Leila Mottley is not your typical Gen Z woman. Unlike her peers, this 20-year-old is disinterested in social media. This shows on her Instagram handle, which seems to have been created for the sole purpose of promoting her new book, Nightcrawling. There are no happy holiday pictures, no beautiful shots of sunsets. Mottley giggles when she tells me over a late-night Zoom call that she only recently learned how to post an Instagram story, considered a basic skill on the site. “Maybe at some point I’ll enjoy it more, but right now it doesn’t bring me a lot of joy,” she says. “It’s a chaotic place to be, as I get a lot of messages. It is overwhelming.”
Mottley is overwhelmed as she was on the Booker Prize longlist — the youngest author ever to be nominated. She is out of the contest now, but her searing novel, on the struggles of a young Black girl to make both ends meet, continues to accumulate fans.
Set in East Oakland, Nightcrawlingis the story of Kiara, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Kiara and her brother Marcus live on the margins, in a grimy place that is ironically named Regal-Hi. Kiara is forced to take care of Marcus, who is older but refuses to hold a steady job and prefers instead to dabble in music. She feels equally responsible for her drug-addict neighbour’s nine-year-old son, Trevor. Her father, a former member of the Black Panther movement, is dead and her mother stays in a rehab facility.
Desperate to pay rent, Kiara turns to sex work convincing herself that it is “just a body. Just sex”. She is abused by police officers and unwittingly finds herself in the middle of a major scandal. With an empathetic lens, graphic details, and sentences so lyrical that they are sometimes impenetrable, Mottley packs in several themes into this book: the class divide, exploitation, brutality, racism, sexuality, and corruption.
The book cover of Nightcrawling
Love and joy in a broken world
Nightcrawling is inspired by a true crime that took place in 2015. It disturbed a young Mottley back then that the media focused more on what the case meant for the police department than on the teenager who had been sexually exploited by law-enforcement officials. “That really stuck with me. I wanted to tell the story of a teenage Black girl from her perspective. I wanted to give her validity and respect. And I wanted to touch on what it means to be targeted by the people who, you are told, are supposed to protect you.”
Mottley wrote the story in warp speed: just two-and-a-half months after she graduated from school. She celebrated her eighteenth birthday by signing her book contract.
The novel is written in first person as Mottley was keen that we “enter Kiara’s head and walk with her”. Kiara’s world is broken: the stairwell of her apartment is chipped, the pool outside is filled with dog poop, and funeral processions are common on her pothole-filled street. Mottley liberally uses the word ‘spit’ throughout the novel: people spit out words, machines “spit out plastic containers”, and “eyes... spit out only desire”. The language of gloom and rejection is stark and carefully considered.
But she is determined that Kiara is never pitied. The “s*it pool” is representative of this duality, Mottley says. “Kiara has to learn to live with the pool that is literally filled with faeces. We see it as a place of devastation and loss, but it is also a site for connection and love and moments of joy [when Kiara learns to swim]. She’s learning that she loves her brother who can’t love her back in the same way and that she loves a city that can’t protect her.”
Nor does she want Kiara to be judged for her choices. “Despite the way that people try to turn means of survival into a villainised act, I wanted to be able to centre the book on characters who live and breathe and make choices because they are forced into them. They still have relationships of love, and this beautiful love for the streets that they walk, even if someone else might see them as dangerous.”
Leila Mottley wanted to tell the story of a teenage Black girl from her perspective
Too ‘woke’ a narrative?
Mottley loves Oakland, the city where she was born and raised. Her eyes light up with a mere mention of the city. It may have been easy to write about Oakland, but what about sex work? “I did a lot of research,” says the precocious writer. “I even showed a draft of the book to a sex worker for insights.”
But there are too many themes — checkboxes that may invite the accusation of ‘wokeism’. She is unbothered by perceptions, simply because she didn’t expect so many people to be reading the book. “I was mostly thinking about Kiara and her world, and about developing the most authentic cast of people around her... When we criticise too much [representation] in one project about social justice issues, that’s mostly because it doesn’t do justice to anyone and it’s not authentic to anyone.”
Mottley is self-assured and confident, which she has probably built by reading poetry on stage and giving interviews to the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Trevor Noah. How have her friends reacted to her fame? “The ones who have known me for a long time are a bit confused by all the attention I’m getting as I don’t talk a lot about my fiction,” she laughs. “So, this came out of nowhere for them. But most of them have been really supportive and treat me as they always have.”
When she is not writing novels or poetry, she spends her time reading. “I have books that I love as immersive reading experiences and books that I love as incredible teaching tools,” she says. Jesmyn Ward is her favourite author. She adores Toni Morrison and Jacqueline Woodson. She admires Arundhati Roy and has recently read Megha Majumdar, but says she has little access to, or knowledge of, translations of Indian writing.
And when she is not being an overachiever, Mottley enjoys binge-watching shows on OTT. “I love reality TV,” she exclaims. “I’m watching A League of Their Own right now. I just finished season three of Never Have I Ever. I’ll watch pretty much anything. It helps me turn my brain off.”
