fathers did to their families’, hinting towards actions of her own father that still remain unknown.

Part 1 Chapter 4 Quotes

Touched as I was, there was nothing I wanted less than my mother’s journals. What’s the point of never talking about the past if you wrote it all down and you know where those pages are? Part 1 Chapter 4

Once, at a parent-teacher conference, my kindergarten teacher had said that I had boundary issues. I must learn to keep my hands to myself, she’d said. I remember the mortification of being told this. I’d truly had no idea that other people weren’t to be touched; in fact, I’d thought quite the opposite. But I was always making mistakes like that. (Rosemary, confused on how to respond to Harlow’s breaking in) Part 1 Chapter 4

Ezra had told me once that he didn’t think of himself as the manager of the apartment house so much as its beating heart. Life was a jungle, Ezra said, and there were those who’d like to bring him down … Ezra saw conspiracies. Part 1 Chapter 4

Part 1 Chapter 5

Harlow takes Rosemary for a drink to apologise. Everyone at the bar seems to know Harlow and various men are buying her and Rosemary drinks. The girls ask each other real and hypothetical questions. Rosemary shares a family story, starting in the middle, when one summer, without warning, she was sent to live with Grandma Fredericka and Grandpa Joe in Indianapolis. She spent the time mostly alone, the kids on the street were older and her grandparents mostly watched TV. After a play date gone wrong, Rosemary decides to walk home to Bloomington. She knocks on a door and a man answers who eventually finds her grandparents’ phone number and they come to collect her, and she is sent back to her parents the following day. Harlow asks whether Rosemary’s mother may have been having a baby. Rosemary shares with the reader, but not Harlow, that her mother was in fact having a nervous breakdown. Rosemary concludes with the weirdest part of the story, how at the man’s house she had witnessed a woman tied to the bed with pantyhose, with something stuck in her mouth, and that the women had winked at her.

Reg arrives and is introduced to Rosemary, who does not acknowledge her. Harlow divulges to him that Rosemary’s favourite superhero is Tarzan, whom Rosemary had spontaneously chosen in response to Harlow’s earlier question. Reg points out that Tarzan does not have superpowers to which Harlow agrees. Feeling outnumbered, Rosemary commits to her answer more strongly despite also knowing it to be untrue, and a debate ensues. Even if he his handsome, Rosemary ascribes Reg with  ‘the brains of a bivalve’ (a two-hinged shell e.g. clam).

Part 1 Chapter 5 Quotes

Crows were rioting in the trees. Part 1 Chapter 5

Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking. I can still talk when I need to. I haven’t forgotten how to talk. Part 1 Chapter 5

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. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 5

Part 1 Chapter 6

Reg lectures Rosemary on the racism in Tarzan books. Rosemary decides to go home rather than continue the argument.

Ezra has received Rosemary’s lost suitcase, delivered by the airline, but is too busy to hand it over. He tells Rosemary that her brother, Travers, had come by yesterday. Convinced that it indeed her brother, because he did not use his real name (Lowell), she asks Ezra whether he said he would return, and Ezra responds vaguely: ‘Maybe … in a couple of days’. The use of a false name adds a further layer to the mysterious activities of Rosemary’s brother.

Rosemary shares childhood memories growing up with Lowell. He was her ‘favourite person in the whole world’ but that ‘he could be, and often was, awful …’. When a boy threw a snowball at Rosemary, with a rock inside it, Lowell held the boy’s arm behind his back and made him apologise to Rosemary, then took her for ice cream using his own money. Rosemary’s reasons for choosing the UC Davis campus are laid out, with the main factor being that her family had heard from the FBI that Lowell had been living in Davis in the spring of 1987, a year after he left home and Rosemary was 11. There is a dichotomy to Lowell’s character, being portrayed as loving yet for some reason known to the FBI, which makes it difficult for the reader to form a view of him. That Rosemary shares how Lowell ‘hated my guts’ when he left, implies there is more to learn about Rosemary’s part in Lowell’s departure.

The chapter concludes with Rosemary finding out that the suitcase returned by the airline was not hers.

Part 1 Chapter 6 Quotes

When we were kids, my brother was my favourite person in the whole world. He could be, and often was, awful, but there were other times. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 6

And I just didn’t think I could do it anymore, this business of being my parents’ only child. (Rosemary happy at the idea her brother has returned) Part 1 Chapter 6

The last time I saw him, I was eleven years old and he hated my guts. (Rosemary about her brother) Part 1 Chapter 6

Part 1 Chapter 7

Rosemary reflects on the story she told Harlow about being sent to her grandparents in Indianapolis. The story is true but, given it is her go-to family story, she is no longer sure if she actually remembers it or if she remembers how to tell it. She ponders on the function of language and how it is able to order memories until a story can end up ‘… like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture’.

The arrival of her brother leaves Rosemary stuck, unable to move forward in her narration without going back to the end of the story, when she was sent back home from her grandparents’ house. Rosemary alerts the reader that she is able to tell a story she has never told before with the implication being this will be told through the use of memory rather than as a pre-prepared story.

Part 1 Chapter 7 Quotes

I did tell it to Harlow just when I said, so my telling of it is from the middle, but the happening and the telling are very different things. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 7

Language does this to our memories – simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. Part 1 Chapter 7

Part 2 Chapter 1

It is 1979, and Rosemary notes certain events of the day, including the formation of the Animal Defense League. Rosemary is five years old and, describing herself using the terminology her father would want, in the pre-operational phase of cognitive development (according to Jean Piaget’s theory), thus able to impose ‘a logical framework on her understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time’ but where her ‘emotions … are dichotomous and extreme’. A teary Rosemary is collected from her grandparents’ house and returned home to Bloomington where she chooses to sleep, a coping mechanism she appears to have learned to deal with unhappy situations. Rosemary later awakes, finds herself in an unfamiliar room and starts crying for her mother. She is instead comforted by her father who tells her they are in a new home, that she should feel free to explore but not to go into her mother’s room. Rosemary learns her brother stayed only one night then moved to a friend’s house. She notices unopened boxes and no place for the graduate students to work. Upon seeing the house has only three rooms, she suspects that a family member has been ‘given away’.

