Kit is in her early 20s. She is a young, stay at home, mom. Her daughter, Gilda, is a constant source of joy and pride for her. Gilda is very hilarious , the description of her were very real to me. Because of Kit’s youth, she often reflects upon identity. A few years ago, she lost her younger sister, Julie. Getting pregnant with Gilda was an accident, and brought Kit headfirst into marriage and motherhood. Losing the identity of sister, bandmate, party girl, bisexual, girl, Kit is discovering who she is without the decoration of her “former” life.

Haven’t we all felt like this? You look in the mirror and you see an old, middle-aged lady. When inside your brain, you still feel like a 22-year-old that shouldn’t really have any responsibilities.

This book is very well written, I loved the character of Pete, her best friend. The narrative goes back-and-forth between her reminiscing about being a child, and what is going on in the current day, which isn’t much. The downside to this book is that nothing much happens. If you’re looking for a lot of plot, this book really isn’t for you. It almost feels like reading someone’s journal, as most of what we’re reading is internal dialogue.

Although boring in parts, it’s a reflective book.
Thank you to NetGalley and AA Knopf

𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒆 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒓𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 𝒅𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒆𝒅.

This novel makes me think of how young parents sometimes feel with the “I used to be cool” vibe. At the start of the novel, Kit, a mother who just beats being a teen mom, explains that while she may be with her little girl Gilda at the playground, she is also in the past, when she was a freshman in art class. Naturally, as lively children do, Gilda carries her back to the present bolding demanding Kit to, ‘watch me Mama.’ The past continues to call, and trying to keep her brain cells alive that are now consumed by mothering her vivacious child, she befriends a sexy mom who is far more interesting than the usual, bland crowd. She fantasizes about sex and strangers most days, like bad dad, even when hours pass by waiting at Gilda’s gymnastics class. Adulthood means spending time with her best friend Pete, which requires doing so with her daughter in tow, adhering to her strict routines. They are taking a trip to Montana, leaving her partner Jad, who is steady and nothing like her explosive absent father was, to care for their child so heartbroken Pete, who broke up with his boyfriend, can heal through a MNE.

Their lives can change for the better, he believes, with a Meaningful Nature Experience but Kit’s only highs have ever been through drug trips. Those days are over for her now, the responsible mom that she is, she knows her breastmilk must be drug free. The thought of nature triggers the past, when her little sister Julie was still alive, and they were having their first acid trip with their friend. With time to herself, taking hikes with Pete, it’s like Julie is there feeding her memories of their band “We Were the Universe”, a bit famous in their little town of Wink, where her mother still lives, struggling with her own issues. The guilt creeps in, having left her sister behind for college, the stuff Julie got up to in her absence, and everything that followed. She is suspended in time, lost to grief and acid trips aren’t an option to escape her pain. Funny and heartbreaking, it’s the aftermath of loss and the truth of facing uncomfortable, hard situations, like the one with her mother.

Yes, read it.

Published May 14, 2024

Knopf

For better or worse, Kit, the narrator of We Were the Universe, has an inner life that is far more dangerous than her exterior life. When we meet her on the park bench, watching her three year old, Gilda, bullying her way through the playground, she is fantasizing about having a romantic relationship with the mother on the bench next to her, and affair that his steamy and satisfying and also outside of her marriage. This escapism is consistent in her life, always clouding the boringness of marriage and motherhood, and always largely relevant because she is doing her best to avoid thinking about her dead sister, her hoarder mother, and the life that she now has that is so far away from her teenage years. 

For better or worse, Kit is a compelling, well constructed character. Kimberly King Parsons writes a woman who knows she is having issues with the loss of her sister coming only months before the birth of Gilda, and it was easy for her to switch one love with the other at the beginning, but now the cracks in the facade are causing problems in her life. She is starting to have panic attacks, become unreliable, and the fantasy world that she hides behind is starting to seep too much into her daily routine. This all feels like a natural progression, and what she does not realize is that she is surrounded by the people that notice these changes in her quicker than she has notice it herself. Her husband, Jad, is a fairly minor character in the novel, smaller even that her friend Pete who takes her to Montana for a weekend to get her away from Gilda and her life for a few days. Both Jad and Pete are supportive and only want the best for her, and you can feel the honest concern by them. This this brings wholesomeness to her life at a time when everything is growing more chaotic, impulsive, and falling apart. 

