TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is author and poet Leila Mottley. She earned critical acclaim a few years ago at just 19 for her New York Times bestselling debut novel “Nightcrawling.” Now she’s back with a new novel that follows three young women as they navigate what it means to be a mother today when reproductive rights are being rolled back across the country. Mottley says she found herself writing and rewriting “The Girls Who Grew Big” in real time, as abortion laws rapidly shifted, forcing her to adapt her characters’ lives to this new and uncertain reality. The novel is set in Padua Beach, a fictional Florida town so small, it doesn’t even appear on a map. And it opens with an explosive scene – Simone at 16, impregnated by her 22-year-old boyfriend, giving birth in the back of his red pickup truck.
LEILA MOTTLEY: (Reading) To tell you the truth, I didn’t know much of nothing back then, sitting in that pickup truck, staring at my placenta. How could I? Not ’cause I was young, but ’cause I was new, like my newborn babies’ skin – so soft, it seemed like they could tear open at any moment. I was just a fragile thing in a sharp world, like every other girl is before they meet themselves, before they meet their child and know what it means to be tethered. I already know y’all will take any chance you get to say we don’t know what we’re talking about. I’ve seen all the teen mom shows, but that’s not what I’m saying. All those shows get made just to give y’all some white girls to laugh at, pity and say they should have known better. But maybe you should have known better than to believe a camera is a mirror or an ocean is a pool, or a mother is anything but a mother. You won’t know till you know, and now I do.
MOSLEY: Mottley says her goal as a writer is to offer new perspectives on what it means to be a young woman in contemporary America. At 16, she was named Oakland, California’s Youth Poet Laureate. Her 2024 poetry collection, “Woke Up No Light,” wrestles with girlhood, reparations and desire. She also co-wrote and starred in the documentary short “When I Write It,” which was featured in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. And her best-selling debut, “Nightcrawling,” was inspired by real cases of young women in Oakland who were assaulted and exploited by police. And a note and a warning before we get started – this conversation references assault and sexual violence, which may not be suitable for young listeners.
Leila Mottley, welcome to FRESH AIR.
MOTTLEY: Thank you so much for having me.
MOSLEY: You know, Leila, as I was reading this book, I kept thinking how, over the last 50 years, young women have kind of been taught that motherhood doesn’t have to be their ultimate aspiration. Teen pregnancy rates in this country are, I believe, at an all-time low now. And yet at the same time, we’re in a moment when access to abortion is drastically being rolled back. And your novel actually puts young mothers at the center, right in the middle of these conflicting realities. How did you think about that tension as you were writing this book?
MOTTLEY: I think we’ve been taught that teen pregnancy is a moral issue. And I wanted us to question the idea that young parenthood is anything but a circumstance, and urge us to look differently at the ways that we look at mothers in general. I think that the world and our culture has so much criticism and judgment for any and every choice that mothers make, from how you birth to how you feed your baby, to how you put your baby to sleep, to what school you put them in – all of these things that are only compounded when we look at young parents, who are almost judged and demonized for the very act of their parenthood. 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.
I am also a doula. And so I am kind of immersed in the world of pregnancy and birth, and specifically work with young parents and with Black parents. And I believe that the transformation into parenthood has a direct relationship to the way that we raise our children and become new people as parents.
MOSLEY: How did you come into being a doula?
MOTTLEY: I don’t quite know what – how I got that in my mind. I worked in preschools as a teenager, so I’ve been working with kids for most of my life. And then, when I sold “Nightcrawling,” it happened concurrently with the pandemic. And so for the first time in my life, I wasn’t working with children. And about a year later, when I was 18, I decided that I wanted to become a doula. And then, a little over a year ago, I started actively attending births. But I also work in full-spectrum doula work. So I do prenatal education and postpartum work, too, and then I also support abortions.
MOSLEY: I’m wondering how your experience supporting moms in real life shaped the way you wrote about birth and motherhood in this novel.
MOTTLEY: Yeah. I mean, I think getting to witness the transformation into parenthood – it is so abundantly clear to me how isolating it can be, especially in those first weeks and months, as there’s almost a death of the self and a rebirth of the new self. And we don’t have a kind of culture of community and communal care around parenthood, and what it looks like to support mothers specifically. There’s so much judgment for mothers. Motherhood is kind of the greatest equalizer. For any and every parent, it is challenging, and it pushes you to the limits of yourself. And you have to learn how to become something not just for yourself, but for this little person that you’ve created, right? And I think for the girls in this book, they essentially have already been outcasted and othered from communities of mothers, and their community as a whole, and have to kind of create a collective together in ways that I think many of our communities haven’t figured out how to do.