The narrative skips to when Rosemary reflects on leaving for college and we are first introduced to Rosemary’s sister, Fern, when Rosemary makes a resolution to never tell anyone at college about her. Her story had become: mother, father and travelling brother. Fern disappeared from the family when Rosemary was five. Rosemary remembers her clearly and Rosemary recounts memories of her, relieved and ashamed that she was not the one given away; the visit to her grandparents is the delineation between her life with a sister and her life without – ‘two entirely different people’. Fern’s disappearance also marked the time when Lowell stopped seeing himself as part of the family. At this point, Rosemary’s parents had shut down communication and Rosemary’s memories were largely formed through her grandmothers. The only talk of Fern came from Grandma Donna until Rosemary’s mother asked her to stop, and from Lowell, until he left. Fern’s disappearance is left unexplained, however there is an implication that Rosemary’s parents were complicit: ‘Once upon a time, there was a family with two daughters, and a mother and father who’d promised to love them both exactly the same.’

Part 2 Chapter 1 Quotes

Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family, all of us, young and old, was really really really upset. (when Fern left) Part 2 Chapter 1

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother – I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 1

Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After, they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet. I finally became so. (after Fern left) Part 2 Chapter 1

Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.
Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood took place in that odd silence. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 1

Part 2 Chapter 2

Rosemary shares how most families have a favourite child and that this can be unfair, but also that it can be difficult to be the favourite. Rosemary presents some facts to support her theory that there was enough love to go around in her family: Rosemary was her mother’s favourite, Lowell their father’s, Rosemary loved Lowell best then her parents equally, Fern loved their mother best, and Lowell loved Fern more than he did Rosemary.

Part 2 Chapter 2 Quote

It’s also hard to be the favourite. Earned or unearned, the favourite is a burdensome thing to be. Part 2 Chapter 2

Part 2 Chapter 3

The narrative jumps back to when Rosemary returned home from her grandparents’ house, Rosemary’s mother had become a ghost to Rosemary, barely talking or eating, appearing out of her bedroom only at night. Grandma Donna helps out during the day and requests Rosemary not to tell her father despite her father already knowing. Donna is at times portrayed as kind, at times judgmental, and has her own ideas of how the family should be functioning. Rosemary’s father prepares meagre dinners for Rosemary and spends his time drinking.

With no children in the neighbourhood her age, Rosemary makes friends with the neighbourhood pets and spends more time with her imaginary friend, Mary. The reader is introduced to more of Fern’s character, that she had taken and eaten the last photograph of Grandma Donna’s husband (Grandpa Dan), and that neither grandmother had insisted Fern be named after them in the same way they had insisted for Rosemary.

Rosemary hears her parents arguing through the wall, her father protesting that the family all blame him, his justification: ‘What choice did we have? I’m as upset as anyone.’ Lowell returns and punches Rosemary in the arm, scolding her for not keeping her mouth shut. Despite this, Rosemary is still elated to see her brother.

Part 2 Chapter 3 Quotes

There was no one I could reasonably be expected to play with.
Instead I got acquainted with the neighbourhood animals. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 3

‘… if only you had just, for once, kept your goddamn mouth shut.’ (Lowell to Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 3

If Lowell was angry that Fern had been sent out of our lives, Grandma Donna was angry that she’d ever been let in. I’m sure she’d deny this, say that she’d always loved Fern, but even at five I knew better. Part 2 Chapter 3

Part 2 Chapter 4

Rosemary and Lowell carry the weight of Fern’s disappearance and their mother’s collapse, their isolation, at times, drawing them to each other. Lowell allows Rosemary to occasionally sleep in his bed, like Rosemary and Fern used to climb into their parents’ bed; their parents felt it was ‘natural and mammalian not to want to sleep alone’. Lowell keeps pet rats in his room, given from his father’s lab, each named for a particular cheese. Lowell befriends and spends his breakfasts with a neighbouring Christian couple who know about the situation at Rosemary’s house, as most of Bloomington did.

Rosemary corrects any assumption the reader may have that Fern is dead; she cannot remember or has repressed the details of Fern’s disappearance. Rosemary’s father suggests a counsellor for Lowell, whom he sees, until methods are suggested which he rejects as unscientific. Rosemary receives a babysitter to whom she warms.

One day, Lowell’s friend Russell arrives and Lowell, who has ditched school, invites Rosemary to go for a drive with them, which will eventually take them to their old house. Rosemary had assumed until now that Fern was still at the old house with the graduate students. Rosemary is nervous, feeling that Fern would not want to see her but Lowell says Fern is not at the house. Rosemary crawls through the dog door and is immediately flooded with memories of Fern and their shared activities. She senses anger then sadness in the house. Meanwhile, Melissa, who had been watching Rosemary, realises she is missing and alerts Rosemary’s father who finds and reprimands both Rosemary and Lowell.

Part 2 Chapter 4 Quotes

We each carried the weight of Fern’s disappearance and our mother’s collapse, and occasionally, for short periods, we carried it together. (Rosemary, about her and Lowell) Part 2 Chapter 4

Bed-hopping was an established custom in the house – Fern and I had rarely ended the night in the bed where we’d started. Our parents felt that it was natural and mammalian not to want to sleep alone, and though they would have preferred we stay in our own beds, because we kicked and thrashed, they’d never insisted on it. Part 2 Chapter 4

Lowell’s room smelled of damp cedar from the cage where three rats, washouts from our father’s lab, would chirp and creak in their spinning wheel all night long. In retrospect, there was something incomprehensibly strange about the way any of the laboratory rats could transform from data point to pet, with names and privileges and vet appointments, in a single afternoon. (Rosemary, about Lowell’s rats) Part 2 Chapter 4

Part 2 Chapter 5

In Fowler’s major reveal of the novel, Rosemary informs the reader that Fern and Mary are both chimpanzees. Rosemary divulges her reasons for withholding this information until now in a necessary attempt to demonstrate to the reader how being raised with a chimpanzee had defined the first 18 years of her life. What she views more important, is that her parents promised to love Fern as a daughter and how for years she had questioned if that was true. Until Fern left the family, Rosemary had never known a moment without her, and viewed her as her twin.

Rosemary recounts how other households were at the time raising a baby chimpanzee alongside a human child, normalising the experience. She recalls memories such as the feel of Fern’s fur on her cheek after she had a strawberry soap bubble bath and of playing same/same not game with the graduate students in which Fern would be encouraged to produce a particular coloured chip if a pair of things were similar or different. Rosemary breaks her arm when, imitating Fern, she climbs onto her father’s desk then falls. Fern laughs at Rosemary’s fall, which Rosemary interprets as a ‘mocking laughter’; until now Fern had only laughed when she was being chased or tickled. Rosemary’s father has the students carefully study the laughter, in terms of what it might mean for oral development, and does not even notice Rosemary has fallen. Rosemary’s competitiveness with Fern’s capabilities is what lead to her invention of Mary ‘to even the score’.

