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
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