The American writer on her debut novel about weight and womanhood set in 90s Harlem, how her mother’s Black feminist books changed her life and writing a work of hip-hop magic realism
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a writer and professor born and raised in Harlem, New York. She now resides in Washington DC, where she teaches African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing at Georgetown University. In 2015, she published the short story collection Blue Talk & Love, which won the Judith Markowitz award for emerging new LGBTQ writers. Her first nonfiction book, The Poetics of Difference, was published in 2021 and explores the writing of Black queer women. Her debut novel, Big Girl, follows the tender, fervent and food-loving Malaya, who comes of age in 1990s Harlem at the height of fad diets, hip-hop and gentrification, and has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel prize, the Gotham Book prize and the Lambda award.
Where did the idea for a story centred on weight and body image begin?
The first draft was my master’s thesis. But the truth is that the core and heart of the story began many years before that, when I was this big Black girl growing up in Harlem, having these experiences and understanding that my body seemed to mean a lot of different things to the people around me. Like all kids, I was coming to recognise that my body was my own to a certain degree and yet it clearly had this effect on others.