Returning to the narrative before Fern’s disappearance, Lowell’s friend Russell calls Rosemary ‘monkey girl’ when he sees her climbing a tree. Rosemary tells of how Mary goaded her into climbing higher. Rosemary falls and is humiliated. When Russell is arrested after throwing a Halloween party at Rosemary’s old house, Rosemary suspects that Fern may have somehow been responsible.

Part 2 Chapter 5 Quotes

I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact, that I was raised with a chimpanzee. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 5

Fern was not the family dog. She was Lowell’s little sister, his shadow, his faithful sidekick. Part 2 Chapter 5

Our parents had promised to love her like a daughter … I began to pay better attention to the stories they read me … looking to learn how much parents love their daughters. (Rosemary, about her parents with Fern) Part 2 Chapter 5

She was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. (Rosemary, about Fern) Part 2 Chapter 5

… she is sharing them with me – one for her, one for me, one for her, one for me. (Fern with raisins) Part 2 Chapter 5

She comes over, rests the rough shelf of her forehead against my own flat one so that I’m staring straight into her amber eyes. (Fern with Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 5

… As I fall, I hear Fern laughing … (Rosemary, thinking Fern is laughing at her fall) Part 2 Chapter 5

Dad apologized by letting me see the damage on my x-ray. (When Rosemary breaks her arm during a study) Part 2 Chapter 5

The only thing I do better is talk, and it’s not clear to me that this is a good trade-off, that I wouldn’t swap it instantly for being able to scamper up the banister or stretch like a panther along the top edge of the pantry door. Part 2 Chapter 5

That is why I invented Mary, to even the score. Mary could do everything Fern could and then some. And she used her powers for good instead of evil, which is to say only under my direction and on my behalf. Part 2 Chapter 5

‘Monkey girl’, Russell said, a phrase I would come to know well when I started school. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 5

Here is what I heard: that maybe Fern had reached, like a poltergeist, across time and space and destroyed the home in which we’d all lived. (after all the windows are smashed followed a Halloween party) Part 2 Chapter 5

Part 2 Chapter 6

Rosemary’s mother suddenly comes ‘back into focus’ and resumes playing the piano, showering and cooking. The family take a trip to Hawaii, something Rosemary reflects on would not been possible when Fern was with them, yet Rosemary still wishes she was there and takes note of the food and activities Fern would have appreciated.

Back at home, Lowell brings up Fern and is told by his father not to discuss her yet, giving the reason for her departure as being that the family needed to act in her best interests. Rosemary’s mother weeps. Lowell disappears for two nights. Rosemary recalls asking her father about Fern on the day they returned from the old house. Rosemary’s father had said Fern was living with a different family on a farm, and that there were other chimpanzees so she had a lot of friends. Rosemary’s father’s answers to Rosemary’s detailed questions about Fern’s new surroundings had formed the basis of Rosemary’s understanding of the ‘farm’ in which she and Lowell had believed in for years.

Rosemary recovers a memory in which her father runs over a cat that had been taking a long time to cross the road. She is unsure if the memory is real and is reassured by Grandma Donna, who doesn’t like her father so why would she lie, that it was not true. This causes Rosemary to question if her father is actually kind to animals, introducing her uncertainty as to her father’s true character.

Part 2 Chapter 6 Quotes

We’d never been able to travel with Fern; now we could, and we needed to get away. Part 2 Chapter 6

I saw her everywhere, but I never said so. (Rosemary, about Fern) Part 2 Chapter 6

Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then. Let’s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it was in the interest of science to be otherwise. He would never have run over a cat if there was nothing to be learned by doing so.
He was a great believer in our animal natures, far less likely to anthropomorphize Fern than to animalise me. Not just me, but you, too––all of us together, I’m afraid. He didn’t believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn’t much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out. (Rosemary, about her father) Part 2 Chapter 6

Part 2 Chapter 7

Rosemary recalls more lighthearted memories of her development alongside Fern, which are sometimes undercut by Rosemary’s jealousy towards Fern when she thinks her mother may love Fern best. This chapter recollects the happiest of times for the family, and also the graduate students, building snowmen and sledding. Rosemary is so happy and invokes her mother’s expression (the book title), ‘we are so excited that … we’re completely besides ourselves’.

Rosemary is sure she understands how Fern is thinking even when she is acting wild and unpredictable and Lowell, confusing communication with language, questions why Fern has to learn their language rather than the family learning Fern’s language. Rosemary shares her knowledge of psychological experiments and raises her suspicions that the object of the study ‘is rarely the thing being studied’. She further suspects that comparing and contrasting her and Fern’s development is not the actual purpose of her parents’ study; she contemplates the possibility that instead of discovering how well Fern could communicate, her father may actually be discovering how well Fern could communicate with Rosemary. Rosemary references a twin study about language, which appeals to her given the system she and Fern had adopted in which Rosemary acted as Fern’s translator. A graduate student attests to observing the secret system of communication Rosemary and Fern had developed when they were preverbal but this is dismissed as ‘unscientific’ by Rosemary’s father.

Fern is interested in chimpanzees she sees on TV but expresses dislike for one that is brought to the house. As with most chimps raised among humans, Fern believes she is human. When Rosemary starts kindergarten and is called ‘monkey girl’, because of her chimp-like behaviours, it becomes clear that Rosemary has come to identify with chimps more than with people. She tries to tone down these behaviours but finds it difficult to adopt human ones. She hopes Fern is adapting better and imagines her introducing the other chimps to human behaviours.

Part 2 Chapter 7 Quotes

No one knew Fern better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 7

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. Part 2 Chapter 7

Surrounded as she was by humans, Fern believed she was human. Part 2 Chapter 7

Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. Part 2 Chapter 7

Here are some of things my mother worked with me on; prior to sending me off to school: standing up straight, keeping my hands still when I talked, not putting my fingers into anyone else’s mouth or hair, not biting anyone, ever, no matter how much the situation warranted it, muting my excitement over tasty food, and not staring fixedly at someone else’s cupcake, not jumping on the tables and desks when I was playing. Part 2 Chapter 7

Part 3 Chapter 1

Rosemary describes how she carried the damage of Fern’s disappearance physically; through smell, touch, ‘a hunger on the surface of my skin’. She would rock in place, unknowingly, and pull out her eyebrows and bite her fingers until they bled. Her constant talking continued however she came to understand that it was no longer of interest to anyone now that Fern was gone.

