Big Girl

February 1, 2022

A Lambda Literary Award winner for her collection Blue Talk and Love, Sullivan offers full-length fiction featuring eight-year-old Harlemite Malaya, who's resistant to her prim mother's efforts to send her to Weight Watchers; she'd rather be painting in her room or indulging in street food with her dad. She must also cope with fierce pressures at her mostly white Upper East Side prep school. Eventually, family tragedy makes her rethink the source of her hunger and face down stigmas about women's bodies.

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Starred review from May 30, 2022
Sullivan (the collection Blue Talk and Love) charms in her stunning debut novel about a Black girl’s coming-of-age. While growing up in gentrifying Harlem during the 1980s and ’90s, Malaya Clondon is irrevocably impacted by other people’s perceptions and judgments of her weight. At eight, her mother, Nyela forces her to attend Nyela’s Weight Watchers meetings, and she endures cruel remarks from classmates at her predominantly white school. When she’s 16, Nyela and Malaya’s father, Percy, fight over the prospect of Malaya undergoing a gastric bypass. Throughout, Sullivan offers a nuanced portrayal of Malaya’s difficulties in navigating a world in which other people are unable to see her beyond her size, even after a terrible loss shakes Malaya’s world and reorients her family. All of Sullivan’s characters—even the cruel ones—brim with humanity, and the author shines when conveying the details of Malaya’s comforts, such as Biggie Smalls lyrics, the portraits she paints in her room, the colors she braids into her hair, and the sweet-smelling dulce de coco candies she eats with a classmate with whom she shares a close and sexually charged friendship. This is a treasure. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management.

May 15, 2022
In this debut novel set in 1990s Harlem, a young girl learns--and redefines--what it means to take up space. Eight-year-old Malaya Clondon weighs 168 pounds. It's also true that she is Black, that her family recently moved from a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side to a brownstone uptown, and that she attends Galton Elementary Academy for the Gifted, but her weight seems to be the most important fact about her to most of the people around her. It's what her classmates see. It's what leads her mother, Nyela, to monitor Malaya's food and take her to Weight Watchers meetings. And it's what prompts her grandmother Ma-M�re to suggest that Malaya get gastric bypass surgery. Only a couple of close friends and Malaya's father recognize that there is more to her than a number on a scale and unruly desires. By high school, she will have a larger circle of friends. She finds solace and joy in the rhymes of Biggie Smalls. And she discovers a new sense of style as she builds a wardrobe inspired by the rappers she sees on MTV. But she still hungers for experiences that she believes are reserved for thin girls--a hunger that becomes more complex when her best friend, Shaniece, becomes a thin girl herself. In an effort to meet this need, Malaya will acquiesce to sexual experiences that bring her no pleasure, just a hint of what it feels like to be wanted, before she begins to explore what it truly is that she, herself, wants. Sullivan writes with tenderness and uses the language of poetry to communicate her protagonist's inner life. In difficult moments, Malaya escapes into fantasy, and she uses drawing and painting as emotional outlets. But what begins as dissociation evolves into a more confident relationship with her art, just as Malaya will ultimately learn to inhabit her body with a sense of license and possibility. She decides to let go of the shame Ma-M�re passed on to Nyela, and Nyela passed on to Malaya, and not measure herself in terms of fatness and thinness but in terms of "the smallness of a body against a broad scape of mountains" and "the smallness of life in the big, busy world." A lyrical and important coming-of-age novel.

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Starred review from June 1, 2022
Sullivan's debut novel is an engrossing coming-of-age story starring Malaya, a young teenager facing the world in a body that is constantly scrutinized, commented on, and judged. Growing up in 1990s Harlem, Malaya thinks about little else besides when, where, and what she is going to eat. She sits through Weight Watchers meetings with her mother, who also struggles with her weight, knowing that she will be rewarded with french fries. She sneaks second dinners, indulges in the treats her friend Shaniece brings for the bus ride to school, and shares forbidden bodega sandwiches and Chinese food with her father. As she continues to put on weight, her mother urges a variety of solutions while her grandmother tries to scare her with threats, such as no man will want a woman that big. All the while, Malaya wonders what it even means to be a woman, and what it means to become one in a fat, Black body like hers. There are no broad strokes in this novel. With grace and patience, Sullivan invites the reader into Malaya's interior world--one of yearnings and rejections--and her rapidly changing exterior world. An affecting and memorable debut.

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