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Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body
A “brutal, beautifully rendered” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractable polar spaces—between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.
Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.
It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with “gorgeous prose” (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks) and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxiety. The result is lyrical and magnetic.
In “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren’t about preference but about self-erasure. In the titular essay “Don’t Let it Get You Down,” we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, “large Black females” encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people’s fear. In “Bad Education,” we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence to participate in our own culture. And in “To Wit and Also,” we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan’s white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America’s original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.
Perfect for fans of Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Don’t Let It Get You Down delivers a “deeply personal insight” (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.
Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.
It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with “gorgeous prose” (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks) and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxiety. The result is lyrical and magnetic.
In “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren’t about preference but about self-erasure. In the titular essay “Don’t Let it Get You Down,” we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, “large Black females” encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people’s fear. In “Bad Education,” we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence to participate in our own culture. And in “To Wit and Also,” we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan’s white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America’s original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.
Perfect for fans of Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Don’t Let It Get You Down delivers a “deeply personal insight” (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.
207 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 13, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
July 29, 2021
I like the voice and intelligence with which these essays come together. I wanted more heft and length from many of the essays. They felt like previews rather than the main attraction. But on the whole this is a vibrant and thoughtful collection of essays.
May 16, 2021
"Don't Let It Get You Down" by Savala Nolan is a collection of essays that are part memoir and part social commentary, and the intersection thereof. As the daughter of a white mother and a Black and Mexican, Nolan navigates her adolescence, college and law school years, and career as an attorney (and writer) from the lens of being not sure where she fits, but clearly finding success nevertheless. Research into Nolan's family and her experience growing up with them is shaped by two polar opposite worlds: her mother's family being former slaveholders and her father having served time in prison and living for survival. Nolan's traversal from her childhood classrooms to esteemed law firms is layered with analysis and the lived experiences of being a woman of color in America. This book is really excellent!
June 30, 2023
A memoir in essay form reflecting on the titular race, gender, and the body. It explores fatphobia both external and internalized, body acceptance, the intersections of race, gender, and fatness, privilege, and what it means to exist in between as a mixed-race person, or as a person from poverty in wealthy spaces. It is thought-provoking, interesting, and in some ways relatable. I did want a little bit more in terms of reflection and exploring the larger impact of ideas and experiences, but this was well worth the read. Thank you to Libro.FM for the audiobook!
August 24, 2021
I typically don't read books that are just collections of essays. But I made an exception for Savala after reading several of her periodical pieces. She takes notable stories of the black experience to new heights. Other stories in the same vein seem to either underwhelm me in the quality of writing (e.g. "The Hate U Give"), or be so disturbingly raw and cruel that it's hard to see the forest through the trees ("Heavy", "Precious", etc). Just like being the only minority in the room makes us the example by which the majority will judge our entire class, being a black memoirist in a field of white (and predominantly male) writers means that the work serves as a beacon for how outsiders might view--and judge-- the minority experience. Sometimes the "shock & awe" overwhelms the message of inequity and systematic bias...but I suppose we all read for different reasons.
Savala's essays are different. They are BEAUTIFULLY written. Absolutely fantastic narratives that I could not recommend highly enough. Each word is deliberate. She makes the concepts of gender, weight, and racial insecurities seem relatable. She shares these through short stories on her relationships with men, her father, and friends insensitive to the symbols of Black America. Thse experiences elicit raw, yet thoughtfully described reactions which I never knew could come in the form of an "essay".
Read it. It's short, interesting, and worthy of your attention!
Savala's essays are different. They are BEAUTIFULLY written. Absolutely fantastic narratives that I could not recommend highly enough. Each word is deliberate. She makes the concepts of gender, weight, and racial insecurities seem relatable. She shares these through short stories on her relationships with men, her father, and friends insensitive to the symbols of Black America. Thse experiences elicit raw, yet thoughtfully described reactions which I never knew could come in the form of an "essay".
Read it. It's short, interesting, and worthy of your attention!
October 10, 2021
An excellent series of essays on the intersections between race, being a woman, and being plus size in US society. Nolan discusses racism, fatphobia, and sexism with an unerring candor that makes this a really good read.