Part 3 Chapter 1 Quotes

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. (Rosemary, after Fern’s disappearance) Part 3 Chapter 1

Although it had had no immediate impact on the cut of my jibber-jabber – in fact, it took many years to truly sink in – finally I came to understand that all of my verbosity had been valuable only in the context of my sister. Part 3 Chapter 1

Part 3 Chapter 2

Over the years after Fern’s disappearance, Rosemary hears her parents’ conversations through her bedroom wall. Her father worries about his professional reputation, grows paranoid and starts drinking. There are concerns over what will become of Rosemary and especially Lowell, who continues to be a problem. His counsellor points out certain positive qualities that were making him difficult, such as his sense of social justice. Her suggestions around boundary setting go ignored, and instead Lowell’s parents overcompensate by showering him with attention and being permissive, which makes Lowell even more furious.

Rosemary transfers to a ‘hippie school’ where social difference and difficulty are normalised. Rosemary befriends Dae-Jung, a Korean boy who cannot yet speak English. Rosemary carries on both sides of their conversation until, ironically, Dae-Jung’s English is improved and he makes other friends, then eventually transfers to another school.

Part 3 Chapter 2 Quotes

Ms Delancy said that the qualities making Lowell hard to live with were all very good qualities, some of his best, in fact – his loyalty, his love, his sense of justice. (Lowell’s counsellor) Part 3 Chapter 2

For a brief period in the third grade, I pretended that Dae-jung and I were friends. He didn’t talk, but I was well able to supply both sides of a conversation. I returned a mitten he’d dropped. We ate lunch together, or at least we ate at the same table, and in the classroom he’d been given the desk next to mine on the theory that when I talked out of turn, it might help his language acquisition. The irony was that his English improved due in no small part to my constant yakking at him, but as soon as he could speak, he made other friends. Part 3 Chapter 2

Dad gave me some tips designed to improve my social standing. People, he said, like to have their movements mirrored. (Rosemary changing schools) Part 3 Chapter 2

Part 3 Chapter 3

Lowell starts high school, dates Katherine Chalmers (‘Kitch’) and stops talking about Fern. Rosemary has almost completely stopped talking, experiencing an easier time at school as a result. Lowell’s performance on the basketball team in senior year has improved Rosemary’s social standing but she becomes concerned when he misses practice on the day before the big game. She goes to see him and he speaks to her in anger.

Later that night, Lowell takes all this money, packs a bag, steal his father’s laboratory key and frees all the lab rates from their cages. He then takes a bus to Chicago and never returns. Rosemary’s mother is emotionally devastated and although private investigators are hired, Lowell is not found. Rosemary later finds a note from Lowell saying Fern was not on a farm. Rosemary does not share this with her parents.

At the start of middle school Rosemary is again bullied for her chimp-like behaviours. She is unable to speak with her parents, her mother being too fragile, her father being of no help. The bullying stops and her parents are now concerned at how silent Rosemary has become.

The family occasionally receives postcards from Lowell from different locations then one day, a year after he had left, the FBI arrive to speak with him. He has become a person of interest in a fire that caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage at a veterinary laboratory in Davis.

Part 3 Chapter 3 Quotes

… at some point, I’d mostly stopped talking altogether. … First I eliminated the big words. They were getting me nowhere. Then I quit correcting other people when they used the wrong words. I raised the ratio of things I thought to things I said from three to one, to four to one, to five, to six, to seven. (Rosemary at school) Part 3 Chapter 2

… Mom took Lowell’s disappearance had, worse even than when we lost Fern … I don’t have the words for what it did to her. She’s never even pretended to recover. (Rosemary) Part 3 Chapter 2

Most of the rats Lowell had released were recaptured, but not all. Despite our father’s dire predictions, some survived that winter and the next one, too. They went on to have full lives – sex, travel, and adventure. Part 3 Chapter 2

Part 3 Chapter 4

Rosemary and Kitch run into each other and Kitch asks whether she has heard from Lowell. Kitch tells Rosemary the last time she saw Lowell they were heading to basketball practice when they ran into a graduate student who used to study Rosemary and Fern.

The student, surprised that Lowell did not already know, had told Lowell that Fern was taken to a psychology lab in South Dakota and placed with larger, older chimps. When he hears that Fern’s introduction to the group was done callously, and that she was being treated like some inferior animal, Lowell’s brotherly instinct and sense of justice kick in and compel him to rescue Fern.

Rosemary copes with the news through minimising Fern’s fate, reassuring herself that the cage was probably an interim measure before she was to be moved to the farm her father talked about. She says nothing of this to her parents.

Part 3 Chapter 4 Quotes

… He said she had to learn her place. She had to learn what she was. … He never once, in all the time Matt had spent there, had called Fern by her name. (when Fern is placed in a cage with four larger, older chimps in Dr Uljevik’s psych lab) Part 3 Chapter 4

‘That’s my sister in that cages.’ (Lowell about Fern, to his girlfriend) Part 3 Chapter 4

Matt said they treated Fern like some animal. (Matt, graduate student, about Fern at the lab) Part 3 Chapter 4

Part 3 Chapter 5

Rosemary starts college, avoiding all courses involving primates, and attempts to never think of Fern again, or talk about her family. When some freshmen begin bonding over the weirdness of their families, Rosemary is asked whether her family is strange and, desiring to present as normal, answers that they are not. Unfortunately, Rosemary soon learns that difference is celebrated in college compared to grade school where it had been bullied, and her efforts to erase ‘monkey girl’ cues had caused her to miss a bonding opportunity which culminates in her not being invited on a ski trip.

Rosemary notes that by the end of her first year in college, she and her roommate had never bonded. In her second year, Rosemary lives with Todd and they become friends. One night while Todd, his girlfriend, and Rosemary are watching The Man in the Iron Mask, a film about twins, Rosemary finds she is unable to breathe and falls to the ground.

Part 3 Chapter 5 Quotes

I came to UC Davis both to find my past (my brother) and to leave it (the monkey girl) behind. By monkey girl, I mean me, of course, not Fern, who is not now and never has been a monkey. Part 3 Chapter 5

… now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable. (Rosemary on starting college and trying to make friends) Part 3 Chapter 5

He rubbed my shoulders. This was so kind, since Todd wasn’t a toucher. And I do like to be touched; it’s a monkey-girl thing. (When Rosemary falls and cannot breathe). Part 3 Chapter 5

Part 3 Chapter 6

Returning to the scene at the cafeteria, Rosemary reconstructs the scene and recognises how Harlow’s behaviours mirror Rosemary’s monkey-girlness. She ponders on how comfortable she is with Harlow and the potential of having a friend with whom she could be her true self, but recognises the sabotaging effect this could have on resurrecting the chimp behaviours she had worked so hard to eradicate.

