Essay Questions

How does Rosemary view her memories?

We get a glimpse at the thought process of Rosemary as she ponders over the actuality of her memories in the interrogation room.

Recalling what her father told her about Sigmund Freud and his theory of "screen memories", we see Rosemary questioning the reality of her memories time and again throughout the story, and unlike her father who dismissed Freud's notion of "screen memories", the concept of false memories comes to be true in her own case.

Why does Rosemary begin her story in the middle?

Rosemary starts her story in the winter of 1995, which is what she promised. This highlights the importance of 'absence' in the story with her family being reduced to only her parents and herself. Considering herself as a person defined by the loss and the experienced grief and yet some of her words regarding the same absence she felt after the loss of her siblings contradicts her. Seeing as she defined herself by her loss, she also seems to barely think about them soon after, by 1996.

This ignorance of such a great loss was deliberate, as is seen later in the book in Rosemary's attempts to suppress the painful memories associated by the loss of her siblings.

"We were never that family." What does the context of this line reveal about Rosemary's family?

After Rosemary reluctantly comes home to her parents for Thanksgiving, she finally gets fed up of her parents' constant pretense of being the "normal" family they insist on being. Parents' habits of ignoring the dishonesty and denial within the family are common, but it does not seem to be enough for Rosemary's family to be considered "normal", particularly with the loss of her siblings, one of them being a chimpanzee which just goes even further from normal.