we are all completely beside ourselves meaning

Rosemary is an older woman narrating about her college days. But after a while, the brilliant stuff and the trash starts to blend together sometimes. It’s smart and sophisticated or it’s an overwrought wreck. I won’t be! So what I mean by the previous paragraphs is that We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is one of those books that, depending on your point of view, is brilliant or trash. I’ve gone through my pretentious phase and my counterculture phase and so many other phases, and if you had too much free time you would be welcome to back and read my reviews chronologically to revisit them.

They have matured as I have matured from a spritely 19-year-old to a cynical 31-year-old. In over a decade, my tastes for literature have changed considerably. Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I might have written an extremely lengthy review, arguing how awful Karen Joy Fowler is for this dumpsterfire of a novel.

It’s a nauseating mixture of literary pretentiousness and unreliable narration that would have annoyed my mature, post-postmodern sensibilities that looked down on anything so trite as the conceits in this book. When I was younger, I might have hated this book. I might have written an extremely lengthy review, arguing how brilliant Karen Joy Fowler is for this masterpiece of a novel. It’s exactly the right mixture of literary pretentiousness and unreliable narration that would have tickled the still-forming prefrontal cortex of my young university student brain. When I was younger, I might have loved this book.

We are all completely beside ourselves meaning