"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...Nolan is writing into a long tradition, and its contemporary renaissance. From Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to slave narratives, the Black essay is rich with stories of otherness and duality. Writers like Clint Smith, Emily Bernard, Nishta J. Mehra, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Mychal Denzel Smith and Robert Jones Jr. bring the modern essay form to bear as much on how the experiences of Blackness differ as they do on how they cohere. This embrace of the heterogeneity of Black womanhood is part of this book's charm. Vulnerable, but rarely veering into self-indulgence...it is a brutal, beautifully rendered narrative. A standout collection." -New York Times Book Review "Savala Nolan is powerful and complex...Like Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, Nolan's essays speak to both young and old Americans about our country's pervasive history of racism." -BookPage, starred review "A deeply personal debut collection...the mix of cultural criticism and thoughtful personal writing will be just right for fans of Roxane Gay." -Publishers Weekly "It takes temerity to tell this kind of truth, to be unbowed by one's own trepidation. Savala Nolan does so boldly, and this book will help so many Black women to get free." -Brittney Cooper, New York Times bestselling author of Eloquent Rage "In these thrilling essays, built with one blazing, breathtaking sentence after another, Savala Nolan takes us from the personal to the political and back again as she explores her fascinating range of experiences as a Black American woman. Authoritative, honest, and often bitingly humorous, Don't Let It Get You Down is a book for our time and every time. It is not a book to read; it is a book to savor." -Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body "In this woven tapestry of stories and histories of race, gender, class, and the body, Savala Nolan gives readers a deeply personal insight into what it feels like to hold identities that are seen as 'other' in dominant culture. For those of us who feel like 'in-betweeners' this powerful collection of poetic essays offers a place to be seen and to be heard in the fullness of our beautiful complexities. In reading Savala's words as she travels to understand her experiences, and free herself from the parts that oppress, I found myself saying, 'Wow. Yes. Me too.'" -Layla F. Saad, author of New York Times bestseller Me and White Supremacy "In gorgeous prose and with profound clarity, Savala Nolan reckons with the interconnected oppressions, external and internalized, that have burdened her body: Anti-blackness, fat phobia, colonialism, and patriarchy. Don't Let it Get You Down is vital reading for all of us working to bust out of boxes, binaries, silences, and shame." -Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks "Savala Nolan deals a blow to the hollow-and very white-rhetoric of the body positivity movement with her essay collection, offering up her own stories of living in a body that are nuanced and warm, funny and painful." -Marisa Meltzer, author of This is Big "In twelve 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. Nolan's essays on gender are critical continuations of conversations most recently shaped by writers such as Brittney Cooper and Roxane Gay...At the heart of the book is Nolan's insistence that she must firmly stand in her truth and not be roped into needlessly debating it." -San Francisco Chronicle "An eloquently provocative memoir in essays...This fierce and intelligent book is important not just for how it celebrates hard-won pride in one's identity, but also for how Nolan art...
