23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Bighearted Novel Is an Ode to Teenage Mothers
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.
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