For better or worse, We Were the Universe is a debut novel that is just as compelling and wonderful as Black Light, the short story collection that preceded this. Some readers might not like that this is heavily about motherhood or that Kit is doing her own things without regard to her family, her child, or those around her, but Kimberly King Parsons does a great job making this story her own and telling it only how she can tell it. She writes characters that feel like they could be walking down the street next to me, and I would not think anything of it until they stop to dig through a trash can because they see something salvageable. Every story told by her has been fabulous, and this has made me want to go back and reread Black Light.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is not a humorous book. It's heavy and filled with some daunting themes. I couldn't connect with the character and I'm not sure if it was that she's so much younger than I am or if I just didn't like her. Probably both. But this novel is ALL up inside her head, which I found to be burdensome to me. It's stream of consciousness mostly and meanders at times and jerks quickly at others. I don't think of myself as a prude but I was overwhelmed at how much she thinks about sex with just about everyone in her orbit. And the drug usage contributed to the convoluted feel of the book. I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

We Are the Universe slips from ridiculous to profound and back to ridiculous over and over again. In that way, it felt so true to life, to parenthood, to life after loss. This one was a bit of a slow start for me. I struggled to connect immediately to the main character but once I did, oh did I come to love her! I loved how she could look her truth [about her daughter, her mother, her husband, her drug use, her sexuality] in the face and acknowledge it for what it is, a part of her. Kimberly King Parsons has a way of writing "broken women" that tethers them together, presents them in a way that is in and of itself, complete. This book felt like a looking glass into a different universe, one where women [mothers] see their own "shameful" thoughts, actions, words without judgement or self-loathing. I loved myself, my mother, my sister and my daughter a little deeper for having read this.

<i>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.</i>

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, <i>Black Light</i>, 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.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.

DNF at 23%.

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons delves into the raw, unfiltered experience of motherhood through the eyes of a hyper-sexual, bisexual narrator. The book's exploration of the loneliness and chaos inherent in motherhood draws parallels to much contemporary women’s literature. However, despite its intriguing themes and moments of engaging prose, the novel ultimately falls short in several critical areas.

The novel's stream-of-consciousness writing style is both its strength and its downfall. While it effectively captures the protagonist's chaotic inner world, the constant shift between real-time interactions with her daughter and flashbacks to her past creates a disjointed narrative. This back-and-forth pacing can be jarring, making it difficult for the reader to stay engaged with the storyline. The long, uninterrupted chapters exacerbate this issue, contributing to a sense of narrative whiplash that detracts from the overall reading experience.

Another significant aspect that impacts the book's appeal is the portrayal of the narrator's bisexuality. The hyper-sexual depiction of the protagonist feeds into harmful stereotypes, reducing her sexuality to mere behavior rather than a multifaceted aspect of her identity. This approach not only feels voyeuristic but also undermines the complexity and depth that could have been explored in her character. The narrator's constant objectification of others adds to the discomfort, making it difficult to connect with her on a deeper level.

Character development in We Were the Universe is another area where the novel struggles. The narrator's actions and attitudes often feel inconsistent and underdeveloped. For example, her insistence on being a stay-at-home mom is contradicted by her resentment toward her husband's life outside the home. This inconsistency, combined with the lack of substantial growth or insight into her character, leaves the reader feeling disconnected and uninvested in her journey.

Despite these critiques, there are moments in the novel that shine. Parsons' ability to articulate the existential void of motherhood and the feral nature of the protagonist's desires offers a raw, unfiltered look at the complexities of modern womanhood. These glimpses of brilliance, however, are overshadowed by the chaotic structure and stereotypical representation that dominate the narrative.

