Content Warning: The Part 4 Chapter 1 Summary of this guide contains a reference to child suicide, which is referred to in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

The epigraph is a quote from Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Report to an Academy,” which states that all humans are equally—not distantly—related to apes.

The prologue explains how the narrator, Rosemary Cooke, has been verbose since childhood. Her parents would discourage her endless talking with tips like, “when you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that,” and “skip the beginning. Start in the middle” (3).

Another quote from “A Report to an Academy” prefaces Part 1: “The storm which blew me out of my past eased off,” (4).

Referencing the tips that her parents gave her as a child, Rosemary starts the story in the middle, in 1996. Rosemary is 22 years old and shares context about the politics and pop culture of the time. She has not seen her brother for 10 years and her sister has been missing for 17 years. Rosemary’s sole goal in college is to be “either widely admired or stealthily influential” (6), and her grade are suffering.