we are all completely beside ourselves summary

Grandma Fredericka was the sort of hostess who believed that bullying guests into second and third helpings was only being polite. (about Rosemary’s father) Part 1 Chapter 3 He’d been diagnosed with diabetes a few years back and shouldn’t have been drinking at any time. When he worked like this, he didn’t drink, which we all appreciated. 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. Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never every call. My father was usually more circumspect, especially on the home phone, which he believed was bugged. It startled me, this rare mention of my brother.

‘I always thought your brother would be the one to call from jail,’ he added. (Rosemary speaking to her father from the police station) Part 2 Chapter 2 The more irritated he was, the more I became smooth and amused, which, of course, irritated him all the more. I felt my worries slipping from me like skin from snake. (Rosemary at the police station) Part 1 Chapter 2 I checked to be sure I’m a pretty good climber, for a girl. The bars went all the way to the top of the cell. (Rosemary at the county police station) 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, about Harlow and herself when they are arrested) Part 1 Chapter 2 The wildness I’d felt that morning had long since vanished and left something squeezed into its place, something like grief or maybe homesickness. She gave every indication of being an old pro at this. (Rosemary, viewing crows) Part 1 Chapter 1 Part 1 Chapter 2 Quotes

I felt … a little migratory myself, just a little wild. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone.

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep. (Rosemary, about her brother and sister) 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. 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. So the middle of my store comes in the winter of 1996. Start in the middle then, he’d answer … (Rosemary, about her father) Prologue Part 1 Chapter 1 Quotes … I have something to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway. 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.

We are all completely beside ourselves summary