September 27, 2021
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the Libro.fm. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Don't Let It Get You Down exists in between spaces. In spaces where belonging is never singular. Personal and lyrical, this essay collection is full of anecdotes that echo and sentences that stop you in your tracks. Dating preferences turn into reflections on self-erasure and coping mechanisms. Don't Let It Get You Down haunted my thoughts long after finishing. About the instances of being overlooked by people then being gaslit.
full review: https://utopia-state-of-mind.com/revi...
Don't Let It Get You Down exists in between spaces. In spaces where belonging is never singular. Personal and lyrical, this essay collection is full of anecdotes that echo and sentences that stop you in your tracks. Dating preferences turn into reflections on self-erasure and coping mechanisms. Don't Let It Get You Down haunted my thoughts long after finishing. About the instances of being overlooked by people then being gaslit.
full review: https://utopia-state-of-mind.com/revi...
February 20, 2025
False advertising, these aren’t essays.
Okay lets do this. The first chapter is about her dating white guys, but it isn't, it's about her feelings of inadequacy, self consciousness, nervousness and viewing white men as trophies. And THEN how that factors into her dating them. It's a shame to hear her being hypocritical of how people who aren't her race don't understand her, as she at the same time chooses not to understand her dates or their needs. She proceeded to outright admit that she only dated certain boys based solely on their skin. Then blaming her self image and culture when it doesn't work out.
This becomes a theme, her hyper focusing on her image and nothing else. Not feminism, culture, religion, nothing, its that she is different and that the world is at fault. She does touch on those factors, but not enough. She has a whole section talking about her "slave past" and "slaveholders" but NOT on how she saw a counselor for her dirt poor self-confidence and clear anger at being in while America. She just keeps using black history as an excuse to be sour. She won’t pick a lane between discussing what has happened to her personally and what needs to be addressed wholly.
She makes great points about how being white is considered normal in American society and if you’re not then you stick out, (and many socio political analytics agree with this). How whites can skate by in life in many regards.
Example: How she herself was looked over at a coffee shop when a white woman cut her off in line.
It could have been a mistake, it could have been a misunderstanding, or its the culture at play of non-white people fading into the background, and how its not an uncommon experience. She expressed how these little experiences eat away at your psyche and resolve. BUT it's bizarre to then hear her forbid white dolls in her house, using and blaming her past to then inflict the same separation of race anxiety to her family and kids!?
What surprised me was that half way through the book she started giving references and notes like: comingtothetable, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, and notes from REAL essays. For the record this book has no appendix, biography, or notes for sources. That’s right, the book /supposedly/ about essays, does not have any historical or scientific backing to it. Why she chose to do this only halfway through I do not know.
These aren’t the general notes on society complaints, these are the actual “my feet are big I don’t like it” complaints. She may have had a rough childhood, but focus on the positive for at least ONE chapter dang.
All in all, this is a book about a woman complaining about her self image and how white culture ruined her. It tries to be deep but it's undercut by her own hypocrisy, anger, and lack of credibility. Could not get invested when I found out she wasn’t credible and the book became a crawl.
While I don’t know what it’s like to be a black woman and struggle to fit into a world where you feel you don’t belong, I do know what it feels like to not fit the general mold and hide who you are. And how you should view every day as a blessing and enjoy the time you have, not complain in a book about your feet being big and how white boys won’t fix the chunk missing from your heart. Stop blaming your poor self-esteem on white society, I agree it definitely has a factor in causing low self-esteem but I would not say it maintains it.
It has a hold on you because you let it. Just how a large chunk of society is organized by Christianity through history or straight cis culture. All of these things can be a weight on your shoulders if you let them be. Let your damn kid play with a white blonde Barbie doll what the hell. I can’t imagine if a white person wrote a book like this, like imagine someone named Karen Biden had a whole chapter talking about how Snoop Dogg and Sir Mix-a-lot’s music caused them to have poor self-esteem about their butt or how they won’t let their kids play with Jai from MyScene.
---
The writing style seems very childish at times, not in the sense of lacking profundity but in sentence structure and grammar. It's definitely not essays (can’t stress that enough) and more sad/complaining diary entries.
