In the vein of road-trip novels, Daphne Nilson, the narrator in Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel, The Golden State, hits the road, but unlike Sal Paradise in On the Road, she brings along a sixteen-month old daughter, Honey. The novel has been praised for encapsulating the complicated emotional terrain of motherhood—boredom, joy, frustration, isolation, and the immense emotional swings. More interesting to me is how Kiesling seeps motherhood with a toddler into her syntax.

In an interview with The Millions, where Kiesling works as an editor, Kiesling said she began writing vignettes when her daughter was six months old. “The book owes everything to her,” said Kiesling. “I simply wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t had her and if she hadn’t transformed the way I experience time—both the huge anxiety of seeing her new-babyness turn into toddlerhood so quickly, and the slowness of individual moments with her.”

Many of Kiesling’s syntactical choices capture this different sense of time. Early in the novel, with her husband stuck in Turkey because of an immigration screw-up, Daphne decides to pack up and head to the family’s ancestral mobile home in rural California. Anyone who has a kid knows it’s not a matter of throwing a backpack into the passenger seat, buckling up the kid, cranking up the radio, and zooming down the open road. How does Kiesling capture the labor-intensive task of traveling with a toddler?

I put out the cigarette in a flowerpot and go inside and pull out a tote bag and a suitcase, and all the focus that has lately abandoned me at work materializes and I run through the checklist: clothes diapers Pack ‘n Play baby bedding sound machine high chair Ergo stroller toys books bib sippy cup snacks and, in a flash of motherly inspiration, socket protectors.

We often use commas to provide a pause and invite a sense of order. By eliminating the commas in this checklist, Kiseling makes sure that one item quickly follows the other—Daphe is a whirling dervish, quickly throwing items into a bag or near the front door. As a single mother, her husband stuck in Turkey, there is no time for contemplation or calmness. And parenting requires a lot of planning and logistics. Sleep-deprived, Daphne must rapidly pack, lest she forget something.

Here’s another example of Kiesling eliminating commas to distort time and create speed:

I sponge her off change her diaper get her dressed pull on the clothes I wore yesterday and hustle her out toward the back door.

I had the good fortune to talk to Kiesling about her syntactical choices.

“The sections that are written without very many commas are most often sections pertaining to parenting and the logistics of children,” she says. “Their presence or absence sort of matches Daphne’s mental state in a given moment. I remember going back and reading early drafts and thinking, this is too much, about some of the places, and figuring out where to sprinkle some of the commas back in. I re-seasoned with commas as needed.” She adds, “I find myself doing a kind of extended ‘wallet keys phone’ style mental checklist when I’m leaving the house, and I experience those moments in a comma-less way.”

In this next passage, Kiesling uses the conjunction, “and” (a technique called polysyndeton, a favorite of Ernest Hemingway) to string together a series of independent clauses. Here, too, she forgoes the commas. The result is the feeling that Daphne is overwhelmed, with everything happening simultaneously.

Honey knows we have stopped the car and her crying becomes more urgent and her body begins straining against the straps of the car seat and she makes a glubbing sound and I look back at her and before I can do anything her mouth opens wide and her eyes open wide with the unmistakable panic of imminent barfing and I say “no no no” and a small torrent of milk water cheese pieces and noodle bites from daycare sprays forth onto her and the car seat and her eyes are terrified.

If Kiesling had used periods to create separate independent clauses (e.g. “Honey knows we have stopped the car. Her crying becomes more urgent. Her body begins straining against the straps of the car seat.”) the syntax would invoke a sense that Daphne has everything under control and time is flowing in a manageable way. Instead, anxiety is high and there is no time for a period, no time for Daphne—or the reader—to take a breath.

“When I talk about the book, I sometimes worry it will make it sound like I am totally unsuited to parenting and am constantly miserable, which is not the case at all,” says Kiesling. “But there are all these moments in parenting that feel incredibly dramatic for how tiny and ultimately inconsequential they are. It should not be an epic poem to get socks and shoes on a toddler, but sometimes that’s how it feels, to an extent that is comical when you can step outside yourself and see it. The level of kaleidoscopic fluster at certain moments—moments that are almost invariably augmented by something else going on in life, worry about work or money or relationships—felt like it needed a very particular kind of syntax. The kind of arch, measured prose I love in other books was just too detached, totally unsuitable for the in-the-shit-right-now of being with little kids.”

Here’s another one, using the same technique, which occurs in a cemetery, where Daphne’s mother is buried:

I pack her up in the stroller struggling and I’m suddenly exhausted and as I’m trying for the seventh time to buckle at least one of the buckles as she thrashes and strains resolutely forward to prevent me I say into the air “I’m going to fucking kill myself” which I sometimes do when I’m trying to cope with her equipage and I instantly feel bad since I’m sure we are standing on the final resting place of many untimely ends, shotgun blasts and death by drinking and getting rolled on by your house.

This time the long sentence folds an emotional response into the action of buckling her daughter into the stroller—“and I instantly feel bad”—suggesting that there is no pause, no break between the action and the emotion.

When Honey takes a nap, the syntax slowly changes, creating more calmness, more order, more room for contemplation and memory.

I try to remember the light, my mother in a white nightie in the little bed across from mine. The breeze dies and the goat bell is silent.

Motherhood feels like this, with its distinct and strange movement of time, the minutes barely budging, and then you blink, and your kid is heading to kindergarten. Kiesling’s The Golden State beautifully mimics that at the sentence level.