Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Name of Book: Big Girl 

Author: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan 

ISBN: 9781324091417

Publisher: Liveright 

Type of book: Harlem, LGBTQ+, 1988?-2000s? New York, family, growing up, coming of age, death, relationships, stereotypes, obesity, treatments for obesity, 

Year it was published: 2022

Summary:

In her highly anticipated debut novel, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the perils―and undeniable beauty―of insatiable longing.

Growing up in a rapidly changing Harlem, eight-year-old Malaya hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings; she’d rather paint alone in her bedroom or enjoy forbidden street foods with her father. For Malaya, the pressures of her predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are relentless, as are the expectations passed down from her painfully proper mother and sharp-tongued grandmother. As she comes of age in the 1990s, she finds solace in the music of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, but her weight continues to climb―until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger, ultimately shattering her inherited stigmas surrounding women’s bodies, and embracing her own desire. Written with vibrant lyricism shot through with tenderness, Big Girl announces Sullivan as an urgent and vital voice in contemporary fiction. 

Characters:

Main characters include Malaya,  a talented Black painter who dreams of happy endings and of being slim and meeting expectations, and the tale lasts from the time she is about eight to when she is in her twenties trying to get through a tragedy. Malaya is definitely a complex woman who seems to want to please and doesn't understand why she is failing. She is sociable and gets along well with friends, although there are rough spots with Shaniece, her childhood best friend. Oddly enough, she has little dialogue and movement is very central to the story. Nyela is Malaya's mother who is a college professor who teaches race at a local college. She is determined to get skinny and do the best she can for Malaya no matter what. She also tends to overestimate Malaya's understanding of herself and has a thorny relationship with both her daughter and her grandmother. Ma-mere is Malaya's grandmother, a beautiful and sharp tongued woman who makes happiness on her terms rather than anyone else's. However like Nyela, Ma-Mere also desires to be thin but she is realistic and does her best to help Malaya. Shaniece is Malaya's childhood best friend who often gives forbidden treats to Malaya and who becomes boy crazy and loses innocence all too early. There are men in the story, in particular Percy aka Pra, who is Nyela's husband and Malaya's father and who definitely break the stereotypical mold of "Black man". Percy was a poet and lived in Harlem his whole life, often wanting to give Malaya things and experiences he never had growing up. 

Theme:

Obesity is not a simple problem that dieting can cure, but instead its a complex situation that anyone can find themselves in

Plot:

The tale is in third person narrative from Malaya's point of view and it lasts from 1988 possibly? to early 2000s. I often think it is best to describe the tale as sprint because while there is focus on important events that happens to Malaya, there are years that do go by where the reader understands little of what is going on. I also was wary because of the whole dieting message that often inundates these tales, but I am happy to say that the message was truly beautiful and didn't involve happiness being tied to dieting. There is also realism to Malaya growing up and of speaking in a child's voice of hope and dreams, only having them crushed the next minute. I do wish that the novel could have explored friendships a lot more that Malaya has as well as Malaya's decisions and what happens to her often, but I understand that its more of a novel that focuses on family and on women in particular. 

Author Information:
(From goodreads)

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), and the forthcoming novel Big Girl. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young Black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. Her short stories have appeared in Best New Writing, Kenyon Review, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies, All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, DC Metro Weekly, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, the 2021 Pride Index National Arts and Culture award, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received an inaugural Emerging Writers Fellowship.

A proud native of Harlem, NY, Sullivan’s scholarly work explores the connections between sexuality, identity, and creative practice in contemporary African Diaspora literatures and cultures. Her scholarly and critical writing has appeared in American Literary History, Black Futures, Teaching Black, New York Magazine’s The Cut, American Quarterly, College Literature, Oxford African American Resource Center, Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, The Scholar and Feminist, Women’s Studies, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, The Rumpus, BET.com, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, The Feminist Wire, and many others. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, Rutgers University, Duke University, the American Academy of University Women, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation).

Of Sullivan’s forthcoming novel, Big Girl (W.W. Norton & Co./ Liveright 2022), author and activist Janet Mock observes: “Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame,” while author Kiese Laymon says: “There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the suns burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books... I have just read and reread a new American classic that we as a culture and country desperately need. Believe that.”

Mecca is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing. She lives in Washington, DC

Opinion:

In so many ways, this was a difficult but rewarding read for me and it was highly reminiscent of a Yara Zgheib book I read about anorexia; GIRLS AT 17 SWANN STREET few years ago. Just like in Yara Zgheib novel, BIG GIRL instead shades a lot of light towards the complexity of obesity, especially when one falls underneath the umbrellas of minority identities and skin colors. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan also dared to smash stereotypes of what we have about morbidly obese people such as the lack of healthy food or knowledge as well as lack of will or bad parents. In truth, BIG GIRL asks more questions than it answers and even then answers aren't 100 percent guaranteed. I truly hope that this is a book that will one day be a required reading and understanding of people who are different than the mainstream. 

This was given for view

5 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)