Rosemary lists three major events as signalling a change in her life: her mother’s journals disappearing, Lowell making contact, Harlow arriving.

Rosemary has researched the attack on the laboratory in Davis and learns that the incident was classified as domestic terrorism but that there were no suspects. She learns about the Animal Liberation Front, in order to try and learn more about Lowell’s motivations, and discovers atrocities committed against baby monkeys in the name of science.

On Harlow’s suggestion, the suitcase delivered from the airline is opened, enlisting the help of Ezra, and a ventriloquist’s dummy which Rosemary calls Madame Defarge (a fictional character from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities) is found inside. Rosemary finds the dummy disturbing and, showing concern for it being someone else’s property, suggests they not play with it. However Ezra and Harlow proceed to play with it but Harlow promises to return it to the suitcase as Rosemary leaves for class.

Part 3 Chapter 6 Quotes

… I could see that Harlow was fundamentally untrustworthy. Simultaneously, she seemed like someone with whom I could be my true self. I had no intention of doing so, and with an equal and counterbalancing intensity, a great longing for it. (Rosemary, on Harlow as a potential friend) Part 3 Chapter 6

I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me. I handled the situation by not reading more. Part 3 Chapter 6

Ezra had parlayed his paranoid delusions into a very real jungle-commando skill set. It was frightening to think about the things he could do. Part 3 Chapter 6

From the look on Madame Defarge’s face, I could see that everything was going exactly as she’d planned. ‘Don’t spoil my fun’, Madame Defarge said. (Rosemary, on Ezra and Harlow playing with Madame Defarge) Part 3 Chapter 6

Part 3 Chapter 7

Rosemary attends a Religion and Violence lecture, which will be profoundly impactful on her. The lecture begins with a discussion on violent women then turns to the topic of religiously motivated violence towards women then, without warning, lecturer Dr Sosa starts talking about chimpanzees. He says that chimps, like humans, participate in insider/outsider violence, and that while most religions are obsessed with policing the sexuality activities of females, the only difference between sexual herding in male humans and male chimps is that chimps do not base their motivations on religion. Rosemary has another episode of shortness of breath at the mention of chimps.

Rosemary tunes out of the lecture and begins recalling details and experiences from her own sex life and contemplates whether these are normal. She considers being fortunate to have never been forced into sex, presumably comparing her experience to that which may have happened to Fern, in light of Dr Sosa’s reference to an experiment in which a female chimp was repeatedly raped over a three day period.

Part 3 Chapter 7 Quotes

Dr Sosa ended the last lecture of the quarter by telling us that our preference for our own kind begins at birth. … ‘”Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is our highest, most developed morality’, Dr Sosa said. … ‘But if you do believe, as I do, that morality starts with God, then you have to wonder why He simultaneously hardwired us against it.’
‘”Do unto others” is an unnatural, inhuman behaviour…’ (Rosemary’s lecturer, Dr Sosa) Part 3 Chapter 7

But I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve never in my life been forced into any sex I haven’t wanted at the time. Part 3 Chapter 7

Part 4 chapter 1

Rosemary researches the internet for cases of chimps raised with humans and discovers that most died of diseases at a very young age and that the fate of those who were returned to the wild was not much better. She notes that most of the families believed they were making a lifelong commitment. She also notes that at least one of the humans raised with a chimp committed suicide in adulthood.

Part 4 Chapter 2

Rosemary meets up with Harlow for a drink, hoping for some ‘female solidarity’ after learning about the chimp rape. She is annoyed to see Reg there, and surprised that Madame Defarge has been brought along.

Harlow is excited on learning about the gender-reversal version of Macbeth that the drama department was staging and that she’d been chosen to help with the set and costumes. Rosemary becomes drunk and takes some pills from Harlow. Rosemary is surprised that Reg knows nothing about the mirror test to determine self-awareness, and that chimps, elephants and dolphins recognise themselves in the mirror but that dogs, gorillas and human babies do not. Rosemary appears to have returned to her incessant manner of talking.

Part 4 Chapter 2 Quotes

She was sitting on Harlow’s lap, weaving her head from side to side and unhinging her jaw like a cobra. (Madame Defarge) Part 4 Chapter 2

Men were buying drinks for Madame Defarge. Part 4 Chapter 2

Part 4 Chapter 3

Rosemary and Harlow go out for a rice bowl then change their mind and go to another bar.

Rosemary imagines what it must have been like for Fern when she was taken away, imagining her drugged and waking up alone, forced to accept a low status as a five year old female in a cage with old chimps. She considers the list of females who had played a role in Fern’s life: herself, her mother, the female graduate students; all who did nothing to help her.

Next Rosemary is at another bar and behaving strangely, drawing comments from Harlow and one of the two guys with whom they are at the bar. Rosemary throws up in the bathroom, accidentally using the men’s room, and sees Reg. She flirts with him, then lectures him on how easy it is to train any animal into any behaviour. He tells her to go home.

Back at the first bar again with Harlow, Rosemary believes she sees Lowell and falls into his arms before she is taken away by Officer Haddick.

The narrative becomes temporally disjointed, and is distorted by Rosemary’s cognition being influenced by substances, thus is difficult to follow. However what emerges is that Rosemary’s night has been impactful: she has allowed herself to start thinking about Fern again, her brother has returned, and she has again found herself arrested along with Harlow.

Part 4 Chapter 3 Quotes

‘You can train any animal into any behaviour on cue if it’s a natural behaviour to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism – all natural human behaviours. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.’ (Rosemary to Harlow’s boyfriend, Reg) Part 4 Chapter 3

Empathy is also a natural human behaviour, and natural to chimps as well. (Rosemary) Part 4 Chapter 3

Part 4 Chapter 4

The pills Rosemary had taken keep her awake in the jail cell, where she compares her situation to what she imagines happened to Fern, drugged and confined to a cage. She starts signing in the way she used to communicate with Fern and talks erratically throughout the night, often about chimps, being asked to be quiet by the other woman in the cell and to shut up by Harlow. Rosemary attempts to be quiet, and the rest of the night passes as an ‘endless dream sequence’ about Fern. In the morning, Reg collects both Harlow and Rosemary.

Finding Madame Defarge missing from the night at the bar, Rosemary makes phone calls to locate her then again falls asleep. She recalls a happy memory when one evening Lowell had taken her on an adventure at night. At the end of the recollection, Rosemary returns to a list she had started in jail, calculating what and who is missing from her life.

