Edan Lepucki’s wildly imaginative novel, “Time’s Mouth,” out Tuesday, Aug. 1, imbues a cast of believably flawed characters and real Northern California locales, including San Francisco and the forests surrounding Santa Cruz, with a kind of otherworldliness, a dash of mysticism.

The book follows three generations of a family, beginning with young mom-turned-cult leader Ursa, and later her granddaughter, Opal, who discover that they share an inherited ability to time travel. They enter a trance-like high that enables them to slip back through personal memories and revisit their most potent, formative experiences.

Lepucki, who lived in Albany from 2013 to 2017, told The Chronicle by phone from Los Angeles that she “felt a freedom when writing to conjure strange and exceptional things because the novel takes place in a sort of magical world, but I grounded it in real places and real moments in time.” These locales include jazzy North Beach in the 1950s, hippified Santa Cruz and Los Angeles in the 1980s, including her real childhood home in the city’s Fairfax district.

Time travel “is a thrilling idea for anybody, whether you have kids or not,” said Lepucki, whose earlier books include the 2014 bestseller “California” and the critically acclaimed novel “Woman No. 17.” But she explained that as a mother of three, she came to understand the particular yearning a parent can feel for their children’s earlier ages once each youthful phase passes.

Years before writing “Time’s Mouth,” Lepucki recalled writer Ben Fountain telling her when his kids were in their late teens that “he wouldn’t want to go back and do it all over again, but if he could ‘go back in time for just a glimpse of those first moments when they were a baby, or sit on the couch with his son when he was 4 for just a few minutes, he would.’ ”

Once Lepucki’s own children were a little older, she “really understood that longing and started weaving it into this story,” she said. The result is an emotionally visceral, page-turning saga exploring motherhood, abandonment, self-invention, intergenerational trauma, cult worship, somatic therapy, and, most of all, the poignancy that even reconjured memories are forever lost once the present vanishes. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What intrigues you about time travel, especially as a parent?

A: There was some wish fulfillment in writing the book. I love time travel stories. “Interstellar,” for instance, is one of my favorite movies, and it’s also a parent-child movie. I’m not really interested in the “science” of time travel. I’m more interested in what a character in the book calls “emotional time travel.” I think the past is both delicious and painful to think about because you can’t have it back. It’s heartbreaking in that way.

Q: How did you develop Ursa, who had a traumatic childhood and understandably wants to transport back to happier times?

A: Ursa is my villain. I never had a villain before, and I really wanted to try to write somebody complicated that you could both identify with and be repelled by. In earlier drafts, you didn’t see her in her earlier life, but as I rewrote it, she became the heroine of the novel at the beginning and then she turns more damaging. It’s interesting as a writer and reader to experience that kind of shift.

Q: She’s like the embodiment of that phrase, “Hurt people hurt people.”

A: My editor kept saying that to me when we were trying to crack her character! I need that on a mug now (laugh). But it’s true. Ursa didn’t deal with her own issues and brought them to bear on her most important relationships, to everyone’s detriment. I think that’s what makes her scary. I didn’t set out to write a book about intergenerational trauma, and I feel like that’s such an overused phrase in our culture right now, but I did think while writing, what if something truly horrifying happens to you and you don’t try to face it in some way, how will that reverberate?

Q: Ursa’s son, Ray, who flees her cult, gets into Reichian therapy to confront his own pain. You’re great at describing the things people will try to feel better, even joining a cult. Has that always interested you?

A: It’s part of our California mythology that we have so many modalities for curing pain or just having a better life, and I’ve always been interested in why people join cult-y communities.My dad is a very woo-woo person and very freethinking. He has a Reichian therapist and an astrologer. He has all kinds of self-help books. 

On our fridge growing up, we had a handwritten sign with this “power of positive thinking” slogan. So I have always wanted to write about that way of seeing the world and the methods people use to get over adversity. Some of those methods that, out of context, can sound unconventional, have worked their way into the mainstream, like listening to your body, the body keeping the score as they say. It’s fascinating.

Q: Did writing “Time’s Mouth” make you more nostalgic about your own life?

A: I’m a deeply nostalgic person. I can close my eyes and go into an imaginative space of my past and think about every detail. This book nurtured that side of me and also exhausted it enough that I don’t do it as much as I used to. 

I think there’s value in looking to the past, and thinking as an adult about your own upbringing and how you were parented, especially if you’re a parent. Having that retrospective gaze on one’s life is incredibly valuable, but I want to keep looking forward as well. As you get older, people say, “If you’re not looking forward to anything, you’re basically ready to die.”

Q: There’s a theme in the book of mothers abandoning their daughters. How was that to write as a mom yourself?

A: My mom wants everybody to know that she is very present in my life. (Laughs). I honestly don’t know why that comes up as a theme. Maybe it’s because I find mothering beautiful, but also constantly challenging. Even when you’re trying to not mess somebody up, you can mess them up and that’s what’s so existential about parenting. 

I had two kids when I started the book and I have three kids now, which probably accounts for why it took me seven years to finish it. I don’t know why I thought it would be easier than it was. I joke that if you’re writing a time travel novel, you wish you could take a time machine to go back and not write one because it’s so hard.

Q: I’ve heard people say there are two kinds of people, those who would want to time travel to the future and those who would want to go back into the past.

A: I’m not one of those futurists who would want to press a button and go 100, 200, years ahead. Maybe it would be cool, but nobody you love will be there, so what’s the point of that?

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.