Examples:
"Her breasts too huge for beauty. Her breasts more like the barrel udders of milking cows-"
"pudgy velour newborn with a piglet-colored face-"
"To be sure that my claim to ownership was valid I rewatched Lemonade."
Okay lets do this. The first chapter is about her dating white guys, but it isn't, it's about her feelings of inadequacy, self consciousness, nervousness and viewing white men as trophies. And THEN how that factors into her dating them. It's a shame to hear her being hypocritical of how people who aren't her race don't understand her, as she at the same time chooses not to understand her dates or their needs. She proceeded to outright admit that she only dated certain boys based solely on their skin. Then blaming her self image and culture when it doesn't work out.
This becomes a theme, her hyper focusing on her image and nothing else. Not feminism, culture, religion, nothing, its that she is different and that the world is at fault. She does touch on those factors, but not enough. She has a whole section talking about her "slave past" and "slaveholders" but NOT on how she saw a counselor for her dirt poor self-confidence and clear anger at being in while America. She just keeps using black history as an excuse to be sour. She won’t pick a lane between discussing what has happened to her personally and what needs to be addressed wholly.
She makes great points about how being white is considered normal in American society and if you’re not then you stick out, (and many socio political analytics agree with this). How whites can skate by in life in many regards.
Example: How she herself was looked over at a coffee shop when a white woman cut her off in line.
It could have been a mistake, it could have been a misunderstanding, or its the culture at play of non-white people fading into the background, and how its not an uncommon experience. She expressed how these little experiences eat away at your psyche and resolve. BUT it's bizarre to then hear her forbid white dolls in her house, using and blaming her past to then inflict the same separation of race anxiety to her family and kids!?
What surprised me was that half way through the book she started giving references and notes like: comingtothetable, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, and notes from REAL essays. For the record this book has no appendix, biography, or notes for sources. That’s right, the book /supposedly/ about essays, does not have any historical or scientific backing to it. Why she chose to do this only halfway through I do not know.
These aren’t the general notes on society complaints, these are the actual “my feet are big I don’t like it” complaints. She may have had a rough childhood, but focus on the positive for at least ONE chapter dang.
All in all, this is a book about a woman complaining about her self image and how white culture ruined her. It tries to be deep but it's undercut by her own hypocrisy, anger, and lack of credibility. Could not get invested when I found out she wasn’t credible and the book became a crawl.
While I don’t know what it’s like to be a black woman and struggle to fit into a world where you feel you don’t belong, I do know what it feels like to not fit the general mold and hide who you are. And how you should view every day as a blessing and enjoy the time you have, not complain in a book about your feet being big and how white boys won’t fix the chunk missing from your heart. Stop blaming your poor self-esteem on white society, I agree it definitely has a factor in causing low self-esteem but I would not say it maintains it.
It has a hold on you because you let it. Just how a large chunk of society is organized by Christianity through history or straight cis culture. All of these things can be a weight on your shoulders if you let them be. Let your damn kid play with a white blonde Barbie doll what the hell. I can’t imagine if a white person wrote a book like this, like imagine someone named Karen Biden had a whole chapter talking about how Snoop Dogg and Sir Mix-a-lot’s music caused them to have poor self-esteem about their butt or how they won’t let their kids play with Jai from MyScene.
---
The writing style seems very childish at times, not in the sense of lacking profundity but in sentence structure and grammar. It's definitely not essays (can’t stress that enough) and more sad/complaining diary entries.
Examples:
"Her breasts too huge for beauty. Her breasts more like the barrel udders of milking cows-"
"pudgy velour newborn with a piglet-colored face-"
"To be sure that my claim to ownership was valid I rewatched Lemonade."
July 8, 2025
I loved this! I got this for free at my local library for the summer reading challenge and I flew through it! I thought the retellings of her life stories were thoughtful yet honest and definitely cried a bit. I think it's an important read and a 100% recommendation for anyone wanting to learn more about how racism, misogyny, and fatphobia are all intertwined, but it's also a 100% recommendation for any human living in this society. Very important.
