Kimberly King Parsons’ gritty debut novel, We Were the Universe, immerses readers in the kaleidoscopic psyche of Kit, a woman in her mid-20s, as she navigates parenting her unruly three-year-old daughter while mourning the death of her younger sister, Julie.
Kit and Julie were raised by an eccentric single mom who collected armadillo-themed trinkets and struggled with addiction in a tiny Texas town riddled with drugs. Perhaps to survive their circumstances, the sisters formed an almost telepathic bond early on. “Julie had always been a sister who swam in my brain with me,” Kit says. “We sometimes transmitted information the way you do in dreams — one of us would raise an eyebrow and an entire catalog of experience streamed.”
After Julie’s sudden death, Kit was forced to inhabit her mind alone — a task so devastating that she now lives in an almost constant state of dissociation, avoiding her own consciousness at all costs, much to her “discount” therapist’s chagrin. Kit watches porn in the bathroom, tails interesting strangers down random side streets, and fantasizes about attractive parents on the playground. And about past lovers. And her daughter’s gymnastics teacher. We Were the Universe is the kind of book that might make you blush while reading in public, hoping no one’s looking over your shoulder, unsure if you’re supposed to find these pages sexy, disturbing, or both.
But Kit’s efforts to distract herself are futile. While bathing in a hot spring at the behest of her friend, Pete, she thinks, “On the continuum of wellness, this experience falls somewhere between the time I visited Pete’s acupuncturist and the discount yoga class where I fell asleep in corpse pose. Like the worry rock in my pocket or dollar store aromatherapy candles, it’s a nice distraction, never making a dent… And none of it is as fun or effective as sex with a total stranger, most drugs, a cold pull of freezer gin.”
Much of We Were the Universe reads like the transcript of a raunchy standup comedy show — if the comedian was a modern-day Edna Pontellier of The Awakening or Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House. Kit provides particularly hysterical and creative, if ambivalent, commentary on parenting. Describing her daughter, Kit says, “I can’t tell if she’s simpler or more complex than other three-year olds. She tells these tremendous lies, no shame… She’s always slept with Jad and me, and sometimes in the morning we’ll wake up damp in her little puddle. She’ll rub her eyes, her hair all crazy. ‘That’s not pee,’ she’ll say. ‘That’s champagne.’” You can almost hear the audience erupting in laughter.
Kit also touches on how motherhood and marriage are contributing factors to her chronic dissociation. “They need me to be available and so I am, or my body is,” she says. “The body goes around fulfilling my obligations. The body makes grilled cheese and gives blow jobs.”
Kit’s habit of shoving down her own thoughts, feelings, and grief have also led to another unsettling phenomenon: Julie has begun to appear before her in a “prismatic blur… out of order, all the ages she’ll ever be.” Likewise, Kit’s memories of her childhood and adolescence intrude constantly into the story’s narrative, showing readers just how tightly Kit is clinging to the past. Through these flashbacks, a second story unfolds: one of Kit and Julie’s youth, their wild, loving hometown friends, and what addiction really does to a family, a town.
Partway through the book, a series of wakeup calls wrest Kit from her semiconscious state: Her mother is in crisis. Her playground crush is not who she appears to be. Her therapist has some bad news. Following these revelations, Kit undergoes a gradual, organic shift — masterfully depicted by Parsons — which will leave readers feeling surprisingly hopeful.
Bianca Sass, a Nashville native, is a writer, director, and scholar whose work probes the intersection of the personal and the political. She’s a recent graduate of Amherst College, where she majored in English and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, as well as wrote and directed many theatrical productions. In 2023, Bianca workshopped her play Babydoll at the Looby Theater in Nashville. Bianca is now based in Boston.
Tagged: Book Reviews, Fiction
