When Leila Mottley was writing her new novel, she admits she was often surprised by the characters she created. “They’re all different,” she says, although the book brings them together in profound ways around questions of motherhood and self-determination.
The award-winning Oakland author gives each a unique voice in “The Girls Who Grew Big” (Knopf, 352 pages, $28, June 24, 2025), which she’ll launch at Mrs. Dalloway’s bookstore in Berkeley next week.
The girls are the principal characters in a story of love and friendship, attraction and bonding, hard decisions and secrets—the kind of secret “kept exactly where a secret was meant to go: the bottom of the ocean, where you couldn’t find it even if you had a scuba mask and some flippers.”
Set in a small beach town in the Florida panhandle, the novel’s large cast comes from all over, with the teen characters speaking directly to the reader, telling their own past and questioning their futures.
Mottley divides the action into three “Trimesters,” keeping it focused on issues around childbearing, even as the young women struggle to make decisions about school, work, goals and other big life decisions. With few exceptions, the men of the story are supporting characters.
Mottley, the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, won accolades for her novel “Nightcrawling.” She started that book when she was 16, finished the first draft at 17, signed the contract at 18 and published it in 2022. It sold in 11 countries and was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times best-seller.
She notes that she wrote much of “Girls” while on tour to promote “Nightcrawling.” “I wrote it partially in hotel rooms, and I wrote some of it in Florida,” she said, adding that the setting was essential to the story.
“The book is about girls living on the margins of the country and their town, and I wanted the setting to mirror that,” she said. “When we talk about Florida, most of the time we’re talking about South Florida, Orlando or Tampa. It’s very different up in northwest Florida where the culture is southern, but it’s also still coastal and full of beach destinations, places that people go to escape. But there are whole communities living there. And after the spring-breakers leave, what is it like to be on the forgotten coast?”
It’s a mostly poor environment. In the book’s first episode, a girl named Simone gives birth at the beach in the back of a pickup truck. “I wasn’t the first one, that’s for sure,” the character says. “Young girls been having babies as long as there was babies to have.” Adela, an elite swimmer, arrives from out of town having never seen the ocean.
Mottley tells much of the story from the perspectives of Adela, Simone and Emery, but there are strong characters appearing throughout.
“I’ve no idea how many characters there are; it rotates throughout the book,” said Mottley. “Each trimester has a kind of interlude that is told through the collective. Their group includes maybe seven or eight strong characters; there are also girls coming in and out. I had spread sheets with kind of concurrent timelines, and because we’re dealing with pregnancy here, it was helpful to have a week-by-week understanding of where both Adela and Simone’s pregnancies were. It was definitely a challenge to keep it all straight.”
Relationships between the book’s young women and older men are often hazardous: “Girls,” she notes, “who fall in love with men who are too old. Simone is 20 and falls in love with a man six or seven years older; Adela is also pursued by an older man.”
For Mottley, it was essential for the book to show the ways pregnant women are often portrayed. “I think we have a very interesting relationship with teen pregnancies,” she said. “There’s a lot of simultaneous stigma and shame put on young parents—and, at the same time, a strange fascination with young moms. There are a lot of TV shows about young parents, and rarely do we see young parents actively parenting.
“I wanted to show a vast array of different young mothers. They’re not monolithic. They have very different lives, different circumstances; each of these girls have different desires and pathways in parenthood. I wanted to remind us of the fact that these are just young women learning how to be adults—to live and survive and have fun, fall in love, and have friendships that are complicated.”
Parenting, she adds, is hard, “and it typically requires community to not make it completely isolating. A lot of this book is about the way that community shows up for us, and how necessary that is.”
Mottley hopes the book illustrates the struggles that are real for many women. “They make choices that are questionable. They’re trying to figure out how to be parents and be young women at the same time. They’re young and they have been tasked with this major responsibility of raising a human. That’s hard at any age, but especially hard to do when you don’t have the support of the people around you. I think I would approach the girls with a lot of compassion and respect for where they are.”
Leila Mottley appears at 7 p.m. June 24 at Mrs. Dalloway’s, 2904 College Ave., Berkeley. Visit mrsdalloways.com/events.
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