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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is author and poet Layla Motley. She earned critical acclaim

a few years ago at just 19 for her New York Times best-selling debut novel Nightcrawling.

Now she's back with a new novel that follows three young women as they navigate what it means to be a mother today,

when reproductive rights are being rolled back across the country.

Motley says she found herself writing and rewriting the girls who grew big in real time as abortion laws

rapidly shifted forcing her to adapt her character's lives to this new and uncertain reality.

The novel is set in Padua Beach, a fictional Florida town so small it doesn't even appear on a map,

and it opens with an explosive scene, Simone, at 16, impregnated by her 22-year-old boyfriend,

giving birth in the back of his red pickup truck.

To tell you the truth, I didn't know much of nothing back then, sitting in that pickup truck

staring at my placenta. How could I? Not because I was young, but because I was new. Like my

newborn babies' skin so soft, it seemed like they could tear open at any moment. I was just a fragile thing in a

sharp world, like every other girl is before they meet themselves, before they meet their child

and know what it means to be tethered. I already know y'all will take any chance you get to say

we don't know what we're talking about. I've seen all the teen

mom shows, but that's not what I'm saying. All those shows get made just to give y'all some white

girls to laugh at, pity, and say they should have known better. But maybe you should have known

better than to believe a camera is a mirror, or an ocean is a pool, or a mother is anything but a mother. You won't know till you

know, and now I do. Motley says her goal as a writer is to offer new perspectives on what it

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