Part 4 Chapter 4 Quote

In my head, I finished the grid I’d started in the holding cell, the grid of what was missing and for how long. One, my bicycle; two, Madame Defarge; three, the journals; four, my brother.
Five: Fern. (Rosemary) Part 4 Chapter 4

Part 4 Chapter 5

Rosemary looks for Madame Defarge, wandering around town for two hours, before returning home to find she has been returned by an unknown man from the bar. She finds out from Todd and Kimmy that Harlow had been over but had left with a third man who had arrived calling himself Travers and who Rosemary immediately suspects is her brother. Harlow and Travers had left a message for Rosemary to join them where they were heading for dinner.

Rosemary feels a sudden pang at loosing Madame Defarge again when it comes time to return her and is surprised by her attachment.

Rosemary expounds the concept of ‘theory of mind’, noting that tests have concluded that chimps can infer human goals in observed situations, and hopes, as she makes her way nervously to the restaurant, that Harlow will be sharp enough to figure out that Rosemary’s goal was to be alone with her brother.

Part 4 Chapter 5 Quote

‘I hardly knew you,’ I said. ‘And now you’re leaving me’. Her uncanny valley eyes stared up. She snapped her reptilian jaw. I made her wrap her arms around my neck as if she were also sorry. Her knitting needles poked my ear sharply until I shifted her.
‘Please don’t go,’ she said. Or maybe I said that. It was definitely one of us. (Rosemary and Madame Defarge) Part 4 Chapter 5

Part 4 Chapter 6

At the restaurant, Rosemary sees Lowell and Harlow sharing fondue. Lowell has already ordered for Rosemary, who is touched he still knew what she liked. Rosemary and Harlow speak to Lowell rather than to each other, competing for his attention, with Rosemary annoyed that Harlow portrays them as being closer friends than was true. Harlow flirts with Lowell. Rosemary is jealous of the attention she is getting from him.

Lowell spends part of the night with Harlow in Rosemary’s room; Rosemary takes Todd’s room while he is out, twice having to lie on the phone to Reg about Harlow’s whereabouts.

Lowell comes to get Rosemary in the middle of the night for pie, and Rosemary feels nostalgia for their old days.

Part 4 Chapter 6 Quote

Sometime between my salad and crepe, I’d stopped wanting to be Harlow’s friend and started wishing I’d never met her. I felt bad about this – my jealousy, my anger – what with her saying all those nice things about me. Though I was pretty sure she didn’t like me nearly as well as she was claiming. (Rosemary, on Harlow talking with Lowell) Part 4 Chapter 6

Part 4 Chapter 7

Rosemary and Lowell talk until morning, then order breakfast. Lowell is vegetarian now, mostly vegan, and shares what he knows about the abuse of cows in the dairy industry as well as his criticisms of psychological studies using nonhuman animals, including his father’s work. He regrets not going to college but reads a lot. He says his father’s methods were wrong, that it would have been more scientific to start with the assumption that Fern and Rosemary were similar, then look for their differences. In that way, the burden of proof wasn’t always on Fern to be able to communicate.

Rosemary asks about Fern and Lowell delivers the heartbreaking story of when he went to the lab to which she had been taken, posing as a prospective student in order to gain access. After finding out her location, he entered at night where he saw Fern in a cage with four adult chips. Fern was aware of him and started screaming, grabbing his arm and pulling him towards her, squeezing his fingers with great force. Lowell talked to her, apologising, said he loved her, but she continued screaming. An adult male came over and began pulling on his arm so that Lowell was being bounced off the bars until Fern bit the male chimp on the shoulder. Fern signed Lowell’s name followed by the words for ‘good Fern’, highlighting that she still had an internal sense of her previous life. The older male then attacked Fern at which point staff members attended with a cattle prod which immediately scared the male chimp off. Lowell was told to leave before police were called. Fern kept signing ‘good Fern’, but sloppier now with the man standing over her with the cattle prod, threateningly. Lowell was forced to leave with the heavy knowledge that after all that had happened to Fern, she had protected him from the male chimp and he was now leaving her, never to see her again.

Part 4 Chapter 7 Quotes

‘Look at how much I’m talking!’ he’d said, at some point during the evening. ‘I’m more like you than you are tonight…’ (Lowell to Rosemary) Part 4 Chapter 7

It seemed to Lowell that psychological studies of nonhuman animals were mostly cumbersome, convoluted, and downright peculiar. They taught us little about the animals but lots about the researchers who designed and ran them. Part 4 Chapter 7

I recognised Fern right away, he said, but not because I actually recognised her in the dim light, just because she was the youngest and smallest. (Lowell, about Fern in the cage) Part 4 Chapter 7

I could smell the excitement on her, a smell sort of like burned hair. She hadn’t had a bubble bath in a long time or a good tooth-brushing. She kind of stank, to be honest. (Lowell, about Fern in the cage) Part 4 Chapter 7

The other man stayed with Fern. He stood over with the cattle prod. I think he was protecting her from the other chimps, but I know she saw it as a threat. Her signing got sloppy. Despairing. (Lowell, about Fern in the cage) Part 4 Chapter 7

Part 5 Chapter 1

Lowell’s story brings home for Rosemary the realisation that Fern had always been the property of the Indiana University, that she ‘could be bought and sold’. She learns that after her father ended the family project he had planned to keep working with Fern but that this was costly and the University could not house her. He had at least arranged for a graduate student to help resettle her. Accepting that his visit had unsettled Fern, and the fact the FBI were after him, Lowell did not visit Fern again but had had someone keeping an eye on her and tried, unsuccessfully, to have her purchased by a sanctuary. A different chimp was purchased who was nearly beaten to death by the other chimps at the sanctuary.

Lowell goes on to share that Fern had three children through artificial insemination because having been raised with humans, she was not interested in sex with the other chimps. Two of her children were sold to another lab but she still has her youngest, two year old Hazel, and it seems an experiment has been designed around them so it appears they’ll get to stay together. Fern was teaching Hazel to sign. The cruel professor had retired and the pair are loved by all the graduate students.

Lowell admits he never planned to leave home, only that he needed to take care of Fern first. However, he now realises he could never have done that on his own and with the FBI now involved he could no longer help her and needed to leave. Lowell informs Rosemary that Fern is now her responsibility and that she should go and see her.

Rosemary discloses that she knows Lowell blames her for Fern’s disappearance. Lowell admits he shouldn’t have given she was only five, but that she had made her parents choose between her and Fern; ‘you were always such a jealous little kid’. He urges her not to blame herself then leaves. Later, Rosemary hears Mary’s voice saying, ‘You love Fern’, then realises she had been jealous of Fern, and still was.

