“Sometimes at night I think about whales loose in the ocean living their lives, and it upsets me,” Kimberly King Parsons writes in her debut novel, We Were the Universe (Knopf). Hilarious, profane, and profound all at once, the book tells the story of Kit, a 20-something mother consumed by lust for a mysterious woman she meets at the playground. She’s also grieving her younger sister and debating whether to get back into LSD, which once bound the two of them together.
“I often feel as if I’ve been placed on a random corner by some giant, unseen claw,” Kit muses. She’s going through the motions of being present for her daughter and husband, of keeping a lid on her grief. But a grocery store panic attack and a botched weekend getaway make it clear that seeing a sliding scale therapist (her payments are “at the ass end”) and going on mandated date nights won’t be enough to make her okay.
Parsons, whose short story collection, Black Light, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, was interested in writing a different kind of queer story, featuring a young mother who was both horny and haunted.
“I’m always wanting to read books about queer/bi parents, especially those in what seem like heteronormative relationships or families from the outside. I’m also very interested in books that center queerness without necessarily featuring a fraught coming-out narrative or heartbreak,” Parsons said. “Kit is a queer mom happily married to a straight dude, and this is fine for all parties—her sexuality is just one of many aspects of her identity.”
In advance of We Were the Universe’s release on May 14, Vanity Fair and Parsons discussed—via email—queer motherhood, psychedelics, and the mysterious specificity of desire.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: Where did the seed for We Were the Universe come from?
Kimberly King Parsons: In October 2015, my friend Tom and I went to a writing retreat in Montana. My youngest son was just under two years old, and it was my first time being away from him. I was having a really hard time concentrating on the lectures and workshops, so one day Tom and I skipped class and went swimming at this insanely beautiful place called the Boiling River (sadly, I learned it was wiped out by floods in 2022). I’m not sure if it was the gorgeous setting, the heat, or the hormones (I was still breastfeeding and had to pump constantly on that trip), but I was overtaken by this intense, druggy tug of nostalgia. I wouldn’t begin writing We Were the Universe for another five years, but when I did, I started with Kit in hot water—a haunted woman fantasizing about the substances of her youth.
Kit and her little sister, Julie, share a kind of sibling clairvoyance. During a psychedelic trip, Julie telepathically makes a harrowing confession to Kit, and then tries to take it back. Years after Julie has died, Kit still feels her trying to communicate. I love that the novel doesn’t take a stance on whether these moments are “real” or whether they’re Kit projecting her grief onto the universe, looking for Julie everywhere. What drew you to writing about mysticism in this way?
Since I was little, I’ve had intense connections with certain people in my life. We don’t just share a feeling of closeness, though that’s part of it, but our interactions seem to defy logic—stuff like identical hunches and gut feelings, wild coincidences, unspoken communication. I never tip into full magical realism in my fiction, but the idea of transcendent connection comes up in nearly everything I’ve written. I think, ultimately, these weird soul links have as much to do with intimacy, biology, and our acute animal perception as they do with magic—the many amazing things the body knows, senses, and understands before the intellect catches up.
That body sense manifests in paradoxical ways. Kit is at once extremely aware of her body and estranged from it. Seeing a fluffy lamb on wobbly legs makes her lactate. Meanwhile, her desires, when she’s not totally ignoring them, “are an annoyance, a Cheerio crushed under a bare foot.” Something to take care of akin to mopping up a mess you made on the floor. This contradiction feels so emblematic of both motherhood and grief—how your body is yours, but not yours.
Exactly—Kit’s experience here mirrors mine, both in motherhood and in grief. The body is such a miracle and such a problem!
The “reams of urgent porn” that Kit consumes when she finally has a weekend away from her daughter really highlight that. I love how you describe her appetite: “guys with scrunchies in their hair, women in ankle socks, women with sex machines, sex machines with sex machines, women letting coned ice cream melt all down their hands.” Do you feel like desire is as mysterious and surprising as motherhood and grief?