Fowler’s inspiration for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves came from a real-life 1930s experiment in which a husband and wife, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, raised an infant chimpanzee, Gua, in their own home alongside their child, Donald. The experiment ended after nine months when it was rumoured that Donald was adopting Gua’s behaviours.

In the novel, written in the first person from Rosemary Cooke’s perspective, Rosemary is raised by her parents alongside a chimp for five years. Like the Kelloggs’ experiment, Rosemary begins to take on chimp behaviours; she finds it difficult to keep her hands to herself and sees space around her as vertical and horizontal. She is taunted by her classmates for being a ‘monkey girl’ and internalises this image so that it forms part of her identity.

Rosemary appears uncertain as to her father’s experimental goals, perceiving them to be the potential in Fern’s capabilities were she to be raised as a human. With age, she suspects that it was she and not Fern who had been the real subject of the study, and that her father was not trying to raise a chimp who could talk to humans but rather a human who could talk to chimps. Rosemary minimises her mother’s role in the experiment, presumably due to her mother’s breakdown when Fern leaves the family.

Communication and language are important elements in the novel. Rosemary is an incessant talker as a child, then grows silent when Fern is sent away. By the end of the novel, she is using her voice again to tell the story of her brother and sister.

Fowler’s father was a psychology professor who studied animal behaviour and, in an interview, she confesses she argued with her father from a young age about animal intelligence. Compared to her father’s cautious and scientifically collected data, Fowler would base her conclusions on personal observations of the family’s dogs, cats, birds and rats. Her book is a contribution to this long-running debate with her father, who has since passed away. Fowler’s daughter continues the family’s animal behaviourist heritage, devoting herself to working on the development of diving and foraging behaviours in sea lions.

Several accounts of cross-fostered chimps have been documented and these are referenced in Fowler’s novel. In addition to The Ape and The Child which documents Gua’s development, these include The Ape in our House about chimp Washoe, who learned to use American Sign Language, The Ape in Our House about Viki, the The Chimp Who Would Be Human about Nim Chimpsy, and Growing Up Human about Lucy.

Keen to make the presentation of Fern’s character as plausible as possible, Fowler references non-fictional accounts in her novel, utilising her research into chimpanzees and bonobos living in laboratories as well as those in the wild and on preserves. She also observed chimpanzees in residence at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Ellensburg, Washington.

Beginning the story in the middle, with the reader under the assumption that Fern is the narrator’s (Rosemary) sister, the story loops back to the beginning twice. Fowler invites the reader to approach the story from the Darwinian perspective of kinship. Whereas Rosemary’s father commences his study from the premise of assuming Fern’s difference to humans, Fowler points out through the character of Lowell, whose experiences drive him into animal activism, that it would be just as scientific to start at the other end, assuming similarities between Fern and Rosemary and looking for the proof of any difference. For this reason, the reader is first introduced to Fern as a sister and daughter, then as a chimpanzee.

Interestingly, researchers have since sequenced the genome of chimpanzees and bonobos and confirmed that they share 99% of their DNA with humans making them the closest relatives to humans.

The story unfolds within the wider context of research using animals and the animal rights movement that evolved in response. While Lowell takes part in several illegal actions to free animals and is hunted by the FBI, he also presents the less radical line of raising public awareness of the plight of animals used in research. The suggested argument here is that people should have a legal right to see how animals used in fields such as biomedical research, food production, and entertainment, from which humans derive benefits, are treated.

Rosemary’s experiences with Fern raise philosophical and psychological points that centre on what it means to be human; solipsism, the view that only one’s own mind can be sure to exist but external worlds and other minds may not (developmental psychologists attribute this to human infants); theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others; and episodic memory, memory for one’s past personal experience that occurred in a particular time and place.

The epigraphs throughout the novel are taken from a 1917 short story by Frank Kafka, A Report for an Academy, in which an ape is the narrator. The ape is taken captive and must learn to behave as a human in order to win himself some freedom. Fowler introduces the metaphor pertinently in that so many children’s stories involve talking animals (e.g. Charlotte’s Webb, Winnie the Pooh), with whom children form an affinity, but which they are expected to shake off as they mature into adulthood.