MOSLEY: You set this in the panhandle of Florida, a place that you had never been before you started writing this story. Why Florida? And why a fictional town in Florida?
MOTTLEY: Yeah. So when I started writing this book, I knew the setting needed to be set in the South, where reproductive care was limited. And I wanted the setting to mirror these girls’ experiences. The Florida panhandle is kind of an entirely different culture than a lot of the rest of Florida. It’s culturally the South. But it also still has kind of the same culture of escapism that we think of when we think of Florida, of, like, spring breakers and people going to vacation in these coastal towns. But I wanted us to look at, like, there’s this small town that’s not even on the map. And in a lot of ways, I think it mirrors the girls’ experience of being undervalued and seen as undesirable, but creating a world of possibility and beauty for themselves, regardless of if that is recognized by the world.
MOSLEY: Were you writing and rewriting in real time as the laws in Florida were shifting?
MOTTLEY: Very much so. When I started writing the book, it was before Roe v. Wade was overturned. And then, over the course of writing the book, the laws in Florida around abortion changed four times. And so it went from a 15-week abortion ban to an 11-week abortion ban to a six-week abortion ban that then had to pass through Supreme Court. And when we think about a six-week abortion ban, that’s six weeks from your last missed period. A lot of people don’t even know they’re pregnant at that point. But I wanted this book to look at not only kind of those facts that we talk about around abortion access, but also some of the other limitations and obstacles to accessing abortion. Like, in a lot of states, you need to have two appointments, 24 hours in between, in order to receive medication to then go home and self-manage an abortion. For these girls, they’re three hours away from the closest abortion clinic, and that means that they have to figure out gas money. And a lot of women have children already when they’re getting abortions, including the character in this book, and so that means child care access – and then actually self-managing an abortion, having a safe place to do so. All of those things can be prohibitive, not to mention the actual cost of abortion and the restrictions around timeline.
MOSLEY: I want to talk a little bit about the characters in this book – so 16-year-old Adela, 18-year-old Emory. And then there’s 20-year-old Simone, who already has twins. And she’s, at the beginning of the book, pregnant with her third child. Is there something in particular about those ages – 16, 18, 20 – that felt like time periods in a woman’s life that you wanted to explore?
MOTTLEY: The teenage years are so packed and all-consuming. Everything feels big. And so I wanted us to get a spectrum of young girls who some maybe have a little more hindsight than others because they’ve already lived through some of it, whereas, you know, Adela, she’s 16. She’s pregnant. She’s in the thick of it. Emory has a newborn and is kind of in the trenches of newborn life. And then Simone already has 4-year-old twins. So she has a little bit more hindsight and more perspective.
And I think I wanted us to understand how much can change for us between those ages. I know a lot changed for me between 16 and 20, and there’s just so much growth that takes place. But this is also a time in life where we’re gaining independence, right? And we’re figuring out how to separate ourselves. And I think the way that we think about young people as a culture is almost as though we own them until they’re 18. And the very act of pregnancy and parenthood is a marker of choice and independence. And there is some tension that arises for them with their families and their communities in figuring out how to be their own people and how to do so while also wanting to receive the love and support and belonging of their families.
MOSLEY: Let’s take a short break. If you’re just joining us, my guest is author Leila Mottley. And her new novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big,” is about a group of teenage mothers in a small town in the Florida Panhandle who forge a community through their circumstances. Through their stories, the novel explores the realities of reproductive rights and the weight of history on our present moment. We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we’re talking to Leila Mottley, author of the bestselling novel “Nightcrawling,” which was published when Motley was 19. Her new novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big,” centers on the lives of a group of teenage mothers navigating the intersecting challenges of bodily autonomy, history and survival. Just to note, before we get back to our conversation, there will be a frank discussion of childbirth that may not be suitable for young listeners.
Leila, one of the things you do is immerse us in this book with your characters’ inner worlds. We are reading this from the private conversations they’re having with themselves, and it feels deeply intimate. And I want to share another excerpt from the character Simone that captures this so powerfully. So this moment I’m going to have you read, it’s a significant part of her journey, but I promise to listeners that it’s not a spoiler. So in this section, Simone reflects on getting an abortion, and she mentions the name Luck in this excerpt, which refers to one of her children, one of her twins. Can I have you read it?
