Leila Mottley's novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, follows three women navigating pregnancy and motherhood in a small Florida panhandle town. The story's development was influenced by evolving abortion laws in Florida. Mottley, also a doula, aims to challenge the stigma around young motherhood, emphasizing that teen pregnancy is often wrongly perceived as a moral failing. She highlights the isolation new parents experience and the importance of community support in their transformation into parenthood. Additionally, Mottley utilized journaling to capture three distinct first-person perspectives of the characters, enhancing their voices and experiences.
When I started writing the book, it was before Roe v. Wade was overturned. And then over the course of writing the book, the laws in Florida around abortion changed.
I think we've been taught that teen pregnancy is a moral issue. And as we see declining rates of teen pregnancy, we are taught that that is a win, which in some ways then implicitly implies that young pregnancy and parenthood is a failing, and it's not.
Getting to witness the transformation into parenthood, it is so abundantly clear to me how isolating it can be. I think for the girls in this book, they have to kind of create a collective together in ways that I think many of our communities haven't figured out how to do.
I did journaling for each of the characters in this book. This was a process because I was creating three first-person perspectives of girls in similar demographics from the same place.
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