Leila Mottley interview: 'There’s never a wrong age to tell the story that is aching inside of you'

The Booker longlist features both the youngest- and oldest-ever nominated authors. Does age matter when writing fiction? Is there a good/bad/right/wrong age to write a masterpiece, or is age irrelevant?

We write the stories we are most adept at telling at the time they are ready to come out of us. I think that can happen at any age and I also think there are books we’re not prepared to write at 50 or 15 or 80, for a multitude of reasons that often have more to do with us as people than as writers. Age and life experience absolutely matter, but less as a constraint than as a factor in where the writer is in life and what kind of stories we’re compelled to tell. There’s never a wrong age to tell the story that is aching inside of you.

The Booker judges described Nightcrawling as ‘a Catcher in the Rye for a new generation’ - how does that make you feel, and do you see yourself as writing for a new generation?

The Catcher in the Rye and Nightcrawling are both books that recognise the universality of adolescence and the necessity of having teenage characters who are complicated that can be read and loved by such a vast audience. I’m at a point in my life and career where I feel compelled to write about young people, particularly people on the brink of adolescence and adulthood, and my context for adolescence is in this current era, so I think in many ways my work ends up oriented toward a younger generation that is just beginning to exist in adult literary fiction at this point.

I also would love it if my books helped more young people start reading again, since I think accessible, emotionally potent novels like Nightcrawling could help people who haven’t read in a while return to it.

Nightcrawling was inspired by real events - police officers had participated in the exploitation of a young woman and tried to cover it up. What was it about that event and its aftermath that compelled you to write Nightcrawling?

I was born and raised in Oakland and when this case broke, it rattled the Bay Area and caused this examination into the corruption of the police department, specifically where it related to young girls and women. Both the case itself and the media response to the case - which was narrow and often misdirected attention away from the systemic pattern of harm to girls and women of colour - stuck with me over the years. When I began thinking about writing Nightcrawling, I knew I wanted to explore the vulnerable experience of black girlhood and adolescence. I returned to this case, and other cases of police sexual violence, as an instance that exemplifies the lack of protection of young girls and that became the seed of the novel.

You say in your author’s note that you wanted to write a story that reflected ‘the fear and danger that comes with black womanhood’. Is that something that you feel has been under-explored in fiction? 

I think we rarely get to see the way that police violence impacts black girls and women, in fiction and beyond and, when I decided to write Nightcrawling, I didn’t want to shy away from the graphic and brutal nature of violence against black girls.

How big a challenge was it to make sure that your depictions of sex work in the book were authentic and how did ensure that they were?

I did a lot of research on sex work and the criminalisation of sex work in the writing of the book. Sex workers aren’t a monolithic group, so there are so many varying experiences and understandings of sex work, influenced by the cultural shaming of the industry, the type of sex work, the country and policies around sex work, the identity of the sex worker, etc. It was important to me to also have someone with experience in sex work read the book and provide feedback for authenticity. With all of that information, I had to make decisions about Kiara’s character that felt true both to the context of sex work and to who she was and the circumstances she found herself in.