MOTTLEY: (Reading) You ever wondered what happens after you abort a baby? Life and blood. The blood came on and off for almost three weeks. I threw a party with the girls on the beach when all the spotting ceased to nothing. In between songs and rounds of Would You Rather, I took another pregnancy test down by the water, Emory standing by me, and we both hollered like coyotes in the night when only one line showed up. It was over. All my ugly feelings washing away with my p***.
(Reading) I ran back to the girls, picked Luck up, and swung her into the air until she started hiccupping, she was laughing so hard – me laughing with her like I hadn’t in months. That hurricane began and ended so many things. But I’d spent every minute since then worrying it didn’t work or that I was about to hemorrhage or that somebody was going to come and lock me away for what we did that night in Adela’s basement. But now it was really over. Life was a steady trickle by the dune lake, and me and my babies was good.
MOSLEY: That’s my guest today, Leila Mottley, reading from her new novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big.” I want to talk to you a little bit about your process in finding these voices because you have three singular voices that you’re telling these stories through. And for “Nightcrawling,” I actually heard that you spent time journaling as the main character to deepen the voice of the main character in that book. What was your process of finding the characters’ voices in this novel?
MOTTLEY: 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. And so I did a lot of work to kind of create their individuality, and a lot of that is how we see them interact with kind of the same scenario very differently.
MOSLEY: Were they based on real people?
MOTTLEY: No. I think that as a writer, there are, like, fragments of myself and people that I know that show up kind of subconsciously in every book and in every character. 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.
MOSLEY: What made you want to explore the age difference situation? It’s almost so common in society that we don’t see it. Like, the main things that we focus on is whether someone’s underage or legal. But anything beyond that – I don’t know if I’ve read anything that really examines that power dynamic and difference between, say, someone who is 17 and 18 and being with a man who is much older.
MOTTLEY: It’s so common. And, I mean, I grew up with so many people who dated far above their age. And when you’re a teenager, there really isn’t as much perspective on that difference because you feel grown. And in a lot of ways, like, you want to be independent. And this person comes and tells you, like, oh, you’re mature. There’s no difference between me and you. And you want to believe it.
MOSLEY: Is that an experience that you ever had?
MOTTLEY: I think in my experience in Oakland as a young person, there was a lot of harassment and sexual harassment. And I think that’s common, particularly among young Black girls. And almost all…
MOSLEY: And what did that look like? Explain it.
MOTTLEY: I mean, 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. Like, I think that it is an experience that is so common, we almost, like, don’t even bother to talk about it because we already know that no one is going to protect us. And a lot of, I think, “Nightcrawling” was built around, like, what does it mean to walk through a world that doesn’t care about your safety? And I think part of this book was born out of, what does it mean to care about what it means to be a parent and figure out what it means to be a good parent, and do so while you’re also trying to become a person yourself?
MOSLEY: Because in “Nightcrawling,” which was your best-selling debut novel, it’s about a young woman named Kiara who was scraping by in East Oakland. And she eventually becomes exploited by the very people that’s supposed to protect her – the police. She becomes a sex worker, and she is exploited. And that story is loosely based on several true stories. Is this part of the reason why you wanted to tell it? Why did you feel like, for your debut novel, this would be a story that was important to get out there?
MOTTLEY: I was 16 and 17 when I wrote “Nightcrawling,” and for me, part of it was a memorializing of Oakland. I grew up in Oakland at a time where it was rapidly changing, and still is. And there’s a sort of implicit grief in that experience. And I wanted to capture my city as it was and also recognize that we can love a place, and we can call a place home, and also recognize and criticize the ways that it doesn’t protect us. And I don’t know a single Black girl specifically who hasn’t experienced the same type of, like, 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, like, are taught that we’re supposed to stay silent because it makes other people uncomfortable. And so I wanted to create this story that maybe hopefully helps us understand what it feels like to walk around in the world, knowing no one is looking out for you.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is author and poet Leila Mottley. We’ll be right back after a short break. I’m Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD & BILL EVANS’ “PIXIES”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. Today, we’re talking to author and poet Leila Mottley. Her first novel, “Nightcrawling,” was published when she was just 19 and became a New York Times bestseller. Her new novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big,” tells the story of three young mothers navigating parenthood in a post-Roe v. Wade world. In addition to fiction, Mottley’s 2024 poetry collection, “Woke Up No Light,” tackles themes of girlhood, reparations, restitution and desire. Mottley also served as the 2018 Youth Poet Laureate of her hometown of Oakland, California.
