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Lloronas went onstage around 1 a.m. January 1, 2020, a loaded hour in retrospect, which at the time felt dizzying and full of promise; a new decade was upon us, and Iwastipsyinacheap Penny Lane coat. Punk rock pulsed from the small stage of Slackers, a club on San Antonio's St. Mary's Strip. The women of Lloronas seduced me with their playful rage, and for a few moments I was only a body being emptied of its worries. There is a reason rock and roll keeps company with sex and drugs: they allow us to disassociate into something loose and transcendent. In her debut novel, Kimberly King Parsons departs from the usual beats of band literature: in We Were the Universe, we see that the most punk rock act is failure. This is a story of a band and its ashes.
We Were the Universe hinges on a constant exchange of energy, as characters drain each other of all they have to give. New moms melt on park benches, watching their children under the heat of the Texas sun; a dead sibling haunts her living sister on phone lines, in hotel rooms, atthe grocery store; a withholding mother hoards newspapers and trinkets and waits for others to clean up the mess. There is piss and lactation and decay; motherhood, it turns out, is very punk.
The narrator, Kit, is marooned in North Texas suburbia, a young mom (by millennial standards at least) still mourning the death of her younger sister, Julie, who died three years prior. She spends her days in the throes of motherhood's demanding monotony, taking her daughter Gilda to this playground and that playground, watching her toddler gymnastics class, wiping down her sticky skin. Though drained, she knows her audience needs more: "Nobody wants a mother too sad to make a sandwich, a wife too crazy to fuck, a friend who sounds insane." Kit is restless and misses psychedelics and casual fucking, but is too invested in her commitment to "good" motherhood and to monogamy to indulge. Her mind drifts to her youth in a desolate small town in West Texas where she once tripped with Julie and her friends, melting into a pink carpet on a trailer floor, and where today her...