Mottley, the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, published her debut novel Nightcrawling at age 19, earning a Booker Prize longlisting. The novel encapsulates the lives of three young women facing similar challenges but with unique perspectives shaped by various factors, including race and class. It also examines the dynamics of relationships between young girls and older men, highlighting the need for understanding the naivety of youth. Mottley's own experiences with sexual harassment during her teenage years inform the narrative, underscoring the harsh realities faced by young women.
I also 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, going through very similar experiences. But each of them has a different perspective and a different kind of foundational sense of the world that changes the way that she interacts with pregnancy, with parenthood, with life. And I wanted us to understand that there are a lot of ways to be a good mother and that teen parenthood isn't monolithic and it doesn't look just one way, and that it exists across race, and across class, and across geography, and that we see a lot of different examples and representations of the way that these girls handle themselves and their lives and their friendships.
There's two relationships between young girls and older men in this book, and I wanted us to kind of examine that, because a good portion of young parents have partners who are six or more years older than them. And I think [when] we're 16, we don't understand the vast difference between 16 and 22, whereas by the time that we get to 22, we hopefully have a lot more perspective on how big of a gap there is between that. And I think that there needs to be a lot of grace and compassion for the way that we look at young girls who want to be loved and are being told things that they don't have the information to know aren't true.
Every single day of my teens, from when I was maybe 10 or 11, I was followed home, called out to, had people try to get me to get in their cars, all kinds of things happened.
Collection
[
|
...
]