Girls Who Grew Big: Review

bY fEBRUARY sPIKENER

In the 19th century, a woman named Margaret Garner—a fugitive slave—attempted to kill her children, deciding that she would rather them reside in a place of oblivion than be enslaved once again. This story inspired Toni Morrison to write her novel Beloved, stating in a 1987 interview “…it seemed have in it an extraordinary idea that was worthy of a novel, which was this compulsion to nurture this ferocity that a woman has to be responsible for her children, and at the same time, the kind of tensions that exist in trying to be a separate, complete individual.” 

I begin here because Beloved is my favorite novel, and because my copy of it was my mother’s. My notes as student and teacher exist alongside hers, and most days it is the closest I feel to her, tracing her looping script that I’ve failed to emulate for two decades. But really, what strikes me about this novel is what first drew me to The Girls Who Grew Big—the expanse of motherhood, the desire to understand the inception of my life, how much I could have meant to my mother as a disruption of her girlhood, how small I made her life. Selfishly, I wanted to understand how much I am worth to her.

I don’t have children, and at 26, I don’t feel fit to be a mother. But Leila Mottley’s novel The Girls Who Grew Big reinvents what it means to be “fit”. The novel focuses on three girls in who are in varying stages of motherhood: newly-pregnant Simone, who birthed her (now 4-year-old) twins at 17, and is considering an abortion; 17-year-old Emory, a new mother determined to finish high school and pursue her future; and 16-year-old Adela, shepherded from her comfortable upbringing to her grandmother’s home in Padua Beach after becoming pregnant, and having no intention of being a mother. Simone leads The Girls, a group of young mothers whose families have exiled them. As the world turns their back on them, they turn towards each other, making a way out of none.

Mottley’s prose is glorious and her gaze is tender—each of these girls has things they do not reveal, each of them yearn for their own mothers, each of them frustrated by their abandonment and full of regrets. Simone, Emory, and Adela are all honest when it comes to their wavering resolve, the resentment of no longer having claim to their bodies, even the desire to have no additional children in Simone’s case, admitting that all of her heart and breath belong to her twins, and another would take pieces of her. 

Mottley commits to creating storied portraits of each girl through the alternating chapters in each of their voices, building them beyond the flattened assumption the world makes of them. This novel is not only one of the varying (st)ages of motherhood, but of girlhood, of daughterhood. Like any girl, they deal with heartbreak and betrayal, still yearn to be cared for and accepted. But what Mottley gets right that so many do not about young mothers is the delicacy through which these girls regard their children, and the fact that their dreams do not die as a result of a life being born. 

As their children grow, they push themselves to as well. Their children are extensions of themselves, and yet, there is no talk of what children owe their mothers, or how their existence punishes them—their lives only grow larger. Simone, Adela, and Emory grow with and against one another, reaching for one another instinctively, determined to prove to one another they belong to themselves still, that they can hold myriad truths beyond the narrative crafted for them. Their dreams and capacity for love only grow bigger, so much so that they can hold themselves in it, too. 

I only ever viewed growing alongside my mother as a deficit once others turned a disapproving and shameful eye towards us, and this novel pushed me to remove that veil of motherhood as punishment. I finished this book in hopeful tears, unmoored from the idea I was a cause of ruin. Instead, I reimagined my mother’s teenaged tenderness. Her nose drifting across my bald head. Her tears when I wouldn’t latch to breastfeed. I imagine what relief she felt when the doctors told her I was only sleeping through my birth, choosing to believe she cried, smiling when I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was her.