Nightcrawling

Leila Mottley whose debut novel, Nightcrawling, was published in June by Knopf

-  Kiese Laymon

I am leaving northern Mississippi, likely forever, the night I read Justice Alito’s draft opinion that would obliterate healthy reproductive choice for millions of specifically poor young Black women.

And I’m thinking about Lei la Mottley’s Nightcrawling.

There is a excellent argument to be made that Nightcrawling is the most compelling book written by an American teenager in my lifetime. Somehow, even that feels too brittle, too boring, for the way Leila Mottley, nineteen, pulls us through a body, a city, and a nation equally consumed with crawling toward liberation and jogging toward inequitable failure for our narrator, Kiara, or Kia. Nightcrawling is a scorching, layered, incredibly readable book that takes seriously the task of readerly provocation on every page. We needed it before the Alito leak, and honestly, we need it more—much, much more—after. Get ready. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Leila Mottley is here. And she is doing her part to reckon with what Treva Lindsey calls living through “unlivability.” This is our conversation.

Nightcrawling blew my mind and my heart. More than anything it made me want to write. How has the dream of writing an incredible book differed from the act of writing an incredible book?

I’ve always been a reader, and I read with an eye toward craft, and I think that has created really high expectations for what a book can be. So before I started writing