Excerpt from The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I was in the hospital after I had Honey I told the nurse I wasn't sure the breastfeeding was working and she held my hand and looked into my eyes meaningfully and said, "You have all the tools you need." She was in her late forties and had very white, likely false teeth and tattooed eyeliner and lustrous black hair. I asked if she was from Paiute County because she pronounced the word "Sunday" just like my grandmother, "Sundy," but it turned out she was from Southern California with a mom from Okinawa, not like my grandmother at all. Her parents must have had a cross-cultural marriage, I think now. I should have asked her about that, not the breastfeeding which is in the scheme of things a very small part of life. I light another cigarette in honor of this woman, who reassured me that I could do it, feed Honey that is.

But once I went back to work, less and less started to come out of the tubes, and when I looked online about how to sustain the milk it seemed like an insane project—feed the baby, pump after feeding the baby, wake up and pump every two hours, etc., even if the baby is sleeping. So then I gave her formula, and the more formula I gave the less milk I made, and all the things that I read on BabyCenter came to pass vis-à-vis my "supply." I used to lie on the couch after work and look at pictures of nursing mothers on my phone and cry.

Engin's mother begged me to take more time off work for the good of the baby, but the standard leave policy of the University is six weeks off at 50 percent of your salary, and after many bewildering and misleading conversations with the morons in HR I elected to pay twenty-eight dollars out of every paycheck from the time I started work so that I could instead receive 70 percent of my salary, and then I took the additional six unpaid weeks that were my right by federal law, except Honey was born two weeks late and so that ate up two of those precious weeks and no one in HR ever told me I was legally entitled to tack them on later. I seem to always meet University staff who are just coming back from their second or third six-month absence but those are unpaid and in any case at the discretion of your supervisor. Hugo earnestly counsels his female graduate student against procreating and I felt that he felt that spending any additional time away from work would be frowned upon but to be honest I never even asked so I don't know and thus I went back when she was a mere ten weeks old. I felt so certain that the Institute truly could not function without me because there were grant reports to file and federal compliance to ensure and events to orchestrate and nobody knows how to do any of this but me and it all felt so important it would make me laugh now if I weren't so furious.

If I had just weaned her when I went back to work I never would have had to pump milk half naked and freezing in a closet with Ted's servers and napkins and oranges. Then again if I hadn't gone back to work at all I wouldn't have missed days weeks months with my child that I will never have again in this life.

My thoughts are finding their familiar melancholy groove of love for my child and sadness about our fleeting life together and then I think of Ellery whom I have assiduously avoided thinking about for most of the day, whose life on earth and with her own loving parents is now at an end, and I feel the mustard sting behind my eyes as her face and Maryam's face are summoned up before me from the night air. I never actually met Ellery despite being circumstantially wrapped up in her doom. Two months ago Maryam sent me a cheery progress report, two days before the accident, two days after having dinner with my sister-in-law Pelin and her husband Savas and their daughter Elifnaz, which I arranged so the girls—young women—could have some kind of cultural experience beyond carousing with hot guys from New Zealand in their Tünel-adjacent hostel. Attached to the e-mail was a photo, the two of them in the Rüstem Pasa Camii, Ellery a lively looking girl with great eyebrows white teeth huge smile, her face lit up with the secret joy game white girls feel upon donning a headscarf in a culturally appropriate context, and Maryam who is a Palestinian Christian from Bakersfield by way of Amman duckfacing with a worn mosque-provided paisley sheet wrapped around her short shorts and her arms wrapped around her friend. The memory of this photo, the thought of them setting out on their adventure with their backpacks and their water bottles and their bag of warm bread from Pelin's favorite bakery, and then of these smiling girls being thrown into the windshield of their speeding taxi with no seat belts is several orders of magnitude too large and awful to contemplate and I shake my head hard in the dark, a dimly remembered gesture of my father's whenever he wanted to stop thinking about something he didn't want to think about.

Excerpted from The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling. Copyright © 2018 by Lydia Kiesling. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.