Ultimately, We Were the Universe is a novel with potential that is hindered by its execution. The stream-of-consciousness style, while evocative, becomes tiresome and disorienting. The stereotypical portrayal of bisexuality and the inconsistent character development further detract from the book's impact. At 23% of the way through, it became clear that this book would not surpass a three-star rating for me, leading to my decision to stop reading.

For readers who enjoy deeply introspective and chaotic narratives, We Were the Universe might still hold appeal. However, those looking for a more coherent plot and nuanced character exploration may find themselves similarly disappointed.

I usually like quirky books but this just didn’t do it for me. It started off promising but just went too far into subversive sex and wallowing. Unfortunately it was a miss for me.

This was a beautifully written book until the ending arrived. The ending just fell flat and didn’t hit as hard as the rest of the story. As someone who lost a young sibling in a similar situation maybe I just identified too much with that part of the story. It’s terrible being haunted.

Grief. Motherhood. Marriage. Montana (RIP to the boiling river but I got so excited reading those parts).

This book was so relatable and I highlighted so many passages that made me feel a certain kind of way:

“I need a new best friend, somebody who knows nothing about me.”

“I have a picture in my mind of Julie, her face half buried in shag fur, eyes closed—I wish there was some way to lift it out of my mind and frame it and show it to Gilda.”

“People will show you everything you need to know about them by the way they do something ordinary.”

I loved how normally abnormal this one was. There’s no big climax to the story but it still drew me in and captivated me the entire time. Every single passage about motherhood was so relatable. And the way you’re learning to be a mom while still learning how to peel yourself off of your own mother and her baggage and trauma?

(I am giving this 4 stars due to my own personal trauma with pornography. Otherwise it was excellent.)

sad girl lit meets motherhood

kit is a former grunge kid turned mom, from shooting LSD and other drugs to pumping milk, kit is struggling to raise her mischievous 4 year old daughter. having lost her little sister while pregnant, kit is raiding the waves of grief, seeing traces of her sister in almost every one she meets.

on a trip to the mountains that was supposed to be relaxing and healing, kit instead is thrown into her past, her childhood addled with drugs, the all girl band she started with her sister and the facts of her sisters death.

this was so heartbreaking, tender, funny, a bit messy and complicated but ultimately I felt a lot for kit and her attempts of breaking generational trauma, of bettering herself for her child and not repeating mistakes. also I love a book with a fireball of a kid. there were some parts that dragged on for me, in particular the parts where parsons would go on and on about how a drug trip felt for the MCs but in the end I did enjoy my time with we were the universe

One of my favorite genres of book is “women who don’t quite have their lives together,” and I would say this book definitely falls into that category. Reeling from the death of her sister Julie, Kit is our protagonist as she grapples with grief and its pervasive effect on her day-to-day life in the throes of motherhood. We spend time with Kit in the present tense—often with her daughter Gilda or her friend Pete—and also in the past, which mainly revolves around Kit’s relationship with Julie. The past is a trippy place; a lot of drugs are involved. The present is trippy, too, as Kit navigates her grief, a vacation with Pete, motherhood, and some misadventures, including a drug dealer in her local park. My favorite part of this book was the way the author painted Julie: she was an addict, yes, but more importantly she was a sister, a daughter, a singer, a genius. Like Kit, I felt sad that we didn’t get to know a world where Julie lived.

2.5⭐️. While this book tackled some really engaging themes, I felt like the writing style left a lot to be desired. The author was constantly flipping back and forth between present and past memories -- sometimes within the same paragraph-- and it left me feeling a bit whip-lashed. We are following a main character as she is experiencing motherhood as a young parent, grieving the loss of her sister, struggling with a mother who experiences hoarding and showing up for her friendships. There is a lot of conversation about drug and alcohol usage, lending to the confusion as we follow the plot. Ultimately, I felt really disconnected from this novel and found it really heavy rather than dark-comedy (as it was described).

