Overview
Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolanās mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her motherās 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 spacesāof race, class, and body typeāthat the essays in Donāt Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our societyās most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with āgorgeous proseā (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks) and are as humorous and as full of Nolanās appetites as they are of anxiety. The result is lyrical and magnetic.
In āOn Dating White Guys While Me,ā Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys werenāt about preference but about self-erasure. In the titular essay āDonāt Let it Get You Down,ā we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, ālarge Black femalesā encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other peopleās fear. In āBad Education,ā we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence to participate in our own culture. And in āTo Wit and Also,ā we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolanās white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that Americaās 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, Donāt Let It Get You Down delivers a ādeeply personal insightā (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.
This book title, Don't Let It Get You Down (Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body) - 9781982137281, ISBN: 9781982137281, by Savala Nolan, published by Simon & Schuster (July 19, 2022) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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