You were named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland when you were 16 years old, and you actually wrote this really beautiful poem about the city. Can I have you read the poem? It’s called “Love Poem to Oakland.”
MOTTLEY: (Reading) Dear Oakland, last night I got off a plane, rolled my neck, felt it crack and said, honey, I’m home. Said, baby, I ain’t going to leave you again. This is my love letter. This is my spilling-over waxed mural of a song to you. My prayers to the Panthers, to the Everett & Jones on MacArthur that smells so good. Got that rubber chew of a home too far, that sweet spice of my city.
Oakland, can I cradle you like my daddy cradled me? Hold you tight, say, baby, I got you. Tough love, say, fix your face ‘fore I fix it for you. Fix these streets ‘fore I fix them for you. Where did all the color go? Where did all my sweat-laced, church-clapping, handing-out-pies-on-High-Street men go? My sisters with their gloves on, with their afros out, don’t care if they’re afraid of us ’cause we got these streets. We got this lake. We got Fruitvale Station at 5 p.m. when the music starts.
Dear Downtown, what I got to say to make you love me? What I got to do to strip Uptown back? If I can’t have this hair, this skin, then I don’t want no $5 coffee, no $10 cobb salad piled up with all this talk about how we been criminals, been scared straight, so they can feed us back our shame.
East Oakland, I know you ain’t forgotten about me. I know you been waiting for my tongue to click, gums to throat to lungs, scream till the bay dries up. I know you been sitting on your heels for me to find the key to the Alameda Detention Hall, tell your kids that Mama hasn’t forgotten about you, hasn’t left you chained from your childhood. Mama been at work, been waiting to set us free, to give us back our city.
Oakland, I’m talking to you – Dimond to Laurel to Uptown, to Chinatown to Fruitvale to Foothill, to Temescal to Eastmont to West Oakland. We’re 10 steps from home, a mile, we racing. They been displacing our bodies, our words, our letters, been trying to tear us apart. But I know you been loving us, been whispering our history, Black Panthers to White Horse to BART at night. Oakland, we’re fighting home. We’re clawing home. We’re coming home.
MOSLEY: That’s my guest, poet and author Leila Mottley, reading her poem “Love Letter to Oakland.” Leila, tell us a little bit about this poem. It’s an ultimate love letter. It makes me curious – the story behind the writing of this love letter. Did it start with you returning home from a trip?
MOTTLEY: Yeah. I think I wrote this right after I went to Detroit to visit my family.
MOSLEY: ‘Cause your father’s from Detroit originally.
MOTTLEY: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
MOTTLEY: And a lot of my family still lives there. I was 15 when I wrote this poem, and it’s been a good eight years, 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 of 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 we want for ourselves. And at the same time, like, 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 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, and how to love a place and how to care for it and how to fight for it when we’ve been told that it is undesirable, or only desirable in relation to the influx of whiteness and wealth.
MOSLEY: You have both a deep love for the city. But you also can see the way the city has maybe harmed you in the ways that you’re talking about, and that loneliness you feel walking the streets and being targeted by grown men. Is that what I’m hearing from you?
MOTTLEY: Completely. And I think that when particularly we’re framing historically Black cities through violence, we have to remember that that interpersonal and intercommunal violence is almost always born out of state violence and a removal of resources. And so there has to be a simultaneous, like, criticism of the harm that has been done to us and then the harm that we continue to perpetuate within our communities, and how we can hold each other accountable and show up for each other differently.
MOSLEY: Where did you learn that? ‘Cause so many people don’t really come to that idea – look, I’m saying so many people, but I’ma say me, OK? – didn’t really come to these ideas and understanding of, like, your relationship with your hometown until, like, much older in age. Were these conversations you were having at home?
