The “possibilities” that Yael Goldstein-Love alludes to in the title of her wildly inventive second novel are the keep-you-up-at-night kind no parent wants to entertain, and yet most likely have during their first sleep-deprived months with a new baby.

What if, in the blink of an eye, your child disappeared? Or their fate swung another way, from safety and good health toward injury, or worse?

During an acute period of postpartum anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder following her son’s nearly tragic birth in 2017, the Berkeley writer and psychotherapist felt both besotted with her newborn and utterly derailed by “unspeakable fears.” She recreates that harrowing birth scene, and aspects of the strange, mystifying, almost hallucinatory months that followed, in the opening chapters of her latest book, “The Possibilities.”

Goldstein-Love’s fictional counterpart, thriller writer Hannah Bennett, is haunted by the memory of her 8-month-old son Jack’s limp body in the hospital before he let out a cry. But is that a nightmarish image conjured by her anxiety, or a vision of the true “Jackless” reality she’s been living but can’t accept? Hannah finds herself increasingly unsure whether she is losing her hold on reality, or discovering that reality is just far more bizarre than she thought.

In “The Possibilities,” Hannah travels through a multiverse in an effort to save Jack from vanishing for good. By incorporating quantum mechanics and the theoretical mathematical possibility that we each embody a multitude of selves, Goldstein-Love was able to write her way through her postpartum suffering and create a page-turning work of fiction about how disorienting motherhood can be.

“Landing on a sci-fi metaphor was the only way I could make sense of what I was experiencing” as a new mother, Goldstein-Love told the Chronicle by phone from her East Bay home.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What was your inspiration for this idea of reality slipping out of focus for Hannah after she gives birth to her son?

A:I remember the moment so vividly. I had left the Bay Area when my son was 6 months old and was living in Washington, D.C. I was so homesick, just desperate to be back in Berkeley. I needed to get my son across D.C. to his first pediatrician appointment, and I got him into the car and then realized I forgot the car key. I’m just like, “No, no, no.” So I wheel him back to our apartment in his stroller and I’m looking up these steep concrete steps, and at him in his snowsuit, and I realize if I take him out he’ll cry and we won’t make it to the appointment.

For a brief moment, I imagined running inside, leaving him on the street. I didn’t do it, but I imagined in a flash turning back to him and finding he’s gone. And in my imagining, he had disappeared back to Berkeley. I knew in that moment, this is my new novel and writing it is going to get me through this period.

Q: It’s a great premise because Hannah is hypervigilant due to the trauma she experienced at Jack’s birth, but the apprehension she feels is relatable because new parents are suddenly aware of all the ways things could go wrong.

A:Exactly. My son almost died during birth. You actually know my birth intimately because it is the birth scene that opens the book. … That was it exactly. I might be the only mother in Berkeley in the last 50 years who has insisted on an emergency c-section!

It wasn’t clear for an hour whether he would live or die. After I brought him home from the hospital, I felt my son had both lived and died, that the reality in which he almost died had come too close for us to really be safe. It took the normal hypervigilance of new motherhood up several notches.

Q: So in a way your homesickness and postpartum anxiety led you into this sci-fi multiverse. Were you already a science fiction fan, or did it take you by surprise?

A:It took me completely by surprise. I had always written straight literary realism, and I never anticipated writing in this mashup of genres. But I’ve always read eclectically and I’m a tremendous fan of sci-fi, so in a way it’s predictable that I landed on this idea: What if at the moment of birth the laws of nature briefly change so that different possibilities not only exist side by side, but also affect each other?

Once I said that, I felt, this is how it actually feels and now I can make sense of it in writing.

Q: Was there something in particular about the postpartum experience you thought sci-fi could explain better than realism?

A:爱一个人的存在的风险a parent loves a child. We are saddled with this existential urge to protect our kids, but there’s this profound gap between what we want to do and what we actually can do because we are human and our children are subject to chance. That was the No. 1 thing I wanted to capture with this sci-fi metaphor.

I also see psychotherapy patients, and the thing that most interests me in both careers is the human mind’s infinite depths and surprises. I feel like there are ways in which you can get at the utter strangeness of how our minds work so much better when you aren’t bound by the conventions of realism. Now that I’ve started writing that way, I feel like I’ll never stop.

Q: Did you research theories about the multiverse and living in a simulation?

A:This was very familiar terrain for me because my father (Sheldon Goldstein) is a mathematical physicist, so I kind of grew up around a quantum mechanics seminar table. You were much likelier to be asked at the dinner table what you thought about the two-slit experiment than to be asked how your day was.

Q: Is it gratifying to see your book coming out at a time of greater awareness of postpartum issues and mental health?

A:It is wonderful that we have more awareness of the postpartum experience. I also think we tend to overly categorize things. There’s postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, postpartum OCD, and it can narrow the way we look at our experience. I like to think of it more as human suffering that can take an infinite variety of shapes. The experience of mothering is not one or two things, it’s infinite things.

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.