Don't Let It Get You Down

Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body

De: Savala Nolan

Narrado por: Savala Nolan

A “brutal, beautifully rendered” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractable 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 “gorgeous prose” (Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks) and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxiety. 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 to participate in our own 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 a “deeply personal insight” (Layla F. Saad, New York Times bestselling author of Me and White Supremacy) on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Author Savala Nolan uses her voice to full effect in her narration of this collection of essays about Black womanhood and the complicated realities of living in a racialized body. Her narration, like her prose, has heft. Her voice is full of life, inviting yet firm. She often pauses at the end of meaningful passages, allowing their full impact to sink in. The essays themselves are emotionally compelling and full of critical insight. Nolan explores the complexities of mixed-race identity, Black motherhood, interracial friendships, sexism in popular culture, and the lives of the Black women enslaved by her white ancestors. Her narration is so natural that it often seems like she's speaking directly to the listener, looking them in the eye as if to say: 'Pay attention.'"

Provocative and beautifully written

This is a book to remember because the author's stories are so unique and transparent. She draws you in to her pain, makes you curious about things we take for granted, and helps others to understand the challenges associated with being multiracial.

Expertly written experience of a mixed black woman

At times a beacon of tender light and at other times a piercing flood light shown in all of the dark spots and gaps of the unspoken experience of the subtle and loud experiences of one living in a body maligned and misunderstood.