Ebook {Epub PDF} We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

"The mind is a mystery no less than the heart. In We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas has written a masterwork on both, as well as an anatomy of the American middle class in the 20th Century. It's all here: how we live, how we love, how we die, how we carry on. And Thomas does it with the epic sweep and small pleasures of the very best fiction.4/5(K).  · Shame is the deeply buried force that drives her. Although Matthew Thomas’s “We Are Not Ourselves” tells the story of three generations of an Author: Maggie Scarf. WE ARE NOT OURSELVES by Matthew Thomas is a novel that starts off with a bang – the murder of a frog and a father abusing his son for it. Unfortunately, the bang fizzles quickly. The opening scene was something this reader wants to know more about – who the boy and the father are, for example/5.

In We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas has written a masterwork on both, as well as an anatomy of the American middle class in the 20th Century. It's all here: how we live, how we love, how we die, how we carry on. And Thomas does it with the epic sweep and small pleasures of the very best fiction. A quotation from King Lear prefaces Matthew Thomas's long and ambitious first novel, and also gives the book its title: "We are not ourselves / When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind / To. Although Matthew Thomas's "We Are Not Ourselves" tells the story of three generations of an Irish-American family, the action is seen mainly from Eileen's point of view.

Matthew Thomas’s devastating debut novel, “We Are Not Ourselves,” is a starkly honest, intimate family story with the power to rock you to your core. Book Summary. Epic in scope, heroic in character, and masterful in prose, We Are Not Ourselves is a multigenerational portrait of the Irish American Leary family. Born in , Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. Thomas begins his novel with two epigraphs, one from Stanley Kunitz and one from King Lear. Did the epigraphs inform your reading of the novel? How did they relate to each of the members of the Leary family? Why do you think Thomas chose to use the phrase we are not ourselves, taken from the King Lear epigraph, as the title of his novel? 2.