A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers
poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged,
politicized, and intractably 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
unforgettable anecdotes and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s
appetites as they are of anxieties. 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 in order to participate in our 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 an essential perspective on race, class,
bodies, and gender in America today.