May 21, 2023
From the POV of a woman who is also mixed and grew up primarily poor and in and out of homelessness - the author is absolutely insufferable. Although she makes a lot of great observations and points on gender, race, and the body it’s so hard to take it seriously because of how seemingly annoying she is. I rolled my eyes about her obsession over a white couple while she was on one of her lavish vacations (because don’t forget, despite trying to say she was deep-rooted in poverty [*not actually her, her fathers family] she went to private school, seemingly grew up comfortable with her mom, and then goes on throughout the book mentioning the nice things she owned, her privilege, her ability to live in Italy, New York, stay in France, etc) and she tried to make it seem like they didn’t like her because of blackness and not because of the fact she was being weird as hell and kept trying to interject herself in to their vacation?
All in all - good points, annoying author.
All in all - good points, annoying author.
August 17, 2021
Largely essays and part memoir - this was good. Not great, but insightful & important. The execution of some of the topics could have been stronger.
December 9, 2022
Although I felt it had a bit of a weak start I thought that, overall, this was a really strong and vital collection of essays. Nolan eloquently interrogates what it is to be in-between, contingent, always on the periphery - what it is to inhabit an alternatively fat and thin body, what it is to be mixed-race, what it is to be from a working-class background and grow to inhabit a more middle-upper class milieu, how it is to be able to access white privilege but also face prejudice due to her Black and Mexican heritage. I was really fascinated by her forays into her personal family history (slave-owning in particular), questions of intergenerational trauma and surviving a racialised pregnancy. Lots to mull over, and I am very glad that I picked up this collection.
From 'Dear White Sister':
"I struggled to assert the truth to her: that 'Freedom' (the Beyonce song) is about Black struggle.I hesitated to remind her that it's a song about Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Dred Scott and Margaret Garner, Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer. It's a song about food deserts, redlining and reparations. It's about Lee Atwater and the carceral state, Charlottesville, and all but one president of the United States. It's about Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and the straitjacket of our anger. It's about dating online ("No Black women please") and wrestling with the BMI chart, and dying in pregnancy and childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women. It's about dying at three times the rate of white people during the first months of Covid-19, how the economic, political and social decisions that created this fact are welded to slavery's most fundamental proposition" that Black people deserve the bare minimum, that our lives don't matter as much. It's a song about coming to the bottom of a well and treading water forever. It's about Say Her Name."
From ' To Wit, and Also':
"I'm afraid the white gaze I've internalised will summon caricatures of blackness, limiting my thoughts to what I've seen in book and movies about slavery that were created by white people. Just as women can internalise the male gaze and then can't help rating themselves as objects of male desire, we Black and brown people can internalise the white gaze and then view our people, our creations, and our very being through the lens of white normativity and white centrality. The gaze makes us ancillary in our own lives, as if we can't exist without measuring ourselves against whiteness. It can be a struggle to see ourselves - and other Black people - as existing for our own sake."
From 'Dear White Sister':
"I struggled to assert the truth to her: that 'Freedom' (the Beyonce song) is about Black struggle.I hesitated to remind her that it's a song about Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Dred Scott and Margaret Garner, Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer. It's a song about food deserts, redlining and reparations. It's about Lee Atwater and the carceral state, Charlottesville, and all but one president of the United States. It's about Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and the straitjacket of our anger. It's about dating online ("No Black women please") and wrestling with the BMI chart, and dying in pregnancy and childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women. It's about dying at three times the rate of white people during the first months of Covid-19, how the economic, political and social decisions that created this fact are welded to slavery's most fundamental proposition" that Black people deserve the bare minimum, that our lives don't matter as much. It's a song about coming to the bottom of a well and treading water forever. It's about Say Her Name."
From ' To Wit, and Also':
"I'm afraid the white gaze I've internalised will summon caricatures of blackness, limiting my thoughts to what I've seen in book and movies about slavery that were created by white people. Just as women can internalise the male gaze and then can't help rating themselves as objects of male desire, we Black and brown people can internalise the white gaze and then view our people, our creations, and our very being through the lens of white normativity and white centrality. The gaze makes us ancillary in our own lives, as if we can't exist without measuring ourselves against whiteness. It can be a struggle to see ourselves - and other Black people - as existing for our own sake."
