Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body
(Simon & Schuster, $26)
“If you read Savala Nolan, you will probably like her,” said Philip Martin in the Arkansas DemocratGazette. A law professor at the University of California, Berkeley who focuses on issues of social justice, she has written a first book that’s “fiercely personal,” reflecting on the fault lines in American culture from her vantage point as someone who has always occupied an in-between position. Her mother hails from an elite white family who were once slaveholders. Her father was poor, Black, and Mexican. Nolan has attended tony private schools and also used a bucket as a toilet in her father’s shack. In each of the book’s 12 essays, “she is witty and gently deprecating.” And though Don’t Let It Get You Down is long on self-examination and short on findings, “she is willing to ask herself questions she can’t comfortably answer.”
Each essay exhibits “an unflinching honesty that is both revelatory and unsettling,” said Dolen Perkins-Valdez in the San Francisco Chronicle. In “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Nolan explains how much she once yearned to be desired by a privileged white man, recognizing that winning such attention was the quickest way for a big-bodied Black woman to, as she writes, “move up in the world.” In another essay, she wrestles with her enjoyment of a misogynistic rapper and a TV show that routinely depicts violence against women. She eventually did marry a white man, and acknowledges that it bothered her a little that he was a high school dropout who drank Coke for breakfast.
As a Black writer exploring duality and otherness, “Nolan is writing into a long tradition,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times. Yet she’s focused “as much on how the experiences of Blackness differ as on how they cohere,” and “this embrace of the heterogeneity of Black womanhood is part of this book’s charm.” Taken together, these essays give the sense that Nolan has not yet solved herself for herself. But they also show how the pieces of our lives do not have to fit neatly in a frame in order to make a portrait worthy of attention.