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Leila Mottley’s latest novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big,” follows three women, ages 16, 18 and 20, as they navigate pregnancy and motherhood in a small town in the Florida panhandle. With the state’s abortion laws in flux, Mottley says she had to keep adjusting her characters’ experiences to fit the new reality.

“When I started writing the book, it was before 

,” Mottley says. "And then over the course of writing the book, the laws in Florida around abortion changed. ... It went from a 15-week abortion ban ... to a 

In addition to writing, she also works as a doula, guiding parents through the birth experience and helping with pre- and post-natal care. She sees the novel as an extension of her work, especially in the way it challenges common conceptions of young motherhood. 

“I think we’ve been taught that teen pregnancy is a moral issue,” she says. “And as we see declining rates of teen pregnancy, we are taught that that is a win, which in some ways then implicitly implies that young pregnancy and parenthood is a failing, and it's not.”

Mottley says she was particularly interested in exploring the ways that new parents can form communities of support: “Getting to witness the transformation into parenthood, it is so abundantly clear to me how isolating it can be,” she says. “I think for the girls in this book, they ... have to kind of create a collective together in ways that I think many of our communities haven't figured out how to do.”

Born and raised in Oakland, Calif., Mottley was named the city’s Youth Poet Laureate at 16. She was 19 when she published her debut novel “

,” which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. 

I also did journaling for each of the characters in this book. This was a process because I was creating three first-person perspectives of girls in similar demographics from the same place, going through very similar experiences. 

But each of them has a different perspective and a different kind of foundational sense of the world that changes the way that she interacts with pregnancy, with parenthood, with life. 

And I wanted us to understand that there are a lot of ways to be a good mother and that teen parenthood isn't monolithic and it doesn't look just one way, and that it exists across race, and across class, and across geography, and that we see a lot of different examples and representations of the way that these girls handle themselves and their lives and their friendships. 

On relationships between young women and older men in the novel

There’s two relationships between young girls and older men in this book, and I wanted us to kind of examine that, because a good portion of young parents have partners who are six or more years older than them, and I think [when] we’re 16, we don’t understand the vast difference between 16 and 22, whereas by the time that we get to 22, we hopefully have a lot more perspective on how big of a gap there is between that. 

And I think that there needs to be a lot of grace and compassion for the way that we look at young girls who want to be loved and are being told things that they don't have the information to know aren't true. 

On growing up in Oakland, Calif., and experiencing sexual harassment

Every single day of my teens, from when I was maybe 10 or 11, I was followed home, called out to, had people try to get me to get in their cars, all kinds of things, groping. I think that it is an experience that is so common we almost don’t even bother to talk about it because we already know that no one is going to protect us. ...

I don’t know a single Black girl specifically who hasn’t experienced the same type of harassment and abuse and unsafe experience in the world and particularly in my city. And there is a lot of loneliness in that experience, especially as young Black girls we are taught that we're supposed to stay silent because it makes other people uncomfortable.

I was 15 when I wrote this poem ... so I can’t entirely tell you the story behind it. But I think it came with, like, this initial reckoning that I think a lot us do as teenagers, when, for the first time, we’re interacting with people outside of our families, outside of our homes, and trying to make sense of where we're from, and what we’ve been given, and what want for ourselves. 

And at the same time, learning how to both love and criticize a place, people, your childhood, all of these things. And so I think that I came back home from this trip [to Detroit] and started writing this poem about what it means to be from a place that is constantly changing and that doesn't always love you back.

On ‘Nightcrawling,’ a novel she wrote as a teenager, achieving critical acclaim

You have to understand the dissonance too of the amount of change that happens between 17, when I wrote “Nightcrawling,” and then [ages] 19, 20 when it was coming out. I felt like an entirely different person ... a different writer. And it was almost like having my 17-year-old diary published and memorialized for the rest of my life. 

And I think that’s something that all writers have to cope with. Like, our work is a representation of the time in which we wrote it and once it comes out it doesn’t belong to us anymore and there has been like a lot of work in me to respect the person who wrote that book and really see it as a representation a 17-year-old’s mind, and I think that's something we don’t often get to see. 

Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Tonya Mosley

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Mottley’s latest novel follows three young women as they navigate pregnancy and motherhood in a small town in Florida. She sees the novel as an extension of her work as a doula.

A young novelist takes on misconceptions about teen moms in ‘The Girls Who Grew Big’

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