Part 5 Chapter 1 Quotes

‘She’s already making up signs of her own. Tree dress for leaves. Big soup for the bathtub. Smart as can be. …
‘Just like her mom,’ Lowell said. (on Hazel learning to sign from mother Fern) Part 5 Chapter 1

But as far back as I could remember, I’d also been jealous of her. I’d been jealous again, not fifteen minutes past, learning that Lowell’s visit had been for her and not me. But maybe this was the way sisters usually felt about each other. (Rosemary jealous of Fern) 5 Chapter 1

Part 5 Chapter 2

Rosemary reflects on how Lowell appeared and that although she’d portrayed him as lucid, he’d in fact struck her ‘as crazy’, downgrading this to ‘traumatised’, and realises that he’d presented a different persona at dinner with Harlow. Rosemary prepares herself to receive reports on Fern and wonders if she could get her out of the lab where on earth would she take her.

At home, Rosemary mistakes Reg sitting out front in his car for the FBI. They chat. Reg thinks he and Harlow are breaking up. Later, Rosemary falls asleep hugging Madame Defarge.

Part 5 Chapter 2 Quote

‘I’m seeing so much of America today …’ (Lowell’s catchphrase on learning new things about society that oppose his values) Part 5 Chapter 2

Part 5 Chapter 3

Rosemary shares previously omitted parts to what Lowell had discussed at dinner, including horrendous experiments on animals, conditions inside abattoirs and battery cages and how if you make people aware of it, they ending up hating the messenger.

Rosemary’s writes her final Religion and Violence paper, incorporating all the current issues she is facing. Dr Sosa tells her she has not answered the question. She goes on to talk about issues of violence and compassion: that cruelty to humans begins with cruelty to animals; the Utopian idea of keeping one’s hands clean by hiring someone else to perform the cruelty to animals (alluding to animals used in research, food production, entertainment, etc); and whether science could be a religion. He offers her an ‘incomplete’ for the subject, which she accepts.

Part 5 Chapter 3 Quote

‘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.’ Part 5 Chapter 3

Part 5 Chapter 4

Ezra let Harlow stay in a unit in the building that is temporarily vacant and she continues to spend more time in Rosemary’s unit. She appears obsessed with Lowell and asks Rosemary endless questions about him.

Rosemary learns about the operations of the Animal Liberation Front, that membership is conditional on direct action towards the suffering of animals, not just sympathising. Rosemary sees Harlow grieving for Lowell but she is in the middle of a term paper, still looking for her suitcase and heading home for Christmas, so chooses to put her on the ‘backburner’.

Rosemary receives a visit from a police officer.

Part 5 Chapter 4 Quote

But I was still angry with her. Harlow, I felt, had no right to such grief, no real claim on Lowell. She’d known him for what? Fifteen minutes? I’d loved him for twenty-two years and missed him most of that time. Harlow should be taking care of me, is how I saw it. (Rosemary, on Harlow sick and missing Lowell) Part 5 Chapter 4

Part 5 Chapter 5

Rosemary is taken to an interrogation room where, after being left alone, she surveys the room and imagines how far Mary, Fern and she could have climbed in any direction. The officer returns and proceeds to tape their interview. He asks Rosemary to confirm she is Lowell Cooke’s sister. She does this then insists on speaking to a lawyer, demonstrating her matured approach with police authority compared to her last arrest. The officer switches off the recorder. Rosemary’s thoughts continue to flow in a stream-of-consciousness manner about cats and other things while she sits in the room. She is given a sandwich and allowed to use the bathroom.

Part 5 Chapter 5 Quote

Poor Mom and Dad. All three of their children incarcerated at once; that really was bad luck. Part 5 Chapter 5

Part 5 Chapter 6

Still in the interrogation room, Rosemary shares an early childhood memory in which she believes she was the reason Fern was sent away. She and Fern were playing by the creek when Rosemary found a cat with kittens and had brought a kitten to Fern. The mother cat scratched Fern who, in response, swung the kitten against a tree trunk, killing it, then opened up its stomach using her fingers. Rosemary ran screaming to the house to tell Lowell and brought him to Fern. Fern signed ‘Chase me!’ and Lowell, thinking Rosemary had made up the story of the dead kitten, warned her not to tell anyone. Rosemary promised, but later when Fern hurt Rosemary during play, Rosemary complained to her mother, telling her the story of the kitten, and that she was frightened of Fern.

Part 5 Chapter 6 Quote

And that’s when I told.
And that’s when I got sent to my grandparents.
And that’s when Fern got sent away. (Rosemary) Part 5 Chapter 6

Part 5 Chapter 7

Rosemary takes care of a pill bug in the interrogation room, remaining there for eight hours until Todd, his lawyer mother, and Kimmy arrive to get her. They tell her that Ezra has been arrested for breaking into the UC Davis Primate Centre. He had been trying to free the monkeys inside but they had refused to leave the cages. A female working with Ezra had not yet been located; the reader under the assumption this is Harlow. Rosemary is freed due to Todd and Kimmy providing her an alibi and through Todd’s mother’s legal assistance.

Back at the home, Todd and Kimmy share their excitement at having the dangerous Lowell at their home and at Rosemary’s ‘having this whole hidden life’. Todd assumes Lowell has recruited Harlow to his cause. Later, Rosemary finds Madame Defarge is missing.

Part 5 Chapter 7 Quote

Weeks later, I asked Todd if we were friends. ‘Rosie! We’ve been friends for years,’ he said. He sounded hurt. Part 5 Chapter 7

Part 6 Chapter 1

Rosemary talks about her family’s Christmas vacations after Fern left, which they’d kept up even though they had never been a religious family, and which discontinued when Lowell left. Rosemary arrives to her parents for Christmas in 1996, having already decided not to share about Lowell’s visit. She revisits the story with Fern and the kitten, and contemplates whether she had in fact invented it, considering that if it were true, she was only partially to blame, that it ‘was all Fern’ who had actually killed the cat. While analysing the memory she comes to a realisation about herself.

Rosemary tells her parents about Lowell’s visit, about his mental state, his criticisms of their father’s work, and of what happened to Fern. Her parents are devastated, her mother weeps. To Rosemary’s surprise, her parents tell her they never mentioned Fern because Rosemary would hyperventilate, scratch her skin until it bled and pull out her hair by the root. Further, her parents recalled that it was Rosemary who shut down the conversation on the last evening before Lowell left the family. Rosemary learns that it was not the kitten incident that caused Fern to be sent away, but that there had been other incidents of increasingly aggressive behaviour as Fern grew older which meant for the safety of all that she had to be sent away. This releases Rosemary somewhat from the self-blame she has carried for Fern’s departure; the family members are finally talking truth about what happened, which challenges the reliability of the memories Rosemary had been relying upon. Rosemary realises that she didn’t know Fern as well as she thought she did, that there would be parts to her that were ultimately unknowable.