Read
August 5, 2021review to come!
September 16, 2021
I was intrigued by the title of this book and had originally hoped that it was some sort of inspirational read on how to endure racism , sexism etc. It was more of an examination of all of the intricate ways in which these system of beliefs infiltrate the lives of black women ( even those that are multiracial/racially ambigious) on individual and multigenerational level. While i understand that so many women of color have had contorted themselves to assimilate and befriend whiteness in order to survive, i think I am ready more stories with a focus on what comes after that chapter in our lives is over.
July 29, 2021
A solid collection of essays that share the author's unique perspective as a mixed-race woman finding her place in a society that wants to categorize and label. I appreciated her candidness and found some of observations about white people and behavior very convicting. I'm still reflecting on her assertions regarding women watching Law & Order: SVU and I need to discuss! Great, short read that will leave you with lots to ponder.
February 26, 2021
A must-read for 2021. Full of gorgeous language and stunning insights about being human in this complicated world, particularly when you don’t fit neatly into the inadequate categories that society uses to divide us.
October 26, 2021
Savala’s collection of essays is deeply personal and reflective of an America struggling with gender, class, race, and racial history. Deeper still is the author’s dive into a self that doesn’t fit neatly into any definition. In that grey space between black and white (both metaphorical and literal), Savala finds an individuality that speaks to a nation struggling with its evolving identity.
I was touched by how much I identified with a woman so different from myself. She dealt with larger issues like class and race but more personal issues like her life-long changes in weight. She was very vulnerable and honest to discuss things about herself that she disliked. Her experience straddling the worlds of black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat was a revelation of the intensity around being all those things at once. It was a profound book that I’d recommend to anyone looking to understand some of the most complex issues facing Americans today.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at: https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/sav...
I was touched by how much I identified with a woman so different from myself. She dealt with larger issues like class and race but more personal issues like her life-long changes in weight. She was very vulnerable and honest to discuss things about herself that she disliked. Her experience straddling the worlds of black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat was a revelation of the intensity around being all those things at once. It was a profound book that I’d recommend to anyone looking to understand some of the most complex issues facing Americans today.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at: https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/sav...
July 31, 2022
This is an interesting collection of essays from a woman whose experiences I don't share. Savala grew up hating herself because she didn't have the ideal body in her or societies mind. She's fat and she's black.
The two most interesting points, to me, that she made in this essay collection are her relation and struggles with the "mammy" character, which is what her body appears as. Also he need to have sexual relationships with attractive white men to feel desired but always feeling shameful of her body while seeking these relationships. I never have and never will have either of these experiences so I was particularly interested in her perspective and how her reaction to herself differed from mine.
In the end, these essays are very specific to one woman's life and while she probably shares experiences with other people this is more of a memoir than the overarching black experience I was looking to read.
The two most interesting points, to me, that she made in this essay collection are her relation and struggles with the "mammy" character, which is what her body appears as. Also he need to have sexual relationships with attractive white men to feel desired but always feeling shameful of her body while seeking these relationships. I never have and never will have either of these experiences so I was particularly interested in her perspective and how her reaction to herself differed from mine.
In the end, these essays are very specific to one woman's life and while she probably shares experiences with other people this is more of a memoir than the overarching black experience I was looking to read.
November 30, 2021
Witty, raw, open, vulnerable, unflinching. This is a hard and beautiful book.
January 12, 2022
Thank you Libro.fm for an ALC of this audiobook.
August 18, 2025
Beautifully, funnily and painfully insightful to what its like to occupy liminal and simultaneous spaces of privilege and oppression in the United States.
June 23, 2021
I need to mull over this one.
I did enjoy it, but some essays felt too short, other felt a bit too clustered with so many different ideas that I forgot what was even the point at the beginning.
Still, I did enjoy these essays and I loved her intersectional point of view. As a fat latina who has lighter skin, I could definitely relate to parts of her essays, and the rest was very in your face so you couldn't look away from her experience.
I will definitely need to take a moment to write up a proper review, but I'm glad I read Savala Nolan's essays.
