Writers sometimes talk of giving birth to their books, but probably very few are also working as doulas. It’s an experience that clearly informs Leila Mottley’s new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, in which the struggles of pregnancy and motherhood loom large. Mottley’s work as a doula comes in addition to writing a bestselling debut novel, Nightcrawling, and featuring on Oprah’s Book Club; she was also youth poet laureate of Oakland, California, in 2018. But not much seems beyond the reach of the youngest ever writer to be longlisted for the Booker prize, back in 2022. The pity is that her considerable energy hasn’t translated into a more satisfying second book.
The Girls Who Grew Big tells the story of a gang of teenage mothers and the impromptu community they form in the humid disarray and general dysfunction of Padua, a fictional small town in the Florida panhandle. Led by their de facto leader, Simone, the Girls are a scrappy, ostracised handful of outsiders, variously rejected by their families and harshly judged by locals. Down on their luck and often abandoned by the adults in their lives, they resourcefully become a collective, based in the back of Simone’s truck.
At 20, Simone is the eldest, the mother of five-year-old twins Lion and Luck. When she finds herself unhappily pregnant again, she turns to the Girls for help. Among them is 17-year-old Emory, whose white family are appalled by her black boyfriend. She comes to the Girls when struggling to breastfeed her baby boy, Kai, and finds practical advice, sisterhood and support. Then new girl Adela washes up in town: a champion swimmer with college ambitions, exiled from her former life by an unplanned pregnancy and sent to stay with her grandmother for nine months. Emory is immediately infatuated, and soon the Girls find their community disrupted.
Those are the bones of the book, and there’s clearly something potent here: the raw lives of teenage mothers, the fierce bonds forged in adversity, the alarmingly unequal access to good-quality maternity care in contemporary America. And yet The Girls Who Grew Big ultimately lands awkwardly, emerging as a mawkish paean to motherhood. This is a well-meant novel about decent things – sisterhood and solidarity – but its sentiment is never more sophisticated than this, and the writing too often sinks into the syrupy. Nightcrawling, Mottley’s novel about an impoverished teenage sex worker in Oakland who ends up at the centre of a police corruption case, was a startling debut: miraculously lucid, politically pointed and tenderly wrought. But in The Girls Who Grew Big, when Mottley reaches for gritty realism, she often gives us something that feels gratuitous instead.
The novel opens, for instance, with Simone chewing through not one but two umbilical cords as she gives birth to twins in the back of her boyfriend’s truck. It’s certainly striking, but it also reads like an unnecessary provocation. Simone reasons that her teeth are preferable to her boyfriend’s dirty pocket knife, “crusted in dried brown blood, shed fur from some long-dead animal, and Lord knows how many fishes’ yellowed intestines”, as Mottley seems intent on challenging the reader from the first. Later, calling in a favour, Simone reminds Emory that she “sucked on her nipple just last week to get a clogged duct to flow again”. Birth is messy and women’s bodies are unruly: Mottley insists we confront this. Her prose relishes the blood and milk, straight talk sometimes curdling into something more callow and needlessly graphic.
Setting the novel in Florida allows Mottley dramatic licence and she makes the most of it. She has a hurricane hit Padua, and the Girls flee from it in their wildly veering vehicle. A storm fells a tree, which inconveniently closes the local Planned Parenthood clinic. An alligator turns up at Emory’s high school like a bad omen. An orca beaches itself as if summoned by the novel’s own need for symbolism and the Girls duly scramble to save it. Drama is Mottley’s preferred mode, and the set pieces – a cat fight between Adela and Simone; a tense reveal between Adela and her new boyfriend – feel melodramatic rather than real.
But the Mottley of Nightcrawling is here too, writing with poetic clarity in fleeting moments. She is excellent at capturing the mysterious quality of this neglected patch of Florida: its close, salty air, its turquoise waters and its white sands. She is believable on passion. When Emory gazes at Adela, she feels “a crazed swirl at the bowl of [her] body”, and she longs “to know everything about her, even when she only gave me fractions”. But too often The Girls Who Grew Big feels overly ambitious, a virtuous rhapsody, determined to say something transcendent about young motherhood but stuck peddling folksy wisdom instead.
• The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