(t/y to Net Galley & Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an advance reading copy for exchange of an honest review)

We Were the Universe is the story of grief and acceptance told from a sister struggling with moving on from the death of her sister. It’s been four years since Julie died. Kit tells the story of her present life without Julie while constantly remembering stories of them growing up. Presently Julie is a stay at home mom (to the wildest almost 4 year old I’ve ever read about) and wife. Her life is filled with breast feeding and going to the park. Every so often, something will happen that will trigger a memory of her sister. The flash backs were frequent and long. I felt empathy for Kit and her situation but I did not feel much for Julie. While her problems were quite sad, she never wanted better for herself. A very unfortunate experience for this family and I am glad Kit was able to come out of the other side!

i'd like to preamble this review by saying that this was a dnf for me, but i think that kimberly king parsons is a very skilled, compelling writer and i WILL be picking up more of her work.

my problems with this book are:

1.) i was expecting something about a lesbian character
2.) i didn't realize how much of this book would include motherhood

as far as our main character kit, we're introduced to her and she's married to a man. she's clearly attracted to women (there was one she mooned during a scene early on). i don't know why i was expecting a lesbian character, but this was a disappointment, though not really a dealbreaker for me as i love reading about queer characters of all kinds.

the maternity/motherhood stuff for me is a no-go. there's this trend in fiction that whenever a character is a mother, they want to smell their child (in this book) and like, describe their smell as milky (can't remember if in this book, but wouldn't be surprised), or lick their ear to cure ear infections (not in this book that i know of but Traumatic). i hate this. i hate the way women in books talk about their kids and being a parent.

this book gave me the extra ick of including a child who i think might be an incarnate of satan (in the way all kids are, not literally in the prose) and who was always trying to merge her sticky-ass body with her mom. i don't blame her mom for being fed up.

obviously this is a super personal thing for me and why i had to dnf, though when i left the story kit was on a roadtrip without her kid (naturally, the child's father is useless and can't functionally parent without kit at home which is just straight-up more ick for me).

this book seems to be delving into the death of kit's dead sister and perhaps kit reclaiming some sense of autonomy on a drug-filled trip into the woods with her bff without her family. i hope kit somehow gets her happiness.

and you, if you read this book and feel seen, i'm really happy for you. anyway, three stars because at the end of the day kimberly king parsons' prose was lush and compelling, but no, not the book for me.

Lubbock native Kimberly King Parsons says that her debut novel, We Were the Universe, “is about Texas, motherhood and psychedelics.”

It is also, she says, about sisterhood, grief, nostalgia and how one’s past choices inform the present. Her protagonist and narrator, Kit, is “filthy-minded and irreverent,” so while the book contains both hilariously dark humor and terrible sadness, there also are many, many pages concerning drugs — all kinds, but LSD and mescaline are Kit’s favorites, and not microdoses, either.

In fact, the story of her teenage experimentation with a powerful decoction of San Pedro cactus goes on so long that the reader may also begin feeling slightly trippy. But Kit is nostalgic about those days, and she doesn’t regret any of it. “Psychedelics prepare you for the craziest thing imaginable on this earth: a new human tunneling through an older human’s body.”

There’s also abundant sex depicted, both gay and straight, fantasy and real. Kit, who is happily married to a very sweet guy, is bisexual. Her fantasies roam freely, as do her memories. (The novel is dedicated to Parsons’ mother, to whom the writer winsomely apologized on an Instagram video: “Sorry about all the porn, Mom.”)

Kit is a stay-at-home mom who, at barely 25, can’t quite figure how she ended up living this weirdly straight life in Pivot, a fictional community in the northern suburbs of Dallas. She is obsessive about her wild, precocious little daughter, Gilda, because she and her younger sister Julie were severely under-parented by their own disengaged mother. In addition, Kit is haunted by dreams and memories of Julie, who died at 19 in a car crash after tragically sinking into addiction and wasting her brilliant musical talent, a la Amy Winehouse.

So Kit spends her days taking Gilda to the park, to gymnastics, to the supermarket. “I’m plugged into nothing, I have no deadlines, no personal ambitions, no professional goals of any kind. I’m dedicated to aimlessness and my adorable, needy family. Pinning Gilda down, brushing her tiny teeth, slicking her hair into disobedient pigtails.”

