Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Debuts Highly Anticipated Novel This Summer- Big Girl

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As the newest member of the Department of English, Professor Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is making her debut in more ways than one. Her new novel titled Big Girl is set to release on July 12th, and we cannot wait to add it to our summer reading lists! Check out the description from W. W. Norton’s website:

Exquisitely compassionate and witty, Big Girl traces the intergenerational hungers and desires of Black womanhood, as told through the unforgettable voice of Malaya Clondon.

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.

Big Girl is available for pre-order here, and you can check out some of the advance praise below:

“Mecca Jamilah Sullivan gives voice to girls and women with unruly bodies who dare to take up space in a world that shames them for being hungry for more. Alive with delicious prose and the cacophony of '90s Harlem, 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. Big Girl is a tender and sumptuous offering of beauty.” —Janet Mock, author of Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty
“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. The sound, the expansiveness of the whispers, the critical, brilliant, sometimes bruising, beautiful Black girlness explored in this novel is literally second to none…I know I have just read and reread a new American classic that we as a culture and country desperately need. Believe that.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“Mecca Jamilah Sullivan has given us a gift as big, beautiful and complicated as living itself, filled with everyday people who in her gifted hands, show us the love and struggle of what it means to be inside bodies that don’t always fit with the outside world. I found myself cheering for Percy, Nyela, the Harlem streets and of course, for Malaya. Lovely.” —Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone
“I ate this up in one greedy, joyous gulp. I fell in love with Maya Clondon from the very first page. This book is hilariously funny and quietly devastating—a compelling narrative about what it means to define ourselves and make space for our bodies as women.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn, award winning author of Patsy and Here Comes the Sun
“What I love most about this book is the depth of each character. I'll never forget Malaya Clondon, but the family that surrounds her is just as complex and memorable. This is a beautiful, profound, and moving novel that I'll be thinking about for a very long time.” —Liz Moore, author of Long Bright River and Heft
“Mecca Jamilah Sullivan's Big Girl is a touching meditation on youth. Malaya, our protagonist, is remarkable as she carries forth growing into herself despite the many obstacles thrown her way. I was immersed in this evocative novel. Even as she poignantly depicts the turmoil in Malaya's life, Sullivan reminds us that there is room to laugh, for the world is made up of beautiful, sometimes inappropriate, often hilarious folks! Malaya's story will stay with you long after the novel is through.” —Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees

Curious to read more about Big Girl? Check out these in-depth reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. To stay up to date with the latest events and publications by Mecca, be sure to connect with her social media channels below:

Headshot of Mecca Sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the novel Big Girl, The Poetics of Difference, and Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. Sullivan is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. A native of Harlem, she lives in Washington, DC. (source)