“My daughter is backlit by the sun, waving and calling to me, but I’m split—half of me is here on the playground with her, half is in the past with the girl who taught me about negative space.”
So begins Kimberly King Parsons’s funny, glittering debut novel, We Were the Universe (Knopf, 2024), which centers on a young mother, Kit, who is struggling with the death of her sister, Julie. The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
Kit describes herself as having “no deadlines, no personal ambition, no professional goals of any kind.” Her days consist of “Pinning Gilda down, brushing her tiny teeth, slicking her hair into disobedient pigtails. Endless, invisible, critical labor.” Kit uses porn as a coping mechanism for her grief, fantasizes about a mysterious mom at the local playground, and avoids “Bad Dad” at the grocery store, a man who makes her feel weak. Kit is married to Jad, a sweet, tattooed vegan who runs in the office park after work at a discount home hospice supply company. He checks out meditation books for Kit from the library.
The daughter backlit by the sun is Gilda. Parsons’s descriptions of Gilda made me empathize with Kit in an almost physical sense; I felt the exhaustion of being Gilda’s mother. When Gilda wants Kit to stop pushing her in the stroller, she “skids her glittery plastic sandals on the ground like brakes.” Playing on some plastic fake rabbits with another girl she’s commandeered on the playground, she shouts,
“’See, Mama?’ Gilda and her captive mount the rabbits and rock on them. The sister copies Gilda—one hand up to twirl a slow, invisible lasso.
‘See us?’
Lord Gilda, yes.”
Reading Gilda—the way she glows and commands attention—I couldn’t help thinking of another Gilda: Rita Hayworth in the film of the same name, about another fiery leading lady—a dancer. Kit’s Gilda, too, has a kind of star quality, albeit more stroller and rainbow lights, less noir and sultry singing. And, like Hayworth, she’s got style: “Her favorite part of gymnastics is the gold leotard—‘leoturd,’ she says—that she wears over sparkly silver tights.”
That our introduction to Gilda is an image of her literally backlit by the sun is no accident. Like Black Light, Parsons’s first book—a collection of stories I loved for its depictions of girlhood, its sentences, and its straight-up verve—light is everywhere in We Were the Universe.
The epigraph to Black Light is from the poet Richard Siken: “Cut me open and the light streams out.”
The epigraph to We Were the Universe is Of Montreal, the pop band: “No matter where we are / We’re always touching by underground wires.”
It’s easy to overuse the word and concept of light in writing, but in Parsons’s work, it crackles, adds texture, illuminates a kind of sticky darkness. It serves, rather than distracts. It appears in the weirdness of everyday life: Gilda’s sparkly gold water bottle, Kit’s past adventures with psychedelics on a pink rug (“Pinky is fur and chemicals and stardust”). Inevitably, it’s linked to the presence of Julie. Julie’s mouth “was a rip in the scrim of her body, light spilling.”
To tell Kit’s story—and thus, the story of Julie and Kit—We Were the Universe jumps back and forth in time, weaving between the present and the past, a structure that mirrors Kit’s grief. We get glimpses of dusty Wink, Texas, where the two grew up with their mother. We see the sisters steal the centerfolds from their mom’s boyfriend’s Playboy subscription, imitating the looping scroll of the models’ handwriting in giddy, fascinated glee. We see Julie’s burgeoning talent as a singer and her burgeoning addictions. Kit’s love and admiration for Julie is so obviously powerful, yet Parsons is careful not to present a glorified version of the dead sister, laying out different Julies like portraits from a Polaroid, shots that document the private, in-between moments of a life:
Tween Julie in a gigantic T-shirt in front of an open refrigerator, eating sliced ham, standing on one leg. Gap-toothed, pigtailed Julie in the back seat of Mom’s Buick, fogging up the window with her breath. She used the side of her hand to make baby footprints, the tips of her fingers to make baby toes. She marched them across the glass like that. Grown Julie unwashed, diminished, behind a closed bathroom door, arms bruised and talking to nobody, hair matted on her head.