MOTTLEY: No. No, they weren’t. I mean, Oakland is a really specific place and has a, like, kind of tradition and history and legacy of resistance. And growing up in a time where Oakland was rapidly changing – so much displacement, so much, like, loss – I had to cope with that on a daily basis and understand, like, that there is power in fighting and in trying to maintain our homes. And I think that that very much ties into this kind of legacy of rebellion. I grew up getting to, like, be in conversation with former Black Panthers, and I read a lot. And I think that that definitely helped me kind of process it. But I think it wasn’t until I left home really briefly – I think just even a couple months of distance to kind of reevaluate and understand and choose my home. And since then, I’ve kind of had to create an adult relationship with the city.
MOSLEY: You reference a lot of things in the poem. One thing that comes up is Fruitvale Station, which people outside of Oakland may only know through the death of Oscar Grant. How much of that has made up your consciousness as you think about your city and your interactions with authority? It was just a major event for the city that still reverberates.
MOTTLEY: Yeah. Completely. Fruitvale Station is, like, my home BART station. And so for a lot of my life, all I thought about it was, like, this is the place I go every day. And they ended up painting a mural of him on the side of- there’s this big wall right beneath the train tracks. And I think I probably learned about Oscar Grant when I was maybe 10, 11, 12. And I think one of the most impactful things for me is, like, his mother and the way that she continued to fight for not only him, but Black children across the world and across the country, and the amount of grief and harm that mothers have to carry in particular when their children are unsafe in a world that they can’t protect them from.
MOSLEY: That’s an interesting perspective to key in on at such a young age because oftentimes when these stories are reported out, a mother’s grief is kind of a flashpoint in the story, but the larger story becomes kind of political. It became about police and police violence, and the grief is almost secondary.
MOTTLEY: Yeah. And I think that the way that we position Black women in particular around police violence is always kind of at the sidelines, even though in reality, often Black women are carrying the bulk of the weight of what it means to mourn and to fight and to keep a memory alive.
MOSLEY: Is it true that your grandma was part of SNIC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, back during the…
MOTTLEY: Yes.
MOSLEY: Civil Rights era?
MOTTLEY: She was, yeah, in Detroit.
MOSLEY: What stories did you hear about that growing up?
MOTTLEY: I heard a lot of stories about the Detroit Rebellion. And kind of my dad grew up in the ’60s in Detroit, and he used to tell me this story about how during the Detroit Rebellion, he lived in my grandmother’s house, and they would sleep on the floor to avoid the bullets coming through the windows. I think my family has a strong history of resistance. My grandmother was also the head of the nurses’ labor union in Detroit, and she did a lot of work around caretaking and activism and organizing. And there is definitely a legacy of that, as well as art and writing.
MOSLEY: In your poem, you mention that you had contact with Black Panthers. What’s the story behind that?
MOTTLEY: I think I met Elaine Brown for the first time when I was 15. And I performed a poem at a tea for, like, dozens of Black women and Black women organizers in Oakland. And then I’ve gotten to be in conversation with Angela Davis and meet Ericka Huggins. And, I mean, it’s so special to get to grow up among these people who have spent their entire lives working towards this mission, and who continue to do so, and have such an active impact in my community.
MOSLEY: Let’s take a short break. If you’re just joining us, my guest is author Leila Mottley. And her new novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big,” is about a group of teenage mothers in a small town in the Florida panhandle who forge a community through their circumstances. We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAQUITO D’RIVERA QUINTET’S “CONTRADANZA”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we’re talking to Leila Mottley. Her new novel, “The Girls Who Grew Big,” centers on the lives of a group of teenage mothers navigating the intersecting challenges of body autonomy, history and survival.
You know, a lot has been made of your age. You’ll be talking about being a young writer until you’re no longer a young writer, but you started writing your first novel at 14. And you said many times, though, that you weren’t a typical 14-year-old, that you had to grow up fast. Can you tell us a little more of what you mean by that?
MOTTLEY: I grew up in a complicated family with a lot of experiences and emotions and feelings. And so I was a very talkative kid. I talked a lot, and there wasn’t necessarily the space or capacity for people to hear me. And so instead of talking about my thoughts, I – at first, I started, like, talking to my fingers. I’d whisper to my fingers. And then, once I learned how to write, I started writing. So I started writing poetry when I was six, and then I started writing short stories when I was eight or nine. And then I started writing novels when I was 14. And I think with each novel, it became, like, more and more just part of my DNA and part of who I am. I also am fortunate enough to have grown up with a lot of artists, where art and discipline was common. And I think that we have kind of this idea culturally that young people are not doing anything, and I think that we underestimate the power and the amount of thought that young people have. But also, I do believe that we need to look at art for young people as important beyond just how it is consumed.