I did enjoy it, but some essays felt too short, other felt a bit too clustered with so many different ideas that I forgot what was even the point at the beginning.
Still, I did enjoy these essays and I loved her intersectional point of view. As a fat latina who has lighter skin, I could definitely relate to parts of her essays, and the rest was very in your face so you couldn't look away from her experience.
I will definitely need to take a moment to write up a proper review, but I'm glad I read Savala Nolan's essays.
August 2, 2021
4.5 stars. “It dawned on me later that equals do not need validation.”
July 5, 2021
***Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review***
I will never tire of reading the memoirs of other multiracial individuals. Each time I read one, I feel validated in my own experience and reaffirms my connection to others, even if we are not of the same races. This book was no exception. Savala Nolan is so self aware, and it is a gift that she allows us into her own reflections in such an open way. As a Black, Mexican, and white woman in a larger body, she describes what it is like to live at the intersection of these identities as a whole person. She is self-deprecating at times, yet also very much aware of all that she brings to the world. Just based on her writing, she seems like the kind of person I'd want to call my friend.
I will never tire of reading the memoirs of other multiracial individuals. Each time I read one, I feel validated in my own experience and reaffirms my connection to others, even if we are not of the same races. This book was no exception. Savala Nolan is so self aware, and it is a gift that she allows us into her own reflections in such an open way. As a Black, Mexican, and white woman in a larger body, she describes what it is like to live at the intersection of these identities as a whole person. She is self-deprecating at times, yet also very much aware of all that she brings to the world. Just based on her writing, she seems like the kind of person I'd want to call my friend.
February 25, 2023
Lyrical and poetic: the test of writing is to read it out loud to your family. This book reads out loud like poetry. It's a textbook of how to flow, how to choose words, how to surprise.
Savala Nolan writes with vulnerability. She writes with clarity about her life. She has a great story to tell.
Recommended.
Savala Nolan is a lawyer and the Executive Director of a center at UC Berkeley.
Savala Nolan writes with vulnerability. She writes with clarity about her life. She has a great story to tell.
Recommended.
Savala Nolan is a lawyer and the Executive Director of a center at UC Berkeley.
September 7, 2022
very interesting!! only downside is that it’s incredibly american, which made the whole thing about the jewish friend is super weird, i feel like she doesn’t want to acknowledge antisemitism? like i get that america is super racist but i’ve seen so many americans, because of this, talk like jews can’t experience racism?? being “white” doesn’t take away from the fact that jews get hate-crimed more than any other group (balck people, gay people,, anyone). i also feel like she doesn’t want to talk about being wealthy because that takes away from all her other struggles(?) obviously she’s got very real struggles as a black woman in america but ignoring wealth like that takes away from her ethos. she also talks about p much everyone else like they don’t have feelings/ thoughts/ their own experiences. lastly sometimes it feels like reading spoken word/ slam poetry which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just not for me… still a very important book and i would still really recommend it!
July 4, 2025
3.5 stars // Nolan’s writing style is lush, honest, and quick. These essays are full of personality, of aching, and of clarity as well as murkiness. I think there were a few sections and lines that really made me think. I loved the first essay in particular and her and the essay “Nearly, Not Quite.” But overall I don’t know if I gained or learned that much from reading. A few parts just didn’t work for me, or I struggled to understand her views/decisions, such as her getting mad at a shorter woman for asking her to help reach a top shelf at the grocery store? I thought that’s just what you did when you were short. Maybe personal essays are not my genre.
