Menu
Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body
Top of the pile
78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
75/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Savala Nolan
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
July 13, 2021
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 an understanding of our society's most intractable points of tension.
What The Reviewers Say
The essays in Savala Nolan’s first collection, Don’t Let It Get You Down, unfold out of her complex relationship with being a big-bodied, mixed-race Black woman.
In 12 probing essays, Savala Nolan explores her intersectionality of race, gender and body awareness with an unflinching honesty that is both revelatory and unsettling. The essays are personal and confessional but informed by an awareness of larger historical narratives rooted in American culture.
Like the 12 essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body, Savala Nolan is powerful and complex.
... vulnerable yet voluble personal essays.
