We Were the Universe: A novel

Written by Kimberly King Parsons

Narrated by Kristen Sieh and Justis Bolding

A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR • A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (long-listed for the National Book Award).

"Kimberly King Parsons sings the lushest, cruelest, kindest, weirdest, darkest and most hilarious songs on paper; I want to hang these sentences in my house and admire them like the interdimensional multisensory illuminated artworks they truly are."
—Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Swamplandia!

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit’s best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They’ll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she’s lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine—long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother’s phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit’s mind, she’s reminiscing about the band she used to be in—and how they’d go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She’s imagining an impossible threesome with her kid’s pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction—a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593906811

Reviews for We Were the Universe

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sure, death is one thing people will let you open your jaws and scream about for a while, especially when someone dies young--it isn't fair, I'll never get over it, etc.--but what nobody admits is how incredibly dull grief is to witness. It's boring, like hearing about somebody's toothache, all-consuming but completely personal, nontransferable. Shut up about your sorrow--take that grief and tamp it down. The people who love you need you to hurry and clean yourself up, blow your nose and fix your hair, come back from the brink.

Kit's the mother of a toddler. Barely in her twenties, she's suddenly a stay-at-home mom in the Texas suburbs, and while she adores her daughter, she's often bored and would like a few minutes to herself, maybe to read a book. But when her daughter's attention is focused somewhere else, she ends up having sexual fantasies about the people she sees at the playground. Kit is kind of a mess, and it's not just because she dropped out of university to have a kid; her sister recently died. She and her sister were inseparable, as neglected children, they raised each other and their closeness persisted until Kit decided that without opportunities in their rural Texas community, she needed to go to college. She feels responsible for what happened to her sister and she's having trouble holding herself together.

Kimberly King Parsons, author of an excellent collection of short stories, Black Light, has created an engaging character in Kit, one who makes many mistakes, but who is also someone you can't help rooting for. Parsons likes oddballs and people who just don't fit, the rebels and the weirdos and this works very well here. This novel is far more focused on character than it is on plot, looking back at Kit's childhood and teenage years, showing how she became the person she is now, without much worry about forward momentum. It feels very much like life with a toddler, a lot of activity with little to show for it, and the things that Kit gets up to are entertaining mainly because they are recounted in Kit's voice. This is a dark story lightly told.