A âbrutal, beautifully renderedâ (The New York Times Book Review) collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between societyâs most charged, politicized, and intractable polar spacesâbetween 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, Nolanâs mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her motherâs 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 spacesâof race, class, and body typeâthat the essays in Donât Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our societyâs most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with âgorgeous proseâ (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks) and are as humorous and as full of Nolanâs appetites as they are of anxiety. The result is lyrical and magnetic.
In âOn Dating White Guys While Me,â Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys werenât about preference but about self-erasure. In the titular essay âDonât Let it Get You Down,â we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, âlarge Black femalesâ encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other peopleâs fear. In âBad Education,â we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence to participate in our own culture. And in âTo Wit and Also,â we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolanâs white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that Americaâs 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, Donât Let It Get You Down delivers a âdeeply personal insightâ (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.