Leila Mottley was just 17 when she completed her extraordinary book Nightcrawling, which was published by Bloomsbury worldwide two years later.
Nightcrawling is based on a real-life criminal case in Mottley's hometown of Oakland, California in which local police officers were accused of sexually abusing a teenage black girl.
The book has received rave reviews and was quickly selected as an Oprah's Book Club pick.
Photo: author image: Magdalena Frigo
Nightcrawling centres around Kiara – a 17-year-old black girl living in a "precarious position" with her brother Marcus, Mottley tells Kathryn Ryan.
“Kiara becomes involved with a network of police officers who sexually abuse her. And the book kind of follows through the aftermath of that and the major investigation that follows.”
The book was inspired in part by a real case of sexual abuse perpetrated by Oakland police, she says.
Mottley grew up on the same rapidly gentrified streets that Kiara walks.
“I was born and raised in Oakland, and this case broke in 2016 when a young girl was sexually exploited by various police departments and officers.
“And there were attempts to cover up but the case eventually came out and had a huge impact. It kind of consumed the media within the Bay Area.
“I remember being a young teenager at the time paying a lot of attention to this case, both as you know, a kind of statement on the lack of protection and care for young girls of colour.
“And also, [it was] as an instance in which we got to see the response to a case like this be one of neglect and misdirection where a lot of the conversation was about the police officers in the police department and very little about the harm to this young girl.”
Writing the novel at an age so close to Kiara’s own helped Mottley give authenticity to the character.
“When I started writing this book, I wanted to write about the experiences of a black teenage girl.
“And I think we very rarely get to kind of see inside the head of a black teenager and experience them in a really respectful and validating way in which their experiences aren’t minimised.
“I was 17 at the time that I wrote the majority of the book. And so, I really pulled on that experience of being in that era of life at the time that I was writing the book.
“And I wanted to address how vulnerable black girls really are. And that ties in very directly to police sexual violence.”
In the novel, Kiara and her brother are facing eviction from their apartment.
“It was really important to me, that kind of the catalyst of the whole book is the pending eviction because of this rent increase and in the context of 2015 Oakland [after] you know, there was this huge influx of wealth in 2012.
“Housing prices got more and more hiked and many apartments like Kiara’s were sold to investors who raised the rents to a point where people who have called Oakland home for decades no longer could afford to live there.”
Books were an important part of Mottley's childhood, with her father a playwright and her mother a teacher.
“I've always loved books; every week my mom would take my brother and I to the library, and we'd pick out our books for the week and we had this bookshelf that I would often like steal my mom's books from.
“I think that definitely created this foundation of a love for reading. And as I got older I started kind of figuring out what kind of books that I liked, and I think I fell in love with poetry first. I was often in the library kind of scouring through different poets’ collections of works and I came to love and Sonia Sanchez and Lucille Clifton.
“And from there, I started reading novels written by black women. And I think that really changed kind of my idea of what a novel could be.”
Since Nightcrawling, Mottley has completed two further manuscripts.
“Right now I'm really interested in stories of black girlhood, and also in kind of expanding the narrow views of black girls and people in pockets of this world that we don't often get to see or hear from.
“So that's kind of what I'm focusing on right now. But I think it's always shifting and changing and I like to challenge myself with new things, too.”
