Edan Lepucki got the earliest inklings of her novel Time’s Mouth from the stare of her then-infant daughter, Ginger. “She had these big blue eyes and this knowing gaze,” the author recalls in the bougainvillea-swept backyard of Civil Coffee, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park. “She would look at me in this way that was just like, ‘Oh, I’ve got your number.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, magic baby.’ And then I thought…‘Ooh, magic baby. What would it be like if you had a magical baby?’ I didn’t even know what that was.”
This is not the first time Lepucki has taken those weird, wild moments of motherhood and turned them into speculative fiction. Her 2014 debut, California, follows a young couple trying to survive a slow-motion apocalypse; after an accidental pregnancy, they must reckon with what it means to bring a baby into a world even more broken than ours. Her second book, Woman No. 17, is also intimately concerned with motherhood, creation, and survival.
Time’s Mouth involves three generations of a family whose lives are centered on a secret: the women can time-travel. Or, not time-travel exactly, Lepucki wants to clarify. “It’s more like astral projection,” she says. “But there are things happening, messing with time. It’s not a time machine or going back in a Bill & Ted kind of way. It’s the feeling that I’m really after…the nostalgia. The sweet pain of wanting to be back.” The difference between our nostalgia and that of her characters, of course, is that we can’t revisit the past, even in projected form.
The novel opens in the 1930s, in the cloistered world of Mystic, Connecticut. The family’s future matriarch, Ursa, is still a lonely little girl called Sharon. Eventually, she flees to 1950s San Francisco and then the woods of Santa Cruz, where she establishes an ersatz cult. In the 1980s, her son, Ray, and his wife, Cherry, who is pregnant with their daughter, Opal, move to Southern California. Along the way, we encounter Reichian therapy—which involves a mysterious force called orgone energy—and spectacular residences: the Queen Anne–style house where Ursa sets up shop and the Mid-City Los Angeles mansion, surrounded by an oil field, where Ray and Opal settle for a time.
Lepucki credits her fascination with real estate to her childhood in the city. “Domestic space is where everything happens in Los Angeles,” she explains. “I’m not a very woo-woo person, but I do think houses have history and feeling trapped in them.” And Time’s Mouth is absolutely fascinated by the ways we trap ourselves in our own histories.
All of this is only fitting, since writing a novel is, itself, something of a time travel exercise. “George Saunders, I saw him speak once,” Lepucki remembers. “And he talked about how a Buddhist believes in these different selves at every moment. And when you’re writing, you’re containing all these selves. There are all these past selves in the writing, which is so beautiful.”
Lepucki has had an unusual career arc: When California came out, her then-publisher, Hachette, was locked in a battle with Amazon over e-book pricing. The retail giant blocked preorders of Hachette books, which overwhelmingly affected early-career writers such as Lepucki. Stephen Colbert, himself a Hachette author, took offense and used his late-night show to encourage viewers to buy books via Powell’s, the Portland independent bookstore. He focused his campaign on a single debut novel, betting that he could make it a New York Times bestseller.
That book was California.
The strategy worked, and California became the most-preordered book in Hachette’s history. But lightning rarely strikes the same place twice, and Woman No. 17 failed to replicate that level of commercial success. “When you’re starting your career, you think, ‘I’m going to sell one book, and then I’m good,’” Lepucki says now of the experience. “But you’re only as successful as your last book, which is sort of heartbreaking. But it’s liberating, too, because you can make it new again.”
For her third novel, Lepucki decided to make it very new. “The first two books, they seem really different, but formally they’re actually very similar,” she observes. “A six-week timeline, two characters, alternating point of view.” So for Time’s Mouth, she got more expansive, spanning decades and using multiple perspectives.
“Every book, I go in totally naïve,” she says, laughing. “This can be easy!” But Time’s Mouth resisted her. Initially, Lepucki tried selling the book on proposal. When that didn’t happen, she wrote the whole thing, hoping a finished manuscript would be more palatable to publishers.
A second round of submissions, however, also ended in rejection. “This book taught me so much about persistence,” Lepucki acknowledges. “I learned a lot of humility. Definitely an ego check.” For this reason, she feels it’s important to talk about the experience. “People should know what it’s like to be a working writer,” she says.
Ultimately, there was a happy ending: Time’s Mouth ended up with Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint, who pushed Lepucki to take it further. “He kept saying, ‘Time travel’s cool. So what? What does it mean?’” Lepucki notes. “He really encouraged me to figure out what the deeper subjects were and to put them in the book.”
Those deeper subjects circle around questions of parenting and what we have to be willing to leave behind in order to gain a future for our families. Parenting, after all, often brings a heightened awareness of time’s movement. As much as we want to meet our kids’ future selves, we’re equally loath to let go of their past ones.
Fittingly, then, Time’s Mouth came out on Lepucki’s youngest son’s fourth birthday; he hadn’t been born when she began work on the book. Ginger, the baby with that bewitching gaze, is soon to start second grade. Lepucki’s oldest, meanwhile, is entering junior high. “When he graduated from elementary school,” she says, “I fucking cried my eyes out the night before. [My husband] said, ‘In six years, he’ll be moving out. We should spend as much time as we can with him because it’s almost over.’ That time is necessary for him to have his life. And I know that, but still. It’s the sweetest pain.”•
Zan Romanoff is the author of three novels: Look, Grace and the Fever, and A Song to Take the World Apart. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