She develops instant, sex-fantasy-driven crushes on people, male and female; sometimes she becomes curious enough about a stranger to follow them on the street, even tail them home. She watches a lot of online porn. She does “endless, invisible, critical labor. Dishes. Laundry. So much mopping.”

Kit constantly thinks back to the three-girl band that she and her best friend, Yesenia, put together with Julie in their West Texas hometown of Wink. Wink — also the hometown of Roy Orbison — is a “spiteful little town” whose smallness “can’t be overstated.” Kit left Wink as soon as she humanly could. Yet she keeps returning to see her mother, Tammy, and her best friend, bandmate and surrogate sister. “Sometimes I hate where I’m from,” Kit says, “but the shape of Texas on a map — I can’t explain it — it chokes me up.”

Their band was called You Are the Universe, and the people who came to their shows really only came to see Julie. “Having access to genius — growing up with it sleeping in the twin bed next to you — it crystallizes your shortcomings,” Kit says. “There’s always been a tremendous gulf between my taste, which is excellent, and my ability, which is nonexistent.”

The extraordinary connection between sisters Kit and Julie, it seems, may be replicated between Kit and her daughter, Gilda. The book’s title is a callback to the sisters’ band, when the three girls were indeed their own universe.

But Gilda, who seems to have inherited the singing voice of the aunt she never knew, has now become the center of her mother’s world. One can imagine Kit whispering the name of her band to her sleeping child: You are the universe. That’s what our loved ones are, after all.

Kit hasn’t fully processed the grief she has from the death of her sister and it is starting to affect her life. Kit got pregnant senior year of her generally unsuccessful college career, dropped out, got married and her sister Julie died before her baby was born. Kit and Julie had basically raised themselves since their dad left and while their mother raised them, she essentially left them to raise themselves. Trying to be a better mother, Kit has adopted the attached parenthood method (the co-sleeping, never leave your kid’s side type of parenting) and can’t figure out why she is so depressed; her best friend Pete takes her away for the weekend to try and break through to her.

This book has gotten a ton of amazing reviews so I’m assuming I am just not the audience for it. I’m also sure if I discussed with someone or a group I could analyze it and have a great discussion. However, I am going to say that I didn’t enjoy it because it featured a main character and themes that generally grate on me. This just falls in a genre of books that I shouldn’t read and if I had known that I would not have picked it up (but sometimes there is no way to know). It’s heavily character driven and if you cannot stand the character it makes the read incredibly hard. The writing is good but, again not for me.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC to review

Absolutely a case of "it's not you, it's me." While I've enjoyed literary fiction about mothers and motherhood in the past, something about the writing style of this book just failed to grab me. I found myself unable to empathize with Kit, Gilda, or any of the other characters who populate this book. Given Kit's status as a bisexual mother grieving the loss of her sister, I was frustrated by how little I was able to connect with her character. It's so rare to see bisexual characters simply existing in ways that are unrelated to their bisexuality, and I was willing to give this book so many passes for that alone, but, in the end, something about it just didn't quite connect with me. I would still recommend this for anyone interested by the premise, though, as I definitely feel this is a real case of my personal experiences and expectations impacting my enjoyment of the book.

This was a great book! I very much enjoyed it and I look forward to reading the author’s next work! Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

I’m still not sure if I loved this or didn’t like it. But I know I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. The book is the story of Kit, who is a new-ish mother and who is struggling to processes the death of her younger sister. We live mostly in Kit’s head, and different timelines and focuses shift, with no clear start and stop or beginning or end, they are all just woven in like a braid. Being in Kit’s head is tricky at times, and honestly, just tough to get through at certain points.

Some of the descriptions of how she thought about her own child and motherhood are some of the most real that I have read. And while I did not share a similar headspace with Kit after the births of my children, I did find small nuggets that really hit in a way that other books have never.

The ending was not what I was expecting, but I also don’t know how I would have done it differently. I didn’t love it, in that it seemed to just push a little too quickly after this long, languid (at times slog) of a narrative.

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC!