CANR
WORK TITLE: The Girls Who Grew Big
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.leilamottley.com/
CITY: Oakland
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Oakland, CA, in 2002.
EDUCATION:Attended Smith College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and doula. Has worked as a substitute preschool teacher.
AWARDS:Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, 2018; PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction finalist, both 2023, both for Nightcrawling.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry to numerous publications, including the New York Times; cowriter and subject of documentary short film When I Write It.
SIDELIGHTS
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Even before the age of twenty-one, Leila Mottley had an impressive literary resume. She was named the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate at the age of sixteen, and her debut novel, Nightcrawling, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, making Mottley the youngest person to achieve that honor. She was born and raised in Oakland, California, and she attended Smith College before moving back to her hometown.
Nightcrawling is about seventeen-year-old Kiara, who has dropped out of high school and is looking for work to provide for herself, her older brother Marcus, and a boy next door who has been abandoned by his mother. Marcus dreams of being a rap star, but Kiara’s dreams are more realistic. When she has a drunken encounter with a stranger, however, she realizes that sex work might be one way to pay her rent. Things become much more complicated, however, when Kiara is named in a grand jury indictment involving Bay Area police.
The novel is fiction but was inspired by real events that happened in Oakland. As Mottley said in an interview with Booker Prizes, “The case itself and the media response to the case—which was narrow and often misdirected attention away from the systemic pattern of harm to girls and women of color—stuck with me over the years.” Along with being named a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, Nightcrawling was also an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
Reviewers were taken with Mottley’s audacious debut. A writer in Kirkus Reviews praised both the “lush, immersive writing” and the novel’s “acute observations” of the danger and violence many young women of color experience. The reviewer was particularly impressed by “Kiara’s intense, anguished interiority rendered in lovely and poetic exposition.” A contributor in Publishers Weekly called the novel “heartrending” and a “powerful testament to a Black woman’s resilience.” They wrote, “Mottley powerfully chronicles Kiara’s desperation and her bravery, as well as her determination to keep moving forward.” Luke Gorham, in Library Journal, described the novel as a “powerful discourse on the dehumanizing effects policing can have on marginalized communities, bodies, and minds (and especially on Black women).” Gorham emphasized that the book would be considered a powerful work even if Mottley were much older.
“An accomplished first novel with a remarkable heroine whom the reader wills on every step of the way,” wrote a reviewer in the Economist. They were impressed at how Mottley “conveys corruption, brutality, injustice and suffering in a manner that is hard-hitting but never heavy-handed.” Lauren Christensen, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote, “Mottley writes with a lyrical abandon that reminds us she was once Oakland’s youth poet laureate.”
Two years later, Mottley published her first collection of poetry, woke up no light, which in part chronicled Mottley’s own transition from teenager to adult along with topics ranging from food to family connections.
The Girls Who Grew Big, Mottley’s sophomore novel, is a portrait of three pregnant young women, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty. Adela, the sixteen-year-old, has been thrown out of her house by her parents, so she heads to her grandmother’s in Florida. There, she meets Emory, an eighteen-year-old who brings her newborn baby to high school. Meanwhile, twenty-year-old Simone is already the mother of four-year-old twins and is now pregnant again, and she is not sure she wants to keep the baby. These three find community and support together and with other young moms who have been cast out by society.
Along with being a writer, Mottley also works as a doula, and she has discussed in interviews how her novel was shaped by her experiences of working with young expecting mothers. In an interview with CBC, Mottley explained the double meaning behind the book’s title, “The phrase ‘growing big’ is a common euphemism, especially in the South and among Black people. It’s a way of being like, ‘Oh, she’s getting pregnant, but also she’s taking up space.'”
Reviewers were impressed with Mottley’s follow-up effort. A writer in Publishers Weekly called it a “distinctive coming-of-age story that’s worth seeking out.” They described the plot as “poignant without being saccharine,” and they were taken with the “sharply drawn characters.” Allison Escoto, writing in Booklist, praised Mottley as an “elegant and expressive writer,” and she called the characters “unforgettable” and ones that will “appeal to many readers.” Escoto also appreciated Mottley’s “poetic and striking imagery.”
“A sensual set of character studies, shaped by compassion and defiance,” wrote a contributor in Kirkus Reviews. In the New York Times Book Review, Nina LaCour wrote, “It’s through the portraits that the plot lines emerge, hinging on Florida’s restrictive abortion laws; the complexities of female friendships; the challenges of chasing or relinquishing dreams; romantic love (queer and straight, requited and unrequited, sincere and exploitative); and, most poignantly, the young mothers’ reckonings with the families that have failed them.” LaCour appreciated how Mottley “writes with unabashed reverence for these young mothers, never sanitizing or romanticizing their lives but instead valuing them.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2024, Allison Escoto, review of woke up no light, p. 9; May, 2025, Allison Escoto, review of The Girls Who Grew Big, p. 27.
Economist, June 14, 2022, “‘Nightcrawling’ Is a Gritty, Accomplished Debut Novel,” review of Nightcrawling, p. 84.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2022, review of Nightcrawling;May 15, 2025, review of The Girls Who Grew Big.
Library Journal, May, 2022, Luke Gorham, review of Nightcrawling, p. 84.
New York Times Book Review, June 26, 2022, Lauren Christensen, “Cover Up,” review of Nightcrawling, p. 12(L); July 20, 2025, Nina LaCour, “Support System,” review of The Girls Who Grew Big, p. 11.
Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2022, review of Nightcrawling, p. 47; April 28, 2025, review of The Girls Who Grew Big, p. 34.
ONLINE
Booker Prizes, https://thebookerprizes.com/ (December 8, 2025), author interview.
CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/ (November 19, 2025), Mattea Roach, author interview.
Fresh Air, https://www.npr.org/ (July 9, 2025), “A Young Novelist Takes on Misconceptions about Teen Moms in ‘The Girls Who Grew Big.'”
Leila Mottley website, https://www.leilamottley.com/ (December 8, 2025).
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (June 27, 2025), “Leila Mottley Wonders If You Can Truly Write a Place You’ve Never Been,” author blog.
Leila Mottley is the author of the novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times best seller, and the poetry collection woke up no light. Her sophomore novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, is forthcoming in June 2025. She was also the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live.
Leila Mottley
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Leila Mottley is the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES and OPRAH DAILY. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live. NIGHTCRAWLING is her first novel.
Genres: Literary Fiction
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Nightcrawling (2022)
The Girls Who Grew Big (2025)
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leila Mottley
Born 2002 (age 22–23)
Oakland, California, U.S.
Alma mater Smith College
Notable works Nightcrawling
Leila Mottley (born 2002) is an American novelist and poet.[1] She is The New York Times bestselling author of Nightcrawling, which was a nominated for numerous awards, including the Booker Prize, making her the youngest author to have been nominated for the award. In 2018, at age 16, she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California.
Early life
Mottley was born and raised in Oakland, California,[2] where she continues to reside.[3] She began attending Smith College in 2019 and is currently on indefinite leave to pursue writing.[4]
Career
Mottley was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California in 2018 at age 16,[2] having served the prior year as Vice Youth Poet Laureate.[5] Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times.[6]
Mottley co-wrote and starred in a documentary short, When I Write It, an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020.[7]
In June 2022, Mottley published her first novel, Nightcrawling,[8] which she began writing at age 16.[9] She wrote the original version during the summer of 2019, shortly after completing her high school education. At the time, she was employed as a substitute preschool teacher.[10][11][12][13]
In 2024, Leila Mottley published her first poetry collection, woke up no light.[14]
Awards and honors
In 2018, at the age of 16, Mottley was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California,[2] having served the prior year as Vice Youth Poet Laureate.[5][15]
Her debut novel, Nightcrawling, was a New York Times Best Seller[16] and an Oprah's Book Club pick in June 2022.[17] AudioFile included it on their list of the best audiobooks of 2022.[18]
Awards for Mottley's writing
Year Title Award Categ Result Ref.
2022 Nightcrawling Booker Prize — Longlist [9][19][20]
Booklist Editors' Choice Adult Books for Young Adults Selection [21]
Goodreads Choice Award Fiction Nominee [22]
Debut Novel Nominee [22]
2023 Audie Award Female Narrator Finalist [23]
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Debut Fiction Nominee [24]
Lambda Literary Award Lesbian Fiction Finalist [25]
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award Josephine Miles Award Winner [citation needed]
Selected publications
Nightcrawling (2022)
woke up no light (2024)
A young novelist takes on misconceptions about teen moms in 'The Girls Who Grew Big'
July 9, 20252:49 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
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Tonya Mosley
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Transcript
Leila Mottley is the author of Nightcrawling and The Girls Who Grew Big.
Leila Mottley is the author of Nightcrawling and The Girls Who Grew Big.
Leila Mottley
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 Roe v. Wade was overturned," 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 six-week abortion ban."
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.
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Inspired by a true story, 'Nightcrawling' deals with sex work – and sexual abuse
NPR's Book of the Day
Inspired by a true story, 'Nightcrawling' deals with sex work – and sexual abuse
"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 Nightcrawling, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Girls Who Grew Big
Penguin Random House
Interview highlights
On finding each character's voice
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.
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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.
On writing "Love Poem to Oakland"
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.
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On Nightcrawling, a novel she wrote as a teenager, achieving critical acclaim
It was almost like having my 17-year-old diary published and memorialized for the rest of my life.
Leila Mottley
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.
Leila Mottley’s novel challenges our misconceptions about teen moms
The American writer discussed The Girls Who Grew Big on Bookends with Mattea Roach
CBC Books · Posted: Nov 19, 2025 11:57 AM EST | Last Updated: November 19
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Leila Mottley is the author of The Girls Who Grew Big. (Submitted by Leila Mottley)
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From Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant to Gilmore Girls and Juno, American writer Leila Mottley grew up watching shows and movies about young mothers.
But something about the way they were portrayed didn’t sit right with her.
“There's a romantic quality to it or the making of a spectacle,” said Mottley on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
“I think none of that is representative of the vast spectrum of worlds that young mothers are in and create for themselves.”
Mottley, known for her breakout novel Nightcrawling, wanted to change that narrative.
Drawing on her experiences as a doula, her new book, The Girls Who Grew Big, is a story about a group of teenage mothers navigating their own coming-of-age while raising children in a small Florida town.
This week on Bookends, Mottley joined Roach to talk about the nuances of teen motherhood and the power of community.
Mattea Roach: Are there things about young mothers that you would have encountered in your doula work that you felt were maybe missed in the cultural conception of what a young mom or teen mom is?
A young woman in a high school uniform. A woman wearing a turtleneck with no sleeves.
Alexis Bledel, left, and Lauren Graham star in the TV series Gilmore Girls about a young mother and her daughter. (Getty Images)
Leila Mottley: I think the way we talk about it is narrow and often includes a moral component to it. I don't think that teen pregnancy is a moral issue. I think it's a circumstance often created by other circumstances and other systems. The way we respond has a huge impact on the lives of children and parents.
One thing that I've found in my work as a doula is that, universally, we have so much criticism for the ways that people parent regardless of age. There's no right way to do it right. We create so many contradicting expectations around how people feed their kids, how people put their kids to sleep, where their kids go to school, how you parent in every way. And that creates an impossibility around motherhood and around being what we would consider a good mother.
Those expectations are heightened by the criticism around getting pregnant at a young age.
What I am pushing people to do when they read this book is to understand the many factors that go into becoming a young parent, but also just to have grace and compassion for how challenging it is to raise another person while you're also still raising yourself.
The Girls Who Grew Big is a title that has a weighted meaning. What does “growing big” look like for you as someone who's recently gone through this period of being a teenager, coming into adulthood and then settling into yourself?
The phrase, “growing big,” is a common euphemism, especially in the South and among Black people. It’s a way of being like, “Oh, she's getting pregnant, but also she's taking up space.”
That's a lot of what these girls are doing by their physical presence. They are taking up space. But also, pregnancy, in some ways, is like a physical claim on sexuality and on choice. For these girls, they're having to make a lot of choices about who they are and are forced into it because the evidence of their lives and their choices is present in their bodies.
When we're moving from teenagehood into adulthood, there's so many choices we have to make and so many ways we have to decide how we want to occupy space and how we want to navigate the world. These girls are doing that in combination with also figuring out how they want to parent, knowing that there is never going to be a right way to do it.
A book cover of a painting of a woman in a green bikini taking a mirror selfie.
You've said before that you know when a work is political because it tells the truth about people that we usually ignore. What do you think the role of fiction is in telling the truth about what's going on right now?
There's a lot of writing in the nonfiction space. It's being done with incredible clarity about various issues, but fiction opens up other opportunities as well.
We make it tangible. We can get lost in abstractions and in statistics and in the cognitive understanding of politics and events without embodying it, without understanding it on a somatic and experiential level.
In fiction, when we attach and invest in people it becomes so much harder for us to distance ourselves from what we see as something abstract and political.
I don't usually start with wanting to address some political issue. I think the reality is that politics impacts every person's life from every direction.
With these girls, we see so many different ways in which the systems and institutions that make up our country and our world impact their ability to be people and be parents and what that looks like.
LISTEN | Leila Mottley on Bookends with Mattea Roach:
Bookends with Mattea Roach26:02
Here’s what you have wrong about teen moms
At the end of this novel you actually left a note to your future children in the acknowledgments. What did you want your future children, whoever they may be, to understand about what it means to be a mother or about the world through what you've written in this book?
We find family in collectivism and in relying on people and showing up for people and being in conflict with people and letting that be okay. Both in the sense that these girls have created a chosen family, but also in the sense that we, as a country, have created an expectation of nuclear, narrow ideas of what community looks like, especially in parenthood that end up just isolating us further.
I want my children to understand that family, it's not just a choice, it's a requirement. You need people. We all need people. Especially in communities of women who show up for each other, that's how we have worked for generations. That's how we're supposed to care for children. That's how we're supposed to care for mothers.
I want my children to be free of some of the shame and judgments around what a family is supposed to be.
- Leila Mottley
I hope that this book is a reminder to us that we can show up more and that we cannot only ask for help, but we can be the help. We've just gotten so far from our understanding of how to show up for people and how to care for people, and especially how to care for new parents and young parents. I want my children to be free of some of the shame and judgments around what a family is supposed to be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
Leila Mottley Wonders If You Can Truly Write a Place You’ve Never Been
Creating an Authentic World Without Living in It
Via The Craft of Writing
Leila Mottley
June 27, 2025
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.
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I’ve always been obsessed with Google Maps, specifically street view, but even more so since becoming a novelist. I have spent countless hours cruising down open highways on “Driving Through” YouTube videos and looking at the 360 view of a dead end street on Google Earth, memorizing street names, and getting to know a place from the comfort of my computer to include a new setting in a short story or describe a character’s hometown. So when I decided to set my sophomore novel in Florida, I believed I could depict it using a thorough expedition on Google Maps and a library’s worth of travel books. Only when I actually began writing did I realize I was in over my head.
I knew the book had to be set in Florida before I wrote the first word. It was the only place in the country that could perfectly mirror the themes of the book, while simultaneously providing a vivid and beautiful Southern setting in a state where access to abortion was severely restricted. This was going to be a book about young mothers who are rarely viewed in their complexity, without judgement or shame, and it would be set in a part of Florida that is neglected, misunderstood, and complicated.
Florida is a state of paradoxes, from its history of colonization and relationship to enslavement, to its immigrant communities and conservative politics, to its gorgeous waters and swampy inlands. Young mothers are also living among the dissonance of teenage girlhood and parenthood, subject to the joys and challenges of both, and often misrepresented and othered because of it. The only problem was that I’d never set foot in Northwest Florida.
As soon as I made the decision to set The Girls Who Grew Big in the Florida Panhandle, I dove into research, exploring the Forgotten Coast, the emerald waters, the many poor small towns and the larger beach destinations. I tried to understand the geography through books and Google Maps and travel blogs. I tried to learn the language, the particular southern twang, through internet forums and interviews and YouTubers. But no matter how much I made use of the resources I had from my Oakland apartment, I couldn’t quite get there.
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I believe it is part of the job of the writer to imagine beyond ourselves. I also believe there are limitations to what we can know without living, at least tangentially. Toni Morrison said in an interview with NEA that she told her students at Princeton to stop only writing what they know because they don’t know anything and she wanted them to stop “record[ing] and editorializ[ing]” and instead “imagine it, create it.” The advice to write what you know is in conflict with the very purpose of fiction. When we restrict ourselves solely to what we believe we know, we stifle our imaginations and prevent ourselves from the hard work of becoming, creating, and envisioning something far wider than the sliver of knowledge we have access to.
However, we also have a responsibility as writers to do our due diligence. Not to take the easy way out, to assume we know something because we have been exposed to it, or researched it, or heard about it. Particularly when we think about writing about other places, other cultures, other communities, we have to assume there is a wealth of experience so far out of our reach we don’t even know what questions to ask. We have to assume we will not get all the way there and be prepared to remain accountable for our shortcomings. At the same time, we have to do extensive work to get as close as we can and be willing to abandon the project if we see or believe the distance is too vast. When we are lazy in our imaginings and in our process of achieving authenticity, we can do more harm than good.
I have found it to be impossible to skillfully write about a place I’ve never been. I wrote the first half of The Girls Who Grew Big before I’d been to the Florida Panhandle. I figured that because I’d been to Miami and Georgia and had spent so much time researching, I could capture the place without seeing it myself. But draft after draft, my renderings fell flat. The water was vaguely green, the sand nothing but sand, the roads indistinguishable from any other road. I decided to write about a fictional town in the Panhandle and believed that would give me enough jurisdiction to bend reality and create new geographical ties, but my imagination struggled to know what I was looking for, what stores would be in the strip mall, how people walked, what people wore, the exact height and feel of the sand dunes. So I booked a trip.
The advice to write what you know is in conflict with the very purpose of fiction. When we restrict ourselves solely to what we believe we know, we stifle our imaginations and prevent ourselves from the hard work of becoming, creating, and envisioning something far wider than the sliver of knowledge we have access to.
I spent a few days in the Florida Panhandle with a camera and a rental car and no plan. I was not prepared for how wrong I’d been. Not that the descriptions in the early drafts were inaccurate, but that they were fractional and nonspecific, unable to draw upon the regional lilt of these peoples’ voices, the scents of the ocean mixed with sunscreen and gasoline from the dozens of pickup trucks in a beach parking lot, the way the place seemed to be stuck in the early 2000s in wardrobe and storefronts and Wi-Fi access.
I could not have understood the grit or the creatures or the endlessness of the sky without seeing it for myself. I spent days driving and walking and overhearing people talking at beaches and restaurants and even the middle of the swampy forest where I ran into a black man in jeans who told me to be careful of snakes and then continued on his walk in the woods. I wrote pages of notes, recorded the sound of the waves, took hundreds of pictures, and when I returned home, I brought it to life.
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Suddenly, the book had color and sound and taste. It was no longer mine, because it could no longer understand only the things I had references for. My imagination had to grow. I had to see this place, feel it, hear it in order to have the framework to imagine these characters lives. I would not have the lived experience of being from there, living for years among the people I was writing about, but I knew I was as close as I could get.
I had created a Florida Panhandle that was intimate, rich in life, easy to touch, full of compassion and a genuine admiration, and I had assembled a world that could accurately and compassionately hold the story I was telling. Ultimately, this novel was about young motherhood in a sliver of Florida we rarely think about as anything but a Spring Break destination and it deserved to be written as a tangible, vivid, contradictory place where these girls are faced with challenges and decide whether to sink or swim.
Leila Mottley interview: 'There’s never a wrong age to tell the story that is aching inside of you'
With her debut novel longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022, Leila Mottley talks about the true story that inspired Nightcrawling, helping young people to start reading again and trying to be a normal teenager
Read an extract from Nightcrawling here.
Read interviews with more of our longlisted authors here.
You’re the youngest ever Booker-longlisted author. How does that feel?
I’m honoured to be considered among so many incredible authors and I think, as with all ‘firsts’, it means hopefully there will be many more young writers to follow, whose work will be read with the respect and thoughtfulness that the Booker inspires.
What would it mean to you to win the Booker Prize 2022? How conscious were you of the prize and what it means to win it before now?
The Booker Prize is one of the most important literary prizes in the world and I was very much aware of its existence, but I hadn’t even considered that I would be nominated or that, in my wildest dreams, I would end up on the longlist for my debut novel. Winning the Booker would be a testament not just to me or the necessity of Nightcrawling, but would also be a statement that Black girls like Kiara, like me, matter and that our narratives are integral to the fabric of this world.
Nightcrawling was written when you were 17. One of the many impressive things about that is that you had the discipline to commit to something as all-consuming as writing a novel at an age when there are countless distractions. How did you remain focused on the book while still living a normal teenage life?
I think all writers experience the challenge of focusing on a fictional world when the many distractions and responsibilities of the real world feel like they’re pulling us away. Instead of having children or a full-time job, I had school and college applications and a part-time job. I love storytelling and I also recognise that living the fullest life helps us to tell the most authentic and intricate stories, so I worked on trying to be a writer when I was writing and still be a pretty normal 17-year-old when I wasn’t writing.
You’re the Oakland 2018 Youth Poet Laureate and have a poetry collection coming out soon. But now that success as a novelist has come along, is there pressure to focus on more novels? What are you writing next?
I have always loved both poetry and fiction and I’ve been doing both simultaneously since I was 14 and wrote my first novel. I will always write what I feel the most drawn to and I don’t see my poetry or novels as being in competition with each other; in fact, my writing is at its best when I am able to do both. I’m currently working on both a poetry collection and my second novel and couldn’t be happier with the way the two are inspiring each other.
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
The Booker longlist features both the youngest- and oldest-ever nominated authors. Does age matter when writing fiction? Is there a good/bad/right/wrong age to write a masterpiece, or is age irrelevant?
We write the stories we are most adept at telling at the time they are ready to come out of us. I think that can happen at any age and I also think there are books we’re not prepared to write at 50 or 15 or 80, for a multitude of reasons that often have more to do with us as people than as writers. Age and life experience absolutely matter, but less as a constraint than as a factor in where the writer is in life and what kind of stories we’re compelled to tell. There’s never a wrong age to tell the story that is aching inside of you.
The Booker judges described Nightcrawling as ‘a Catcher in the Rye for a new generation’ - how does that make you feel, and do you see yourself as writing for a new generation?
The Catcher in the Rye and Nightcrawling are both books that recognise the universality of adolescence and the necessity of having teenage characters who are complicated that can be read and loved by such a vast audience. I’m at a point in my life and career where I feel compelled to write about young people, particularly people on the brink of adolescence and adulthood, and my context for adolescence is in this current era, so I think in many ways my work ends up oriented toward a younger generation that is just beginning to exist in adult literary fiction at this point.
I also would love it if my books helped more young people start reading again, since I think accessible, emotionally potent novels like Nightcrawling could help people who haven’t read in a while return to it.
Nightcrawling was inspired by real events - police officers had participated in the exploitation of a young woman and tried to cover it up. What was it about that event and its aftermath that compelled you to write Nightcrawling?
I was born and raised in Oakland and when this case broke, it rattled the Bay Area and caused this examination into the corruption of the police department, specifically where it related to young girls and women. Both the case itself and the media response to the case - which was narrow and often misdirected attention away from the systemic pattern of harm to girls and women of colour - stuck with me over the years. When I began thinking about writing Nightcrawling, I knew I wanted to explore the vulnerable experience of black girlhood and adolescence. I returned to this case, and other cases of police sexual violence, as an instance that exemplifies the lack of protection of young girls and that became the seed of the novel.
You say in your author’s note that you wanted to write a story that reflected ‘the fear and danger that comes with black womanhood’. Is that something that you feel has been under-explored in fiction?
I think we rarely get to see the way that police violence impacts black girls and women, in fiction and beyond and, when I decided to write Nightcrawling, I didn’t want to shy away from the graphic and brutal nature of violence against black girls.
How big a challenge was it to make sure that your depictions of sex work in the book were authentic and how did ensure that they were?
I did a lot of research on sex work and the criminalisation of sex work in the writing of the book. Sex workers aren’t a monolithic group, so there are so many varying experiences and understandings of sex work, influenced by the cultural shaming of the industry, the type of sex work, the country and policies around sex work, the identity of the sex worker, etc. It was important to me to also have someone with experience in sex work read the book and provide feedback for authenticity. With all of that information, I had to make decisions about Kiara’s character that felt true both to the context of sex work and to who she was and the circumstances she found herself in.
Leila Mottley
Leila Mottley © Magdalena Frigo
Who were your literary influences when you were growing up? Which writers do you particularly admire on the subject of race and on the experience of black womanhood?
There are so many incredible black women who have been writing about the particular experience of black womanhood in various ways for decades. While the validity and attention the world gives to the experiences of black women has oscillated, black women writers have always been studying and writing about our positions in this world and I follow in this tradition. Writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall and more all do a magnificent job of rendering black womanhood and girlhood on the page and they were all influential in my growth as a writer and person.
There are so many other writers I admired growing up, many of whom wrote about black girlhood and whose work reflected to me that I could exist in stories and I could even write them in ways that felt true to me and veered away from some of the texts I disliked from what we think of as the ‘literary canon’. I found Jacqueline Woodson, Jesmyn Ward, Ntozake Shange, bell hooks, and Arundhati Roy when I was in middle school and early high school, and fell in love with their work and the limitlessness of their writing.
Where do you write? What does your working space look like?
I’m someone who can write just about anywhere. When I’m typing, I’m normally in a cozy chair, a bed, the library, or my desk, but when I’m writing by hand, I will often move around. I love to write outside in nature, in the car, on the bus, on the train. As long as the room isn’t too quiet, I’m happy.
Which book or books are you reading at the moment?
I’m re-reading Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, which I re-read at least once every year or so. I’m also reading a non-fiction book for research on my next novel and I have Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan on my nightstand.
Do you have a favourite Booker-winning or Booker-shortlisted novel?
I would have to say either Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo or The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
What’s the one book you wish you’d written?
That’s difficult because I don’t wish I’d written any of my favourite books, since then I wouldn’t get to just experience them as a reader. Plus I try not to be too envious of other people’s work, since I wouldn’t want to mimic someone else’s voice, even if I could. However, I think the construction of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison is absolutely masterful and if I could create something that intricate and layered, I would.
Mottley, Leila NIGHTCRAWLING Knopf (Fiction None) $28.00 6, 7 ISBN: 978-0-593-31893-5
For Kiara Johnson, life in her family's studio at Oakland's Regal-Hi Apartments might be bleak--mattress on the floor, cackling crack addict next door, bags of dog poop bobbing in the complex swimming pool--but it's all she knows, and she'll do what it takes to preserve it.
Life has never been easy for Kiara. Her father died when she was 13, her mother attempted suicide and is now living in a halfway house, and Vernon, the landlord, has just doubled the rent. Older brother Marcus thinks his nonexistent hip-hop skills will be their golden ticket, so it's up to high school dropout Kiara to look for work at Walgreens, CVS, and finer stores everywhere, including the strip club where Marcus' ex now tends bar. No dice--Ki's only 17. A drunken coupling with a club patron that's more non- than consensual yields her virginity, a quick $200, and a really bad idea--"just till I get us out of our rent debt." While the eventual tale of sexual violence, police corruption, and injustice preordained is inspired by real-life Oakland events, it's Kiara's intense, anguished interiority rendered in lovely and poetic exposition that drives this evocation of an underclass and the disposable women just trying to survive. If the rich language occasionally tips toward impenetrable ("brushing against my skin like 7-Eleven slushies in the winter"?), so too does the hard trap Kiara can't escape, the engineered tragedy of intersectional poverty, racism, and misogyny. The acute observations are more remarkable still considering the author is herself a promising Oakland teen.
Plot, shmot--the real story here is lush, immersive writing and a relentless reality that crushes a girl's soul.
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"Mottley, Leila: NIGHTCRAWLING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696498637/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1660439e. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
Nightcrawling
Leila Mottley. Knopf, $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-31893-5
Mottley, Oakland, Calif's former youth poet laureate, debuts with a bold and beautiful account of two Black siblings striving to thrive and survive. Seventeenyear-old Kiara and her older brother, Marcus, have been on their own since their single mother was convicted of negligent homicide three years earlier. When the landlord raises the rent on their Oakland studio apartment, Kiara grows desperate. Marcus is no help; he can't hold down a job while he chases dreams of becoming a hiphop star. Kiara turns a few tricks--at first, just enough to pay the rent and buy groceries for her and the neighbor's son she's taking care of. But soon Kiara is caught up in a sex-trafficking ring servicing Bay Area cops, and her world collapses when the scandal goes public. Mottley powerfully chronicles Kiara's desperation and her bravery, as well as her determination to keep moving forward despite the crushing torrent of losses affecting her family as . well as those of everyone she knows. Scenes of realism are rendered with a poet's eye, as Kiara experiences moments of beauty and joy by tagging an underpass wall with spray paint, learning to swim in a dirty pool, and finding shelter in the arms of a friend. This heartrending story makes for a powerful testament to a Black woman's resilience. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency. (June)
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"Nightcrawling." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 16, 18 Apr. 2022, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A701549150/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ff5b90e3. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
* Mottley, Leila. Nightcrawling. Knopf. Jun. 2022.288p. ISBN 9780593318935 28. $28. F
Much of the discussion around Mottley's first novel is sure to focus on the author's age--17 when she began writing, currently attending college--but this is a forceful work even outside of this remarkable context. Following high-school dropout Kiara, on the cusp of 18 and living with her brother Marcus, who aspires to rap stardom, Mottley's narrative charts the myriad tragedies that scar this young woman as she struggles to care for those she loves, all the while becoming mired in a police misconduct scandal. It's a work of devastating social realism but cut through with a strain of pulp fiction--or perhaps more accurately, it acknowledges the pulpish shape of so many modern American realities--and it's executed with relentless momentum, built of purely dramatic moments and steeped in emotions that are wrung from characters as if they were wet rags. As a result, there's a certain melodramatic texture, and the construction of narrative incident can sometimes feel a bit inelegant. But it's held together by Mottley's singular voice, rife with frequent poetic flourishes and almost impatient with energy. VERDICT Undeniably bleak but littered with small beauties and a powerful discourse on the dehumanizing effects policing can have on marginalized communities, bodies, and minds (and especially on Black women). Motdey's novel understands that sometimes a happy ending just means surviving.--Luke Gorham
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"Nightcrawling." Library Journal, vol. 147, no. 5, May 2022, p. 84. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A703277650/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=322579f7. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
Nightcrawling. By Leila Mottley. Knopf; 288 pages; $28. Bloomsbury Circus; £16.99
"It doesn't matter how lucky you are", says the protagonist of Leila Mottley's debut novel, "because you still gotta work day in and day out trying to stay alive while someone else falls through the cracks." "Nightcrawling" tells the compelling story of a young black woman who, despite her best efforts, finds herself "stuck between street and gutter". Set in the author's native Oakland, California, and inspired by a true crime which made headlines in 2015, the book is both a searing depiction of sexual exploitation and a gripping account of a struggle for survival.
Seventeen-year-old Kiara Johnson has had her unfair share of hard knocks. Her father is dead and her mother is in rehab. She lives with her brother Marcus, a fellow high-school dropout, in a rundown apartment complex generously called the Regal-Hi. As he follows his deluded dream of making it as a rap star, she is forced to act practically. Kiara divides her time between searching for a job to cover their rent and caring for Trevor, the nine-year-old son of her drug-addicted neighbour.
A fateful drunken encounter with a man who believes her to be a sex worker leads Kiara to resort to desperate measures to stay afloat. "It's just a body," is the mantra she repeats to herself as she takes to the city's streets after dark. She realises that there is more to it than that when she is picked up by police officers and turned against her will into their personal plaything. There is the sex, she says, "and then there is the terror, the fear, the marble white of their eyes".
Deprived of choices, Kiara is manipulated and misused by the very men who should protect and help her. A way out presents itself when one police officer kills himself and leaves behind a suicide note which incriminates his colleagues. She is given the opportunity to name and shame her abusers in a grand jury hearing. But does she have the courage to speak out, and will her voice be heard?
Much of the novel makes for a sobering read. However, its grittier sections are grimly captivating and throughout them Ms Mottley—who is almost 20—conveys corruption, brutality, injustice and suffering in a manner that is hard-hitting but never heavy-handed. She offsets Kiara's ordeals with moments of happiness, like the valuable time spent with Trevor or best friend Alé, and she ensures her court-case climax is a nail-biting final stretch.
Ms Mottley has a background in poetry and in 2018 she was chosen as Oakland's youth poet laureate. Some of her imagery is overblown ("her eyelashes short ghosts framing her eyes"), but more often than not it is rich and inventive. "Fear don't do nothing but paint red across the neck, tell them all how easy it is to split you open." This is an accomplished first novel with a remarkable heroine whom the reader wills on every step of the way.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"'Nightcrawling' is a gritty, accomplished debut novel." The Economist, 14 June 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803808734/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e3cb976e. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
NIGHTCRAWLING, by Leila Mottley
To the long list of literary metaphors for youth's disillusionment, Leila Mottley has added a swimming pool filled with dog poop. A crack addict's vengeful ex gathered the feces from the dumpsters of East Oakland, Calif., and scattered them in the pool of the Regal-Hi apartment complex, which nobody ever swims in or cleans. For Kiara, a Regal-Hi resident and the teenage narrator of Mottley's empathetic debut, ''Nightcrawling,'' this contaminated water is a daily reminder of the havoc this city has wreaked on her young life, and on the only place she's ever called home.
It's 2015 and Kiara is months behind on her increasing rent, ''begging for shifts at the liquor store and counting the number of crackers left in the cupboard.'' Meanwhile, money and power are bleeding across the Bay Bridge into downtown Oakland, where tech offices and Ubers and yoga studios and cafes and bartenders with all the same tattoos proliferate. The Temescal neighborhood ''boasts its pistachio ice cream like they aren't settling the land and calling it entrepreneurship.'' There are no jobs here for Kiara, who was raised in these streets and in the dealers' apartments that used to fill them, who uses the yellow pages to find a job because she can't afford a smartphone or internet.
Not that she has much time to sweat the big-picture stuff around her: gentrification, the impending presidential election, the protesters shouting Freddie Gray's name outside an Oakland precinct. There is too much responsibility on Kiara's 17-year-old shoulders: She's single-handedly supporting both herself and her crack-addicted neighbor's son, Trevor, whom she's known since the day he was born. At 9, he has become less a brother to her than a son.
The boy is Kiara's chosen family in the absence of her own flesh and blood. Her father, a former Black Panther, died of prostate cancer after he got out of San Quentin. ''Mama blamed the prison for Daddy's death,'' Kiara says, ''which meant she blamed the streets.'' Soon Mama is gone too: in prison after drowning Kiara's baby sister in the same Regal-Hi pool, then trying, and failing, to kill herself, too.
Kiara saves perhaps her greatest disappointment for her older brother, Marcus, who refuses to get a job to provide for them both because he's too busy trying to become a famous rapper instead. Since she's underage and has no diploma, the only work she can find is in those same streets that killed her Daddy. A downward spiral of last resorts leaves her at the center of a sex-trafficking ring where the johns are the Oakland police.
Mottley writes about Kiara's serial abuse frankly, without blinking: the feel of callused fingers on her bare skin; of a gun barrel ''cold and threatening above my eye'' as she's being entered; of the ''jerk in the socket above my stomach'' when the cops summon her again and again, to take their turns with her. She prefers when one ''presses harder'' because ''I just don't like the feeling of him trying to restrain himself. Only thing worse than a man untamed is a man on the edge of it.''
The thing about some trauma plots is that even the grisliest ones can, unfortunately, be true. In an author's note at the end of the novel, Mottley cites a 2015 court case in which the Oakland Police Department was accused of sexually exploiting a teenager and trying to cover it up. Kiara's story is pure fiction, Mottley says, but her circumstances are disturbingly, statistically real.
Mottley writes with a lyrical abandon that reminds us she was once Oakland's youth poet laureate. Some similes (a woman's ''cheekbones bob like apples in her hollow skin''; a body in labor is ''gaping like the pocket of sky before the rain starts to pound'') land better than others (drowning is ''kind of like your body overflowing with itself''; the cold air off the bay ''like 7-Eleven slushies in the winter''). A confusingly underdeveloped romance between Kiara and her best friend, Alé, who ''moves kinda like the Hulk'' and mesmerizes Kiara by rolling a joint, feels unearned when it finally comes to fruition. But beneath this gratuitous embroidery, there's a desperation -- a reaching, through language, for some kind of salvation -- a counterpoint to the carelessness with which the protagonist wields her body.
After Marcus lands in jail, Kiara is conveniently connected with a pro bono lawyer, Marsha, who wants her to testify against the police before a grand jury and make a deal to get her brother out. Marsha is a blond woman who wears cat-print shirts and avoids carbs and tells Kiara to stop cussing. ''Marsha done looked up 'how to be your best self' and found some Cosmo article about actualization,'' Kiara cracks, skeptical of her white savior. But her resentment softens into something like trust as Marsha does for her what no other guardian ever has: She continues to show up.
In a novel about sex work and displacement, there is somehow less pathos in all the moments of graphic violence combined than there is in a single, gutting passage of profound love. When Kiara is inevitably separated from Trevor -- when she packs his few belongings into the knockoff Warriors backpack she bought him for his birthday; when she reluctantly peels his arms from her waist ''like untying a knot''; when she carries him to the social worker ''like you carry a small child to bed after they fall asleep on the bus'' -- we feel the final rupturing of Kiara's childhood. She has survived brutal grief, poverty and sexual assault, but ''this must be the hardest thing I've done,'' she thinks: ''being the adult for him.''
When Trevor too is gone, just like when Daddy and Mama and Marcus left the Regal-Hi before him, life doesn't miss a beat. There's still the trial, the grand jury, the filthy pool, the men, the bay, the disappointments. ''Everything is moving, quick and relentless,'' Kiara observes. ''Like the city don't know it should be stopping, should be kneeling, grieving for Trevor.''
NIGHTCRAWLING, by Leila Mottley | 271 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28
Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.
Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.
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PHOTO: Leila Mottley (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARISSA LESHNOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
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Christensen, Lauren. "Cover Up." The New York Times Book Review, 26 June 2022, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A708251591/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5ab5d8d1. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
* woke up no light. By Leila Mottley. Apr. 2024. 128p. Knopf, $28 (9780593319710); e-book (9780593319727). 811.
Mottley, a former Oakland Youth Poet Laureate whose first novel, Nightcrawling (2022), was an Oprah Book Club pick, presents a captivating debut poetry collection that scrutinizes the complexities of a Black woman's coming-of-age and growth into womanhood. From childhood to adolescence, from being present to looking backward to thinking of the future, these poems take various forms, but each draws forth powerful scenes. There is an indelible connection between the natural world and humanity, whether the body is itself an extraordinary landscape--"If she is the flower / moved only by wind / they are the bees / seeking only her yellow"--or the world invades, "Forgetting is in our bones, black as wood rot." Descriptions throughout feel urgent, as in the striking "summer 2020," in which the turmoil of the world competes with the unrelenting necessity to carry on with day-to-day life. There are also poems that ruminate on and long for ancestral connections, as in the sublime "On Fried Chicken and Watermelon," in which the relationship to food is the most powerful link between generations. The four distinct sections, taken together, are a vivid mosaic that illustrates both the internal and external aspects of becoming a person. A beautiful, multifaceted collection by a talented writer.--Allison Escoto
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Escoto, Allison. "woke up no light." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2024, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786417317/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=58adff17. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
The Girls Who Grew Big
Leila Mottley. Knopf, $28 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-593-80112-3
Mottley (Nightcrawling) offers an atmospheric tale of teen moms in the Florida panhandle. Most of the Girls, as they call themselves, are Black and estranged from their families, teenagers who "found each other" from out of their "singular aloneness." The novel opens with a flashback to the Girls' de facto leader, Simone, giving birth to twins in the back of her pickup truck, which becomes her home when her parents kick her out. In the present day, the perspective alternates between several narrators: Simone, who finds to her dismay that she is pregnant again; Emory, one of the few white characters, who is determined to apply to college, even as her baby is born during her senior year of high school; and Adela, a wealthy girl who is sent to Florida to live with her grandmother after her parents discover her pregnancy. Adela is mesmerized by the Girls from the moment she sees them twerking in a parking lot on her way into town ("Children mothering children and never apologizing for it," she observes). A propulsive love triangle between Adela, Simone, and someone's baby daddy drives much of the narrative, which is poignant without being saccharine, thanks to the sharply drawn characters and their all-too-human behavior. The result is a distinctive coming-of-age story that's worth seeking out. (June)
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"The Girls Who Grew Big." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 17, 28 Apr. 2025, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A838688100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cddc8557. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
* The Girls Who Grew Big. By Leila Mottley. June 2025. 352p. Knopf, $28 (9780593801123); e-book (9780593801130).
"I'll put it this way: teen moms, like Florida, are the country's favorite scapegoat." Simone, one of the main characters in Mottley's latest compelling and uplifting novel (following Nightcrawling, 2022), makes this observation after giving birth at age 16 to twins in her wayward boyfriend's truck. It is a portentous observation, and one that causes Simone to form a community of support and mutual aid in Padua Beach, her small Florida panhandle town. The novel is narrated from the alternating points of view of three of the young women in the "Group"--Simone, Emory, and the newly arrived Adela, each with their own distinct experience of teen motherhood. Mottley is an elegant and expressive writer, giving each of her unforgettable characters a fullness and relatability that will appeal to many readers. She also evokes facets of motherhood, alienation, first love, and vulnerability through poetic and stirring imagery: "The bow of our bellies smooth and arched like a glorious moon that can no longer be eclipsed. In these weeks, we start to worry as much as we start to wonder: Who is curled inside us, who are we to be the sanctuary for someone to curl inside?" Give to fans of Brit Bennett's The Mothers (2016) and Kirstin Valdez Quade's The Five Wounds (2021).--Allison Escoto
YA: The teen characters, realistic exploration of issues facing young mothers, and positive portrayals of friendships and relationships will appeal to older YAs. AE.
YA Recommendations
Adult titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curricular value; and YA/S, for books that will appeal most to teens with a special interest in a specific subject.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Escoto, Allison. "The Girls Who Grew Big." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211580/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4f789005. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
Mottley, Leila THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG Knopf (Fiction None) $28.00 6, 24 ISBN: 9780593801123
A group of teen mothers gathers in solidarity.
Mottley's second novel, followingNightcrawling (2022), concerns the Girls, a clique of young women in the coastal town of Padua Beach, Florida, united by their teen pregnancies and active contempt for the families, schools, and other social structures that seek to diminish them. The story alternates among three narrators, starting with leader Simone, who in a vivid opening scene describes chewing off her umbilical cord in the bed of a pickup truck for lack of a knife. (Well, a clean one--her partner's dingy blade, like most of the men in this story, doesn't measure up.) The second narrator, Adela, an aspiring Olympic swimmer until her pregnancy, has been shipped by her family to Padua Beach until she gives birth. The third, Emory, has an infant son, Kai, whom she insists on bringing to high school during her senior year, determined to go to college. Each in their own way claps back against their critics, hyperalert to how they're diminished: "You wouldn't believe what happens when a girl these days gets knocked up," Emory says. "Suddenly, it's the most important thing about you You are nothing but a young mother." Mottley's lyrical prose and spirited characters are meant to be a counterweight to such reductionism, and there are fine set pieces throughout: bonding over breastfeeding methods, selling "jungle juice" to spring breakers for extra funds, a harrowing homebrew abortion that's forced by hyperrestrictive state legislation. The plot can get soap opera-ish--Simone's brother, Jayden, is the father of Emory's child, and romantic squabbles abound. At times, Mottley's prose gets overheated: "They don't tell you in first aid training about the way blood works, about the thump and swirl of red hot beneath the skin and what happens when it runs drought dry." But the ferocity of her characters gets over, letting an aggressively misunderstood group speak for itself.
A sensual set of character studies, shaped by compassion and defiance.
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"Mottley, Leila: THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213358/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b39f6006. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.
In Leila Mottley's new book a group of young outcast mothers band together to support one another.
THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG, by Leila Mottley
One Sunday years ago, while out to brunch with my wife, friends and infant daughter, I spent the better part of the meal struggling to breastfeed. My baby fussed while I tried to hide my body and our difficulty, afraid of drawing the attention of the diners at the long table next to us. When we rose to leave, though, I discovered that at the head of that table was another mother, bare-chested, casually nursing her child in full view.
I was transported right back to that time in my life while reading Leila Mottley's sophomore novel, ''The Girls Who Grew Big,'' which delves into the intricacies of new parenthood.
The story takes place in Padua Beach, a Florida Panhandle town so small that it isn't on the map. This is a town where alligators cause lockdowns at the only high school, where baby orcas wash up on the shore -- and where a 22-year-old man can impregnate a 16-year-old girl without fear of consequence.
That 16-year-old is one of the protagonists of Mottley's novel. Her name is Simone, and when ''The Girls Who Grew Big'' opens, she's giving birth to twins in the back of her older boyfriend's red pickup truck. The boyfriend, Tooth, is ''repulsed'' by the fluid-filled spectacle. Simone delivers the babies herself, and when all that's left to do is cut the umbilical cords, Tooth procures a pocketknife ''all crusted in dried brown blood, shed fur from some long-dead animal, and Lord knows how many fishes' yellowed intestines.'' Simone balks. She has a better idea. She bites through the umbilical cords, further proof of the power of her body.
This triumphant feat of unassisted birth is the prologue. Then the story flashes forward four years. In the interim Simone has been cast out of her family's trailer as punishment for her pregnancy. Now she's terrifyingly vulnerable: unsheltered, broke, estranged from all except her younger brother, Jay. She is also fierce and joyful and industrious and creative. She's a tender, attuned mother.
Now 20 and no longer with Tooth, Simone has made the red truck and the Padua Beach shoreline both a home for herself and her twins and a haven for other girls like her -- young, unsupported mothers -- and their babies. They include: Adela, a competitive swimmer sent away to Padua Beach to wait out her pregnancy at her grandmother's house; and Emory, the sole white girl among them, a victim of her racist grandfather's sadistic rage over his biracial great-grandson.
Each of these young women -- and the dozen or so of others who have cycled through the group -- has been hidden or discarded by family, and also by the Padua Beach community as a whole, which considers them all ''the wrong kind of mother.''
Together, and with Simone as an eldest sister of sorts, ''they lived on whims of want and need, nomadic and ravenous and naked in their hurt.''
But with their exile comes freedom from the trappings of conventional lives. Though she has very little, Simone is generous with what she does have; and she and the other mothers care for their children and one another with an intuition and autonomy unblemished by society's scrutiny. When Emory goes to Simone with breastfeeding challenges, Simone teaches her how to read her baby's body language and position him: ''Squeeze, touch to his cupid's bow, bring his head to my tit.'' Each act of mothering serves as a counterpoint to the wounds of not being sufficiently mothered themselves.
Rendering portraits of the novel's three central characters -- as well as a collective, chorus-like portrait of the group as a whole -- is Mottley's central pursuit in ''The Girls Who Grew Big.'' It's through the portraits that the plot lines emerge, hinging on Florida's restrictive abortion laws; the complexities of female friendships; the challenges of chasing or relinquishing dreams; romantic love (queer and straight, requited and unrequited, sincere and exploitative); and, most poignantly, the young mothers' reckonings with the families that have failed them.
Mottley, who is known for her acclaimed debut, ''Nightcrawling,'' writes with unabashed reverence for these young mothers, never sanitizing or romanticizing their lives but instead valuing them on the page in all the ways they are not valued in their lives.
Finishing this blistering, wise, empathetic novel felt like seeing the mother on the Oakland restaurant patio again, at ease in the sun with her baby held close to her breast, knowing that satiating hunger with her body was nothing to hide. Mottley has brought the physicality and pain and beauty of birth and new motherhood into the light. That she has done so by way of teenage girls who have too often been shamed and shunned and told to hide themselves away makes her novel all the more vital to behold.
THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG | By Leila Mottley | Knopf | 341 pp. | $28
Nina LaCour needs a bio. tkt kt tkt tk tkt tk tkt kt tkt kt tk tkt kt tkt kt tkt kt tkt tk tkt tk tkt tk tkt tk tkttktk
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LaCour, Nina. "Support System." The New York Times Book Review, 20 July 2025, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A848315122/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=807ff68b. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.