There's a shocking event at the heart of Lauren Grodstein's second novel, A Friend of the Family (Algonquin, Nov.): a teenage girl gives birth to a baby prematurely in a library bathroom, and then, most likely, kills it. This act sets in motion a powerful story of two fathers who will do almost anything to protect their children, from themselves and each other.

Grodstein was haunted by the rash of neonaticides that took place in the 1990s while she was in high school and college. Melissa Drexler gave birth in the bathroom at her New Jersey senior prom and then supposedly went back to the dance floor; Amy Grossberg and her boyfriend, Brian Peterson, delivered and disposed of a baby in a hotel in Delaware. Painful stories, but Grodstein is “very sympathetic to these girls and these mothers,” and she takes on the subject of neonaticide with unusual respect for her characters. She wanted to imagine the impact a teenager's killing her baby would have on a family, what the long-term effects might be and how everyone would go on with their lives. While writing the novel, Grodstein became a parent herself, adding another dimension to the story she was exploring.

Grodstein seems always to have been interested in the consequences of reproduction. Her first novel, Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love (Dial, 2004) takes place in flashbacks as a young Brooklynite waits outside the bathroom door for his girlfriend to report the results of a pregnancy test. Her debut, the story collection The Best of Animals (Persea, 2002), follows various 20-something singles and couples as they slalom in and out of relationships, fighting fears and ambivalence about, among other things, having babies. And Grodstein got the news about the sale of A Friend of the Family when her agent and friend, Julie Barer, came to see Grodstein's newborn son.

In A Friend of the Family, Laura Stern gives birth during a year when neonaticide is happening across New Jersey. Laura's family, especially her father, Joe, fights to keep her out of jail, and after a stay in a mental institution, she spends the rest of her young adulthood on the West Coast. But the novel begins years later, when Laura, now 30, has returned home, marked and haunted by her past, but oddly self-possessed. When she seduces Alec, who has just dropped out of college, his father, Pete, a successful doctor, does everything in his power—including something unforgivable—to break the couple up, convinced Laura's influence will completely derail Alec's already precarious future.

Grodstein believes the novel is “a book about family and loving your kids. And both dads in the book do”—though their actions don't produce what they hope for. It's also a story about growing up and taking responsibility for one's actions—both the kids and their parents, in this book, must face the very sobering consequences of their choices. Writing it helped Grodstein reflect on her own changing responsibilities now that her writing and her teaching job at Rutgers helps support a family and pay a mortgage. “At almost 34, there's no two ways about it—I'm a grownup.”

A Friend of the Family came to Grodstein after a difficult writer's struggle. “I wrote another novel between Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love and this novel,” she says. “It wasn't very good, and it took me years to realize it wasn't going to happen. I just moped for like seven months, thinking I should have gone to law school. I was teaching at Rutgers and commuting from Brooklyn. I also had this tiny little studio near Rutgers and I woke up one morning with a voice in my head of this doctor who'd done something wrong, and I wasn't sure what he'd done.” Grodstein knew she had her book.

She hopes A Friend of the Family will help people re-examine what's behind the novel's troubling subject matter. “When I first decided I wanted to use neonaticide as a subplot, I talked for a long time to a colleague at Rutgers who studies the phenomenon. She really did see these girls as victims of their circumstances, of feeling like they had no choices. And a lot of the girls she was studying were impregnated by their fathers or by people that they knew. They didn't know what to do. So it's not that I expect people to take Laura's side, but I hope they'll take another look.”