In the present, Kit and her best friend, Pete, who has recently been dumped by his boyfriend, embark on a trip to Montana for a “Meaningful Nature Experience” (MNE), to rest, hike, and heal. The MNE is Pete’s idea. Pete, with his new hiking boots and his goldenrod-colored pants and his pot of French cream. (Parsons has a gift for funny, acerbic dialogue, which shines in Kit’s relationship with Pete.) There, the two go hiking under the big sky and soak in “the Boiling River,” a body of steamy, roiling water in a cracked, cratered land.
Still, Kit can’t escape what she went to the mountains to forget. “There’s Julie, on the periphery of every memory,” she says, racked by guilt, in another jump back in time:
What was she doing every night? I thought of her alone in our room, how my empty bed drove her out to the screened-in porch with Mom and even further, to the worst parties and drug houses, to the meth trailers out in Nayleen and Moffet, towns you’d be stupid to even stop and piss in. I was living a life while Julie wallowed in Wink, wasting her last years. It seemed I’d served as some sort of guardrail for her. Once I was gone, she careened.
This part in the recollection—it’s my snag.
That snag is the defining characteristic of Kit’s grief, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s the thing that tethers her to the past, despite the people trying to bring her back, including a sliding-scale therapist Kit lies to on a regular basis, telling him she is training for a marathon. As the snag does its dark work in Montana, Julie moving in and out of Kit’s thoughts—what Kit calls “memory hemorrhages”—we learn Julie ultimately died in a car accident. At first, I questioned so many memories lurching their way into the present, but the more I learned of Kit, the more those jagged moves, which come like switchbacks, made sense. While Pete and Kit lounge in the river, Kit thinks: “Pete is next to me but so is Julie, a prismatic blur. She is out of order, all the ages she’ll ever be.” Anyone who has lost someone they love will recognize this blurring of time and space, fact and fiction, version X of a person competing with version Y and Z, the urge to revisit how it all went down.
When I was a senior in college, one of my best friends, who was also my cousin, died in a car accident. For a long time after, P. appeared in my thoughts and dreams, invited and uninvited. She, like Julie, and Gilda, was a kind of star: she was an artist, and there was something about her that radiated light. Every death brings with it its own sadness, its own weird manifestations of grief. Perhaps, though, there are some people, like Julie, and P., who are quite literally harder, in their beauty and light and youth, to forget. To capture something of such people in art—including their flaws—is difficult. That Parsons has rendered so fully the character of Julie, while at the same time making us laugh, is a tribute to her skill and heart.
Parsons writes deftly of human connectedness. Here is Kit in Montana: “I miss the feeling of Gilda at my back, how she clings and repositions, threads her toes through mine, puts her damp little hand between my breasts. How she connects, asserts herself with my every move, completes the circuit of us even while we sleep.” They’re a circuit, something Gilda intuits, in that simple, beautiful way children do.
This sense of connectedness, coupled with all that darkness and light, lends Parsons’s writing a cosmic quality that suits its subject matter. This is especially true when Parsons writes about psychedelics. It is also true when she writes about Julie. In recalling a memory in which Kit and Julie experience the same visions in a dream, waking up at the same time in their room, Kit describes how Julie “had always been a sister who seemed to know what I was thinking, one who swam in my brain with me.”But the connection they experience in the dream is on another level altogether, a wild, speckled trip that joins them to one another.
Parsons leans into the idea of connectedness in one scene, especially, in which Kit and Julie get high on mescaline with friends. The writing in this section is gorgeous—a vivid mash-up of visions and sensations—and toward the end the book, readers will be rewarded with a powerful shift linked to this scene. I won’t spoil it here, except to say that it left me with a feeling of wonder at the ways in which we, as humans, are linked to one another, the way we burn through all kinds of darkness like stars smoldering in the night, how some people really are always touching, no matter where they are.
