WE WERE THE UNIVERSE, fist novel and second book from Kimberly King Parsons

WE WERE THE UNIVERSE
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Fiction.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: 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 (longlisted for the National Book Award).

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 to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle into 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First novel by my 2019 six-stars-of-five delight's author (see link above).

Any novel about grief, grieving, loss, or aging will alienate some readers. It is a requirement of Life that we experience these things. It is not, for some, cathartic to experience them in fiction. I'm not one of those people, but if you are, this is not the read for you.

I'm very much not a member of the Cult of Mother, but motherhood...from both sides, mothered and mothering ("Our spheres are almost entirely our mothers’ doing, for better or worse")...is another central fact of Life for us all. (Yes, choosing not to Mother or being unable to give birth is also in this life-equation.) The way Author Kimberly uses this in her novelistic debut is to explore it while living her own life. When Julie dies, too young, Kit is pregnant. We meet Kit after her daughter turns three, thus not having to deal with the Terrible Twos, an arrangement decidedly superior to the real-life one. In the intense whirl of mothering as a stay-at-home parent, Kit is torn into mother, sister, spouse gobbets by the powerful emotions each of these elicits...requires...of her. It's no surprise that she needs some time off. Don't all mothers? Haven't they needed time off they never got throughout history? I digress.

Kit was a wildchild earlier in her life. That identity never really leaves one, once adopted, it can only be suppressed not expunged. It's clear to me this identity was powerfully rooted because dead-by-overdose Julie ("I cannot fucking believe she's not here, that she's not anywhere") never bothered to suppress it. When her GBFF from days gone by calls on Kit to ditch her life after he suffers setbacks that hurt, she tingles with the old urge to cut loose. It takes spousal support, granted, but it also requires she consider her child's feelings.

This is the single greatest strength of Author Kimberly's stories. Complexity is baked in, not slapped on. It's not the point; it's not handwaved away; it's part of the reality of Kit's life as spouse and mother, so it's in the story. I resonate with this because complexity is what Life is. Part of that complexity in this story is the way the narrative (told from Kit's PoV) is in two timelines, present and revolving like a slide carousel among her memories. Like all adults the world Kit lives in is built on the bumpy earth of memory. At different times the present will pitch one up to see the future from a hill, will spine one around to see the past, or knock one flat to study the ground for a while: "It seems to me these lost pastimes—being a psychonaut and being slutty—are connected. Maybe because they're two things I enjoyed being that I'm not allowed to be anymore. Identities that induced a feeling of security, false as it might have been. My old coping mechanisms have become incompatible with my life choices. 'It's just growing up,' Yes says. 'Easier for some of us than others.'" Unlike books with a different set of timelines that benefit from carefully signposted offramps into the others, this story is about the lived experience of an adult's reckoning process. Look at the title. The memories of life as it was, and as it can never be again, are accurately presented as they happen. Never once did I think "what in tarnation brought that up?"

Speaking of tarnation, Author Kimberly is exiled Texan as am I. It felt so much like going home to the place that made me but doesn't want me to read the memories...it was healing for Kit and it was healing for me to look at the way things were before there was another place to call home. In the course of her escape with her GBFF, which we know will be temporary, her inner monologue gets searingly honest: "Nobody knows me, but they still need me, all of them. Nobody wants a mother too sad to make a sandwich, a wife too crazy to fuck, a friend who sounds insane. They need me in the grocery store, in the bedroom, at brunch. They need me to be available and so I am, or my body is. The body goes around fulfilling my obligations. The body makes grilled cheese and gives blow jobs and gets ready to fly off to god knows where with her brokenhearted best friend."

It is motherhood. It is adulthood, it is caretaking, it is being the one who knows how to fix stuff. This tells the entire history of how one adult is trapped into, trapped by, the needs of others intersecting with the need in one's self to give what one never got. Many are the ones who want to receive this gift, few care to offer it:

It seems to me these lost pastimes—being a psychonaut and being slutty—are connected. Maybe because they're two things I enjoyed being that I'm not allowed to be anymore. Identities that induced a feeling of security, false as it might have been. My old coping mechanisms have become incompatible with my life choices. "It's just growing up," Yes says. "Easier for some of us than others."

Simple truth. Hard to argue with it, and often too easy to use as a weapon against one.

I'm describing a five-star read. I don't have five stars up top. What happened there? The ending. I don't mean, as I usually do when I type those words, that I did not like how the story ended, or felt that it did not end so much as stopped. I am actually stumped. I feel a bit stupid...what just happened here?...and why? So I had to wonder where to go with my pleasure in the read until those last ~75pp.

I realized as I sat with my thoughts that I was *having* thoughts...I was wondering why Kit chose straightness (ugh) why she never opted for...you get the point. No story that makes me think this hard this long after reading it means it needs most of that fifth star in acknowledgment of that power in the storytelling.