and Deontaye Osazuwa

Leila Mottley bounces into the hotel lobby to meet me. It’s her first time in London and she’s spent the afternoon signing copies of her debut novel in Waterstones. If she’s tired, she hides it well. I waste no time with my questions on Nightcrawling, her searing debut novel about young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world. Inspired by a true story of corruption within the Oakland police, it follows 17-year-old Kiara Johnson as she tries to make a living as a sex worker. Nightcrawling was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, making this 20-year-old the youngest author ever to have been nominated.

With themes of underage sex work and police brutality, Nightcrawling is a difficult read. Did you feel you needed to take breaks while writing it?

No! I didn’t take any breaks. I wrote every single day, all the way through. I think part of the reason I did that was because I wanted to immerse myself entirely in Kiara as a character. I made myself feel every feeling she felt. Novels do something particular in allowing us time to invest in character, in allowing us to remove the distance between us and theory or politics. She experiences more than suffering because, as people, we need to have all kinds of different experiences and emotions in order to survive, in order to move forward. When we only focus on pain or trauma, we forget a person is a whole being. We see them only in fractions. There’s at least one moment of delight and joy every chapter, no matter how mundane. Writing these allowed me space to breathe.

Kiara’s decision to take up sex work isn’t painted as a dramatic fall from grace in the way it’s so often seen. I wonder if this was a conscious decision on your part?

It’s just a job. Moralisation is what happens when sex work is criminalised. For Kiara, it’s just a way to make money and live the life she wants to life. It’s true she doesn’t have all the information; it’s a job she doesn’t fully understand. And it is difficult to pinpoint the difference between trafficking and sex work in the story. When she takes up a job that is so criminalised, and therefore dangerous, it leads to a position she can’t get out of.

A major theme here is the adultification of Black girls. Did you come to any realisations in exploring this issue?

I was 16 when I was writing the book. Now I am almost 20. Over those four years, I’ve changed a lot and grown as a person. It’s really interesting because when you’re a teenager, you don’t want to hear that you’re young. Now I wish I’d gotten the chance to be young. It’s strange to not receive the respect that adults receive, but also be put in a position where you have the responsibilities of an adult. Kiara takes it upon herself to look after her nine-year-old neighbour, Trevor, who has been abandoned by his mother. I think he offers her these glimpses of childhood and she wants to preserve his, even when she’s still a kid herself and isn’t resourced enough to be his mother.

When you’re a teenager, you don’t want to hear that you’re young. Now I wish I’d gotten the chance to be young.

Kiara is clearly very isolated, but there’s also a strong sense of community in this book. How do you reconcile the two?

I wanted to show that she has people, and she loves people, but people aren’t caring for her in the way she needs them to be. In fact, each one of them wants something from her. We often equal community with care, but the presence of one doesn’t assume the other, especially where Black girls and women are concerned. We often assume the position of caretakers in the community and are left with no care for ourselves.

I noticed the neighbourhood pool, that image, constantly crops up novel in some way.

I started with the pool! In fact, the first line of the book is the first line I ever wrote. Because the pool captures what the book is, so it felt like the place where it should start and end. You see, water makes up the geography of my city, Oakland, but it also represents fluidity—the idea that two things things can be true at once. The pool, filled with feces, is also a site of joy and life. Kiara loves her brother Marcus, but she also must acknowledge the harm he does her. We hate him at times, we’re furious with him. We also hold space and compassion for the position he was put in. Men are taught to want things from Kiara, to consume things from her and to think of her as a commodity. And, at the same time, they love her. 

Kiara makes choices in this story, but many of these are illusory and were never much of a choice to begin with. Is she a passive protagonist?

I wanted to show what a rich interior world she has, as the world doesn’t expect Black girls to have anything going on in our heads. I wanted her interior monologue to be complex, to show the contrast between the world within and the way she exists in the world without. So there’s a difference between where she begins and where she ends, maybe not in external circumstance, but there is in the way she thinks about herself.

How do we define justice when we will always have to live with the ramifications of the act of harm?

I want to talk about justice or, rather, the absence of justice in this story. How do you define justice?

I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to find justice in the criminal justice system. I didn’t want to find hope in a system that can’t provide it. It’s hard to think about justice as something that is given, because then we are waiting for it. We must instead turn inwards as this world and its systems aren’t going to provide anything. How do we define justice when we will always have to live with the ramifications of the act of harm, whether something happens externally or not? I define justice as something we give ourselves, as something that shifts the way we acknowledge ourselves (even when the world refuses to). I think seeing the one who harmed us punished often doesn’t change how we feel.

And the ones who harm us are often people we love. Isn’t the relationship between Kiara and her mother, Dee, is one in which trauma begets trauma?

I’m very interested in what it means to grieve. Dee has no time or space to grieve because she has kids to care for. She has so many responsibilities but not enough resources. She has so much hurt but no space to process it. So she collapses. The collapse means she can’t really mother. Kiara asks for an acknowledgement of this rupturing, of this silence, but it’s so painful her mother can’t really give her that without breaking down even more. Kiara takes on more than she should, and though she never really had a choice, she also never pauses to question it. I wanted to show this generational ‘taking on’, the aftermath of it, and how it leads them both to a place where they can’t find common ground. If she continues to take on everything, she’s going to end up like her mother.

Do we leave Kiara on a path towards breaking the cycle of trauma?

I wanted to end with possibility for her, seeing as she’s always been trapped and never had any real choice. It was important for her to simply have the option to do and continue down any path she wants, whatever that may be. I know there will always be barriers and obstacles for us, of course, but there’s also possibility.

LEILA MOTTLEY is the author of the novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times best seller. She was also the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live.

DEONTAYE OSAZUWA works in PR and is the creator of the YouTube channel Heroine’s Corner where she spotlights books written by Black authors, with a focus on Black British literature. Deontaye also enjoys writing of both the journalistic and fictional variety.  Her favourite genres are historical fiction and fantasy. She is always looking for stories that centre Black womanhood and girlhood to escape into. Find her @heroinescorner on Twitter.

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Published by Bloomsbury Circus on 7 June 2022
Genres: Coming-of-age, Literary
Pages: 288

Kiara Johnson does not know what it is to live as a normal seventeen-year-old. With her mother in a halfway house and an older brother who devotes his time and money to a recording studio, she fends for herself—and for nine-year-old Trevor, whose own mother is prone to disappearing for days at a time. As the landlord of their apartment block threatens to raise their rent, Kiara finds herself walking the streets after dark, determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her. Then one night Kiara is picked up by two police officers, and the gruesome deal she is offered in exchange for her freedom lands her at the centre of a media storm. If she agrees to testify in a grand jury trial, she could help expose the sickening corruption of a police department. But honesty comes at a price—one that could leave her family vulnerable to their retaliation, and endanger everyone she loves.