WE WERE THE UNIVERSE, by Kimberly King Parsons
When you hear the phrase “grief novel,” relentless, wildly entertaining horniness probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s what Kimberly King Parsons’s singular debut novel, “We Were the Universe,” immediately delivers.
Even those already familiar with Parsons’s fearless wit and sizzling depictions of yearning (her 2019 story collection “Black Light” was longlisted for the National Book Award) would likely do well to buckle up first. The ride could not be more rewarding; Parsons’s transgressive boldness allows us to feel the soul in places that moderation simply cannot reach.
“We Were the Universe” is told in first person from the viewpoint of Kit, the young mother of the almost-4-year-old Gilda. Kit struggles with boundaries, getting Gilda to stop breastfeeding and porn addiction, but don’t judge. First of all, her thoughts are really fun to read (she wants to sleep with everyone she meets and she has very creative ideas about it); second, she is mourning the untimely death of her younger sister, Julie.
It isn’t just the loss of Julie that’s made Kit ultrathirsty: “My high school guidance counselor called me ‘pleasure-seeking,’” she recalls early on, “and I still don’t understand what’s so bad about that.” But now that Kit is a mom in the Dallas suburbs and monogamously married to her husband, Jad, her former coping mechanisms of casual sex and hallucinogens are unavailable to her.
That leaves the imagination. In the past, psychedelics served her as a valuable narrative engine, each trip providing “a story with a clear beginning, middle and end.” She prizes physical contact for these same reasons. (“Touch: It progresses, it’s forward-moving, impossible to walk back.”) And rather than bringing up ghosts, the bodies of others give Kit a chance to stick her head out the window of the haunted house of her sister’s death and breathe; sex is “a connection that frees you from yourself.”
Luckily, her fluid desires can pour into almost any space, whether it be a playground or a coffee shop. “It’s not that I want to masturbate in the vestibule of the Tiny Toads gymnastics class, specifically,” Kit confesses. “There’s nothing particularly erotic about the clown-colored interior and the frigid air-conditioning, the dead-eyed caregivers sitting in folding chairs, scrolling on their phones.” But if given a moment to think, she will do her best to use the escape hatch of libido.
“So often I’m adrift, a brain in a jar,” she reflects. Still, memory and grief can unexpectedly flood her thoughts. When a flashback hits her at the supermarket, she almost throws up in the checkout line and has to abandon the groceries as Gilda wails for the snacks they’re leaving behind. Kit can’t explain what’s happening to the store employee calling out after her: “Listen, I want to say. The extinction of my sister — the cosmos will not recover.”
Though Kit would prefer to fall back on her usual distractions (“I look at his hands, think about how he might help me take my life apart”), her best friend, Pete, has pressured her into accompanying him on a healing journey to Montana to seek out an MNE (Meaningful Nature Experience). She turns out to get more than she bargained for: a Meaningful Supernatural Experience.
Perceived contact from Julie — whether she’s jumping into another person’s body or joining an in-progress phone call unannounced — fans Kit’s grief to unbearable levels, even as she struggles to stay present with Pete, bathing in the biofilm (“a sticky, living movie, mineral pornography”) of a hot-springs-fed river.
These river soaks just aren’t kinky enough to keep Julie, or other fragmented memories of Kit’s pain that she’d rather escape, at bay. Her hallucinations resist linearity and shirk epiphany, except for the deepest truth she’s running from, a “warped jingle” that has been on repeat since Julie’s death: I don’t want to do any of this without you.
Ultimately, the structure of “We Were the Universe” comes to function like a psychedelic journey itself. Discursive modules open up context and click the kaleidoscopic lens of perspective, deepening and expanding everything we thought we knew. In both flashbacks and present action, “euphoria comes in waves, same as grief.” And though the book’s end brings a curtain-drop twist that is the plot-based equivalent of sudden mescaline clarity and awe, equally moving are the moments of joy found in the imagined interiority of Kit’s own fantasies.
Pretending can be a sanctuary, too, and depending on the situation sometimes that’s all we have. The stars in “We Were the Universe” also glimmer in the midst of the everyday. Having wet the family’s shared bed, Gilda invents an alternate story, a happier one: “That’s not pee,” she declares. “That’s champagne.” Parsons has gifted us with a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power. The love between Kit and Julie continues to grow despite Julie’s death. They were a universe; by the novel’s end, they feel like a multiverse.
WE WERE THE UNIVERSE | By Kimberly King Parsons | Knopf | 288 pp. | $28
