About We Were the Universe
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 home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to 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.
Kimberly King Parsons is the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a debut novel ranked number two on Time Magazine’s Best Books of 2024 and a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.” We Were the Universe was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was a best book of 2024 in Elle, Time, Oprah Daily, Nylon, Marie Claire, Marie Claire UK, and others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters First Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. An Oregon Book Award-winner, Parsons lives with her partner and children in Portland and teaches fiction in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University. She is the co-creator of The Fountain with the writer Chelsea Bieker.