Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora and the short story collection Blue Talk and Love, and is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. In Big Girl: A Novel (Liveright), we meet 8-year-old Malaya Clondon. She hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings; she’d much rather paint alone in her bedroom or sneak out with her father to sample Harlem’s forbidden street foods. The expectations of her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor at a prestigious university, add to the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school. And their prescriptions – fad diets of cottage cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes – don’t work on Malaya. Coming of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit in a version of femininity that holds no room for her body. She finds solace listening to Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah and in the support of her father. Tensions at home are rapidly mounting and nothing seems to help – until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger on her own terms.