MOSLEY: Your father also is a writer – a playwright.
MOTTLEY: Yes, he is.
MOSLEY: So you would watch him, as well, in his creative pursuits. What do you remember about that?
MOTTLEY: Yeah. My dad worked a lot when I was very little, and he would come home really late at night. And we lived in this, like, two-bedroom apartment, and so me and my brother would be in our room, and we’d wake up when he got home and listen to his keyboard start clacking. And that’s when he would start writing. I got to grow up with someone who was deeply passionate about writing and about art and about doing it for the love of it, regardless of the outcome. And I think that that was incredibly important to my understanding of the importance of the practice of writing and of doing it daily, and of loving it for what it is and not for what it gets you.
MOSLEY: Right. ‘Cause is it true that you wrote six books between your first novel, “Nightcrawling,” and this current book that we’re…
MOTTLEY: Yeah.
MOSLEY: …Talking about?
MOTTLEY: Yes, that is true.
MOSLEY: That’s an incredible amount of writing. And when I hear about someone working at that level, it shows kind of a deep love for the craft. But it also suggests that you’re creating, first and foremost, for yourself. Is that true for you?
MOTTLEY: Yeah. I mean, until “Nightcrawling” and even during “Nightcrawling,” like, I didn’t show my work to really anyone. And so it was entirely for me. And that was, I think, a really sacred experience that you don’t really get to recreate once you start publishing. But I think having so many years where I had a word count goal that I met every day, regardless of what was happening – I worked full-time, and I would wake up at 6 in the morning and I would write. And I would write on the bus to work, and I would write on BART on the way home. And I had a very consistent practice from a young age that I think helped me get to the point that when I started thinking of what I wanted to write after “Nightcrawling,” I knew how to write anything at any time, regardless of creativity or time. But I struggled with figuring out how to write with the idea of a reader in mind.
MOSLEY: How did you get over that? How did you cross over?
MOTTLEY: I wrote six books, and I…
MOSLEY: Yeah, you wrote…
MOTTLEY: …Threw them out.
MOSLEY: Oh, you threw them out. So will we ever see them, or?
MOTTLEY: Probably not in that form. I imagine that maybe one day I’ll return to some of them, but I’m not super precious about my work. So if I don’t feel like it is clicking or that I’m in the right place to tell a story well, that I will leave it alone and I’ll start over.
MOSLEY: When you’re someone writing for yourself and, like, constantly doing that practice, how does it feel, then, to have your work consumed in such a spectacular way? Because your first novel is a bestseller. You’re chosen on Oprah’s Book Club list. I mean, you’re, like, right in the fire.
MOTTLEY: Yeah. I mean, I think you have to understand the dissonance, too, of the amount of change that happens between 17, when I wrote “Nightcrawling,” and then 19, 20, when it was coming out. I felt like an entirely different person. I was an entirely different person and a different writer. And it was almost like having my 17-year-old diary published…
MOSLEY: Right.
MOTTLEY: …And memorialized for the rest of my life. And I think that’s something that all writers have to cope with, is, 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, like, respect the person who wrote that book and really see it as a representation of a 17-year-old’s mind. And I think that’s something we don’t often get to see.
MOSLEY: Is motherhood something that you aspire to experience?
MOTTLEY: Yes. Yeah. I am one of those people who’s, like, wanted to be a parent since I was a child. Because I am in a queer relationship, I kind of have the blessing and burden of parenthood being a very intentional choice. There’s not going to be an oopsie. And so I think in some ways, that means that I spend a lot of my time thinking about, like, intentionality around parenthood and what it looks like to become ready to truly be selfless and to have your life orient around another person, and to know that there is a certain amount of loss and death of self in becoming somebody’s parent. And I want to be as ready for that as possible while also knowing that we’re never ready, and we’re never prepared. And parenthood is unpredictable, and you don’t know what kind of kid you’re going to get. But I do think that the most important thing is being ready to be accountable to that child for the rest of your life and for the rest of theirs.
MOSLEY: Leila Mottley, thank you for your time, and thank you for this book.
MOTTLEY: Thank you so much for having me.
MOSLEY: Leila Mottley’s new novel is called “The Girls Who Grew Big.” Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the season premiere of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” with the cast of “Abbott Elementary” showing up in guest-starring roles. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT’S “BRIGHT MISSISSIPPI”)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
