The Unbearable Bigness of Being: On Leila Mottley’s The Girls Who Grew Big

The Placenta and the Pocketknife

There are certain truths a novel can tell that nonfiction cannot touch. They are truths of the body, of the blood, of the visceral, unglamorous sacraments that bind one human to another. Leila Mottley, whose searing debut Nightcrawlingestablished her as a cartographer of the soul’s most perilous landscapes, returns with The Girls Who Grew Big, a novel that begins not with a birth, but with an afterbirth. “Nobody ever warns you about the placenta,” her narrator, Simone, tells us. It is a startling, primal opening—a sixteen-year-old girl in the bed of a pickup truck, having just delivered twins, now facing the gruesome, non-negotiable task of expelling the organ that sustained them. When her boyfriend, Tooth, offers a pocketknife crusted with the detritus of dead animals to sever the umbilical cords, Simone makes a choice born of instinct and necessity: she bites through them herself. This act, raw and revolting, is the novel’s foundational sacrament. It sets the stage for a narrative that is less about the scandal of teenage motherhood in the forgotten Florida Panhandle and more about a profound, almost terrifying question: In a world that seeks to make girls small, what does it mean for them to grow big, not just in body, but in will, in love, in the sheer, unyielding force of their own survival? Mottley’s novel is a polyphonic testament to this bigness, a story of girls who become a “glorious sea” out of “sad drops of water,” but it is also an unflinching examination of the brutal gravity that forever threatens to pull them under.

A Cartography of Dispossession

To understand The Girls Who Grew Big is to understand its geography, both literal and psychic. The setting is Padua Beach, a fictional town on the Florida Panhandle, a place Mottley renders with anthropological precision. This is “the country’s favorite scapegoat,” a coastal blip where “you go north and you get South.” It is a landscape of dune lakes, Spanish moss, trailer parks on cinder blocks, and a stifling humidity that mirrors the social atmosphere. The novel operates within a distinct literary tradition—one might call it American Peripheral Realism—that finds its lineage in the works of Dorothy Allison, Jesmyn Ward, and even the early short stories of Flannery O’Connor. It is a literature of the dispossessed, focusing on characters who live on the margins of the American Dream, their lives dictated by the twin forces of poverty and provincial judgment. Mottley’s unique contribution to this tradition is her focus on a specific, maligned archetype: the teen mom. She rips this figure from the exploitative gaze of reality television and tabloid headlines and imbues her with a ferocious, complicated humanity. The “Girls,” a makeshift sorority of young mothers led by the novel’s primary narrator, Simone, are not cautionary tales. They are a self-made ecosystem, a “gang of teen moms” who find family “out of a truck bed and the milky delight of watching our babies grow through the fog of distant shame.” Their red pickup truck is both sanctuary and chariot, a mobile territory in a town that has excommunicated them. Mottley’s narrative premise is a radical act of recentering, forcing the reader to inhabit a perspective that society has conditioned them to pity, condemn, or ignore. The world of Padua Beach is a crucible, and the Girls are not merely surviving it; they are forging a new physics of existence within its suffocating heat.

The Gospel of the Body

At its core, The Girls Who Grew Big is a profoundly corporeal novel. Mottley’s prose is relentlessly physical, grounding its emotional and philosophical inquiries in the flesh. The body is the primary site of knowledge, trauma, and transcendence. This is most evident in the novel’s tripartite structure, which mirrors the trimesters of a pregnancy. Each section opens with a lyrical, italicized chorus—a “we” that speaks for all the Girls—describing the biological transformations of gestation with the reverence of a sacred text. “We sense the presence before our bodies register it as a cell worth multiplying,” begins the First Trimester. “Breasts that had not yet caused an aching…soon swell…like bruised fruit.” This framing device elevates the physical experience of pregnancy from a mere plot point to a liturgical cycle. Mottley refuses to sanitize the experience. Simone’s story begins with the placenta, Adela’s with debilitating nausea, and Emory’s with the painful, frustrating mechanics of breastfeeding. The body in Mottley’s world is not an aesthetic object but a working, bleeding, leaking, and ultimately, powerful entity. When Simone describes biting through the umbilical cords, she notes, “they felt like nothing but pasta before it’s cooked through.” It is a shockingly mundane simile for a shocking act, and it is this commitment to the unvarnished reality of the body that gives the novel its formidable power. The Girls’ bodies are their résumés and their rap sheets, the source of their shame and the undeniable evidence of their creative force.

The Architecture of Voice

Mottley structures the novel as a polyvocal narrative, rotating primarily between three distinct first-person perspectives: Simone, Adela, and Emory. This choice is not merely a stylistic flourish; it is central to the book’s thematic project. Each voice represents a different facet of the experience of being young, female, and dispossessed in Padua Beach. Simone is the anchor, the matriarch of the Girls. Her voice is raw, defiant, and laced with a hard-won wisdom. She is the novel’s beating heart, her narrative grounded in the brutal pragmatism of survival. Adela, the newcomer from an affluent Indianapolis suburb, provides the outsider’s perspective. Sent to live with her grandmother in Padua Beach to hide her pregnancy, her initial judgments give way to a gradual, and often painful, assimilation. Her voice is more polished, analytical, but it carries the deep wound of exile. Emory, the white girl in the predominantly Black group, complicates the novel’s racial dynamics. Her narrative is steeped in the specificities of her “Panhandle Florida” heritage, a world of Pawpaws and Grammy, of wanting more but fearing she is destined for less. Her love for Adela, fraught and unrequited, adds a layer of queer desire that ripples beneath the surface of the narrative. The interplay between these voices creates a rich, contrapuntal texture. Their stories overlap and diverge, offering conflicting perspectives on the same events. This narrative structure mirrors the very nature of the sisterhood it depicts: a collective formed not from homogeneity, but from the messy, often dissonant, harmony of individual lives colliding. The chorus sections that introduce each trimester further amplify this effect, creating a fourth, collective voice—the “we”—that is both witness and oracle.