Part 6 Chapter 1 Quotes

… still I knew I had not made up that kitten. I knew it because the person I was, the person I had always been, that person would not do that thing. (Rosemary realising she had not created a false memory) Part 6 Chapter 1

So this is what I should have said to Mom; this is what I meant to say –
That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know.
That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did.
That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.
Instead I’d said I was afraid of her. That was the lie that got her sent away. That was the moment I made my parents choose between us. (Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 1

Part 6 Chapter 2

Ezra gets a plea deal of eight months in prison with the legal assistance of Todd’s mother. Rosemary visits him and he is downcast. He asks after Harlow who has disappeared. Rosemary meets with Harlow’s parents who appear deluded as to Harlow’s true character. Rosemary herself learns that Harlow had lied about having siblings and that she was in fact an only child. Rosemary asks Ezra where he thought the monkeys he was freeing would go: ‘Wherever the hell they wanted,’ he said.

Part 6 Chapter 2 Quotes

‘The secret to a good life,’ he told me once, ‘is to bring you’re a game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.’ (Ezra) Part 6 Chapter 2

‘But it’s just not like her,’ her father said over and over again … ‘Breaking in somewhere. Taking things …’ (Harlow’s parents on finding out Harlow had been trying to release monkeys from their cages with Ezra) Part 6 Chapter 2

Part 6 Chapter 3

The reports Lowell said would arrive to Rosemary about Fern, never arrived. Rosemary considers going to work with chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, Tanzania, after graduation, but the memory of the chimp rape from Dr Sosa’s lecture changes her mind. She considers teaching but that would mean further study.

Rosemary and Reg date for five months and Rosemary’s appears to be easing into some normality in life.

Rosemary’s father dies and Rosemary reflects on her life choices.

Part 6 Chapter 3 Quotes

‘When a guy takes a girl …’ I hadn’t know it was a date. (Rosemary, going out with Reg, still learning social cues) Part 6 Chapter 3

Next time, I’ll put things right between my father and me. Next time, I’ll give Mom the fair share of blame for Fern that her collapse forestalled this time around. I won’t drop the whole of it onto Dad next time. (Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 3

Part 6 Chapter 4

Back in 1996, Rosemary’s receives her lost suitcase. She sends back the wrong suitcase minus Madame Defarge, writing but never sending an apology for her omission. She opens her mother’s journals and finds her and Fern’s baby books.

Part 6 Chapter 4 Quote

Mom’s notebooks are not scientific journals. Although they do include a graph or two, some numbers and some measurements, they’re not the dispassionate, careful observations from the field that I expected.
They appeared to be our baby books. (Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 4

Part 6 Chapter 5

Rosemary and her mother explore the journals as they prepare them for publication. Various moments in Fern and Rosemary’s development are recorded and captured in photographs. Rosemary’s mother shares lovingly about Fern, her birth in Africa, the circumstances of her arrival to the family and caring for her, and her belief that even after Rosemary and Lowell started their own lives, Fern would stay with Rosemary’s parents forever.

In 2012, Rosemary is living with her mother in South Dakota and has been teaching kindergarten for seven years. They both volunteer at the lab where Fern and her daughter Hazel live and Rosemary takes her students there on field trips. Fern appears to have a high status in the chimp group. At first Fern refused to look at Rosemary’s mother but warmed up to her over time. Rosemary considers how to tell Fern about their father and Lowell.

Fern and the other chimps are no longer subjects of an experiment and are better cared for, but Rosemary admits their life is not ideal and imagines a sanctuary where she could live with Fern again.

Part 6 Chapter 5 Quotes

I told your dad I didn’t see how the two of you could be compared when your world had been so gentle and hers so cruel. But there was no turning back by then. I was deeply in love with you both. (Rosemary’s mother to Rosemary about Fern) Part 6 Chapter 5

‘… I worried about what being Fern’s sister would do to you, but I wanted it for you, too.’… ‘I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,’ she said. (Rosemary’s mother to Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 5

‘Where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail,’ I said. (Rosemary remembers her father’s words) Part 6 Chapter 5

Part 6 Chapter 6

The journals are published into a book and Rosemary considers how her family history will never remain hidden again.

The news of a shift towards ethical animal research and a suspension of new grants for biomedical and behavioural studies on chimpanzees is celebrated by Rosemary celebrating with champagne, giving a little to Fern like their father used to allow them on New Year’s Eve. Rosemary wonders about Fern’s memory, having read that episodic memory is uniquely human, or whether she can only ‘remember but not recognise us as the people she remembers ..’

Part 4 Chapter 6 Quotes

Once upon a time, there was a happy family – a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters. The older daughter was smart and agile, covered in hair and very beautiful. The younger was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both. (Madame Defarge performing Fern’s life) Part 6 Chapter 6

Part 6 Chapter 7

Rosemary recalls how earlier in the year, when she had received requests for interviews about the book, she had learned that Lowell has been arrested while planning an attack on Seaworld, Orlando, along with a ‘female accomplice’ who has not been found.

Rosemary admits she wrote the book for Fern and Lowell. She doesn’t argue that Lowell is innocent, conceding that he probably intended serious financial damage in the attack, believing as he did that ‘… Money is the language humans speak .. If you want to communicate with humans, then you have to learn to speak it. …’ Rosemary compares how Lowell, like Fern, became more dangerous as he grew, and points out, ironically, that it was his fundamentally good qualities of empathy, compassion, loyalty and love which drove his actions to fight animal abuse.

Lowell is not doing well in custody, and Rosemary and her mother have been unable to see him. He has stopped speaking; Rosemary suspects he wants to be tried as nonhuman. Todd’s mother has agreed to represent him.

Rosemary concludes her story by recalling the moving account of her first visit with Fern after 22 years of separation. Rosemary realises she cannot interpret what Fern is thinking, but senses a familiarity, ‘like looking in a mirror’.

Part 6 Chapter 7 Quote

My brother and my sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn’t there, and I can’t tell you that part. I’ve stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that’s mine, and still everything I’ve said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story.
The only reason I’m the one telling it is that I’m the one not currently in a cage. Part 6 Chapter 7