July 26, 2021
Read an ARC, but it seemed pretty complete except for missing the "about the author" section. A really interesting read. The author is a gifted writer and has really elegant words and imagery. There are essays on all of the topics in the title, but most focus on race, and even areas about gender and body image are also connected back to race. She provides an important and unique perspective as someone who grew up with her mother in very priveleged white culture yet who herself is a light skinned Black-Latina on her father's side. I'm going with 3.5 stars for this one, because I really did enjoy the writing style and her perspective, the tone often comes across as needlessly harsh or condemning. Example: snapping at a white lady in a grocery store who asked if she could hand her an item on a high shelf the author was standing in front of, because of the author's perception that the white lady could see she was Black and thus should be ready to leap to her service. Maybe. Or maybe this woman has difficulty reaching the spot, and a tall woman right by it easily could do so. I agree it is important to examine the ways that subtle racism permeates our culture, but I also feel that dwelling on it overmuch leads us to look for what might not necessarily be there instead of choosing to give people the benefit of the doubt when an individual situation is ambiguous. Automatically reacting with hostility causes more division and hostility, and that's not good for a society. That's not to say that there isn't cause to be furious with how white society has treated black and brown society both historically and to this day, because obviously there is plenty of cause, every single day. And it needs to be examined and brought to the light of day, but there needs to be a balance to the anger if it's going to be restorative. I don't know what that balance is, but I hope we can find it.
March 23, 2023
This was an eye-opening read that deconstructed my own Eurocentric, white-washed perspective of race that I was taught and have always naively understood. Nolan discussed the reality of being a biracial, plus-sized, American woman and how our country's conditioning creates the intersectionality that she has often come to face throughout her life. Some especially interesting points that stuck with me while reading: Black women are 3-4x more likely to die during childbirth than white women; discussion of the different Black female archetypes, specifically the "Mammy" character and that role's expectations; the idea that in a questionably sexual interaction between a male teacher and female student, it is the adolescent girl's responsibility to dictate whether the teacher is creepy or sexy, whether to form a relationship or to report; the concept of catcalling as it applies to non-white men, and how a group of Hispanic or Black men catcalling a woman would be presented as threatening while a group of White men doing the same would come off as sexy and desirable. The only downfall of this novel in my eyes were the amount of open-ended, "what if" endings to the points that Nolan tried to solidify with hypothetical situations. I felt like if she drew more from stories outside from her own experience, she could have better solidified some of her claims than just attempting to branch off of the tendrils of her own lessons. My favorite quote from this read was "It's like I'm trying to scratch an invisible thing out from under my skin. It's still here, it's still here, it's still here--the threat, the fear, the inevitability. That being a woman means I am violable but not permitted retributive rage. I see this, I loathe it; but I cannot change it."
September 2, 2021
I’d give it 4.2* overall. I loved the concept, so when I read the title of this book at the store I felt I would identify in some part, even though I’m a light-to-white, part Hispanic male. The idea of blending race, gender, and self-image in a fat-phobic culture was a new piece to other accounts I have read to try to be a better white ally in the fight to end systemic racism in our society.
I wasn’t sure this was going to fill that expectation at first, but when I got to the sections: “To Wit, And Also,” and “State,” I found these two essays to blow me out of the water. It almost read poetically. I could feel the emotion lifting off the page and pouring into me. I recommend this book if for nothing else, than those two pieces, but the ending essays were highly relatable as well.
In the end, this was slow to start, but highly worthwhile, and Savala Nolan successfully represents a voice that pulls together an intersectional experience that is too often dismissed. Her struggle with the image of the Mammy figure comes to its apex in “Fat In Ways White Girls Won’t Understand,” but it peeks up throughout other parts, and is truly a damaging caricature of a time that we should be long past, but in many ways still plagues the author to this day. It was eye-opening to share the author’s point of view through this “memoir” (as she puts it in the author’s note at the end), and I am grateful for her courage in sharing, and making this book.
I wasn’t sure this was going to fill that expectation at first, but when I got to the sections: “To Wit, And Also,” and “State,” I found these two essays to blow me out of the water. It almost read poetically. I could feel the emotion lifting off the page and pouring into me. I recommend this book if for nothing else, than those two pieces, but the ending essays were highly relatable as well.
In the end, this was slow to start, but highly worthwhile, and Savala Nolan successfully represents a voice that pulls together an intersectional experience that is too often dismissed. Her struggle with the image of the Mammy figure comes to its apex in “Fat In Ways White Girls Won’t Understand,” but it peeks up throughout other parts, and is truly a damaging caricature of a time that we should be long past, but in many ways still plagues the author to this day. It was eye-opening to share the author’s point of view through this “memoir” (as she puts it in the author’s note at the end), and I am grateful for her courage in sharing, and making this book.
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