It’s interesting that it links back to your first book, Sarah Canary. So a lot of my book is just thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to be a human animal, and in some ways why we’re so obsessed with what makes us special, when in fact, what’s more interesting to me is the way we do actually fit in with the other animals. I feel that that too has not proved to be a completely reliable distinction. And at the time that my book takes place people were very focused on language as the thing that made humans different from other animals. We now know that many many animals use tools, and this does not in fact distinguish us from the rest of the animal world. So that when I was a very young girl, we were taught that humans were the tool-using animals. I have lived through a number of iterations of people trying to figure out where the divide is. It’s very much exploring, what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be an animal. An infant chimpanzee, infant human child, to see if they had a similar upbringing what the differences in their capabilities would be. But the inspiration for the book is this psychological experiment in which a psychologist attempted to home raise a chimpanzee and his son simultaneously. The actual experiment involved a young boy and a chimpanzee, my book involves a young girl and a chimpanzee. The actual experiment took place in the 1930s. This is a novel based on a very very fictionalised version of an actual psychological experiment. Your most recent novel is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Karen Joy Fowler was in London for an event and was kind enough to speak with Fantasy-Faction afterwards. Award with Pat Murphy, an award that recognises speculative fiction that explores our understanding of gender. In addition, she has also co-founded the James Tiptree Jr. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014) won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was nominated for the Man Booker prize. Her novel The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) was a mainstream bestseller that was later adapted into a popular film. She has won the Nebula, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award for her incisive short fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary (1991), follows a mysterious woman who suddenly appears in the Pacific Northwest of America in the 1870’s, who may in fact be an alien. Her work transcends genre boundaries but frequently explores issues around feminism, alienation and what it means to be human. Karen Joy Fowler is a critically acclaimed and multi-award winning author of both literary and speculative fiction.
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