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

I haven't had a cigarette since we left the City and I feel a little high sucking this one down in the frictionless air. I have secretly had a pack of cigarettes with me at all times for eight months now. I'd like to say that I've had them since after I weaned Honey but if someone is surveilling the search history on my Institute computer which I suppose they could be apart from visa questions they would find many variations of "nicotine" "breastmilk" "nursing" "damage" "bad" etc. The problem with reproduction is that it is stressful, I mean becoming pregnant having the baby raising the baby, and all the measures I employ to deal with stress involve some measure of self-harm, and once you have a baby in or around your body that body is no longer just your own to harm. Engin has some investment in it, of course, not wanting me to die an early death, and shortly after we got married he took what I consider to be a rankly hypocritical position about my smoking, since he has smoked since infancy practically and I'm sure he's sucking them down on his mom's balcony right this moment, that is, morning his time. Unfortunately for him, given the various demands on my physical person over the last two-plus years smoking is now what I consider to be a feminist issue and I take a big drag and watch the smoke go out in the cooling air and think how every time I quit smoking I invest that last cigarette with a lot of ceremony—big, weighty drags, clasped hands, heart lifted up in supplication to God. But I can't remember the last time that I nursed Honey, and that really was the last time, the last time in the history of man that I had my baby at my breast.

This reminds me that my breast pump is still sitting in the basement of Oberrecht Hall. I remember this approximately once a week but while I was on campus I couldn't bring myself to go down the three flights to get it. It's in Ted's server closet, which is tiny and full of whirring machines and one office chair and kept at sixty-three degrees. Ted and I had a system, which was that I would go in there and turn off the AC and lock the door and disrobe and attach myself to the pump and if he needed to come in and check on the servers he would knock which thank god never happened. Sometimes I would go in there and find an orange or a little stack of paper napkins on the table, and know that Ted had shortly beforehand been sitting in the seat and eating his lunch and futzing with his servers. Ted has very long fingernails, which I imagined digging deep into the skin of the orange. I thought about this when I was half naked in his chair with plastic hoses attached to my breasts, and the little bottles of milk placed around his desk and on his papers and next to his servers.

Honey has stopped screaming and it is now very, very quiet and dark. A light pops on in the house behind us, neighbors I don't know.

The issue with the breast pump was that the things it came with, flanges they are called, were too big for my nipples. A whole great chunk of my breast was pulled in along with the nipple, and the skin blistered against the plastic as it was chafed by the motion of the pump. I found online a smaller insert, 22.5 millimeters, but the insert wasn't compatible with the tube thing that the flange stuck in, so that I had to stick it into the original too-large flange, and then stick that into the tube, and some of the milk sort of stuck between the insert and the flange and dripped all over the table when I took them apart. Invariably during the assembly or de-assembly one of the flanges would fall on the linoleum and I'd pick it up covered with hair and fuzz, and I would wipe it off with my clothes and the hand sanitizer that sat on Ted's desk, or one of his napkins. I asked Engin if I had in his estimation smaller than usual nipples, and he asked why and I got waylaid looking up the Turkish word for flange and I never found out about his estimation of the relative size of my nipples.

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.