The Tyranny of Small Choices

While the novel deals with grand themes of motherhood, community, and survival, its most profound insights often emerge from the accumulation of small, seemingly inconsequential choices. The narrative is a study in the brutal algebra of limited options. Does Simone use Tooth’s dirty pocketknife or her own teeth? Does Emory abandon her dream of college to marry Jayden, the father of her child, for the sake of a fragile stability? Does Adela tell the truth about her baby’s paternity to her new boyfriend, Chris, or does she allow a lie of convenience to take root? Mottley masterfully illustrates how, for these characters, life is a series of tactical decisions made under immense pressure. There are no easy answers, and every choice carries a heavy cost. The scene in which Simone decides to induce her own abortion using herbs sourced from Adela’s grandmother is a harrowing example. The decision is not made lightly. It is debated, feared, and ultimately executed with a grim determination born of necessity. The description of the act is unflinching: “I felt the next seize approaching…and I could feel this one was gonna collapse me.” This is not a political statement shouted from a soapbox; it is the quiet, desperate calculus of a young woman trying to reclaim sovereignty over her own body and future. The novel argues that true agency, for those on the margins, is often found not in grand gestures of rebellion, but in the heart-wrenching triage of choosing the least damaging path among a minefield of bad options.

The Unforgiving Mirror of Male Fragility

If The Girls Who Grew Big is a testament to the resilience of its female characters, it is also a damning indictment of the men who orbit their world. The male characters—Tooth, Jayden, Chris, and the various fathers and grandfathers—are not one-dimensional villains. Mottley portrays them with a nuanced, almost tragic, complexity. They are products of the same constricting environment, their own versions of masculinity warped by poverty, lack of opportunity, and a deeply ingrained patriarchal code. Tooth, the father of Simone’s twins and Chris’s true name, is a figure of pitiable weakness. He is repulsed by the biological realities of childbirth and offers a filthy knife for a sacred task. His love for Simone is possessive, a desire to own her youth rather than partner in her life. Chris, Adela’s older boyfriend, embodies a more insidious form of male fragility. He fetishizes Adela’s perceived innocence and strength, but his affection is conditional, predicated on a lie she feels compelled to tell. When the truth of her pregnancy timeline is revealed, his adoration curdles into disgust: “You can’t be out here expecting me to raise somebody else’s baby. Fuck that.” Jayden, Emory’s earnest and loving baby-daddy, appears to be the exception, yet even his love becomes a cage, a well-intentioned trap that threatens to suffocate Emory’s ambitions. The novel’s most provocative argument is that the “bigness” of the Girls is forged in direct opposition to the smallness of the men around them. The men demand the girls remain knowable, controllable, and physically desirable in a conventional sense. The Girls’ growth—their solidarity, their bodily autonomy, their self-defined morality—is a radical act of defiance against this demand. They are not merely growing up; they are growing out of the containers the men in their lives have built for them.

A New Vernacular of Hope

In a literary landscape often saturated with irony and despair, The Girls Who Grew Big offers something startlingly rare: a vernacular of hope that feels earned, not sentimental. This is not the easy hope of a Hollywood ending. It is a hope forged in the crucible of shared survival. The novel’s resonance in our contemporary moment is profound. In an era marked by renewed assaults on reproductive rights, deepening economic inequality, and the relentless public scrutiny of women’s bodies, Padua Beach feels less like a fictional outlier and more like a microcosm of a national condition. The book speaks directly to the ways in which female friendships can become vital infrastructures of care in the face of systemic neglect. The ideal reader for this book is one who is unafraid to confront the visceral realities of life on the margins, a reader who understands that strength is not the absence of vulnerability but the courage to survive it. It is for the reader who sees a headline about a teenage mother and feels not judgment, but a pang of curiosity about the universe contained within her story. Mottley’s recommendation is not a simple one; she is not suggesting that this life is desirable, but she is insisting, with every lyrical, blood-soaked page, that it is worthy of our deepest attention and respect.

The Unbreakable Cord

In the end, The Girls Who Grew Big returns to the image with which it began: the unbreakable cord. The novel’s resolution is not one of neat closure. Emory leaves for college, entrusting her son to Jayden. Simone takes the money from the Girls’ jungle juice enterprise and decides to take her children and leave Padua Beach, to “find Girls like us wherever we go.” And Adela, in labor on the beach, surrounded by her found sisters, reaches down to catch her own daughter as she is born into the world. The physical umbilical cords were severed in the first pages, but the novel reveals the existence of another, more resilient, tether. It is the cord that binds these girls to each other, a connection forged not of blood, but of shared experience, mutual aid, and a radical act of seeing one another in a world that refuses to look. Mottley’s achievement is immense. She has written a novel that is both a love letter to the fierce, unruly power of girlhood and a lament for a world that works so tirelessly to tame it. The legacy of this book is in its unflinching gaze, its refusal to romanticize poverty while simultaneously celebrating the richness of the lives lived within it. It leaves the reader with the lingering, haunting image of girls who, having been told their bodies were a source of shame, discovered they were, in fact, the source of everything.