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| Savala Nolan (photo: Senay Inanici) |
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Savala Nolan (Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body) is an essayist and director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. Nolan's forthcoming collection, Good Woman: A Reckoning (Mariner Books, March 3, 2026), is a thrillingly subversive reckoning with womanhood as it is interpreted in contemporary American culture.
What was the spark that ignited this remarkable new collection?
I'm not the first woman to reach midlife and realize, with a shock, that playing by the rules and being "good" did not yield the happy results I was promised. As I entered my 40s, as my marriage ended, as my body evolved, and as I grew deeper into motherhood, I could no longer ignore the massive problem at the center of my social conditioning: striving to be a "good" woman, where good means agreeable, helpful, and silent, had not and would not ever make me happy or whole--it would only make me conditionally acceptable. What a bum deal! I was furious to have been sold such snake oil, and to have drunk it. I could see its effects everywhere in my life, from how I defined and experienced sex to what I thought about God. The fury was powerful. It burned away strictures that had governed much of my life. Slowly, I stopped being so palatable; I stopped dieting, I divorced, I stopped being so helpful, I said no. I refused to be "good," and my life improved. A few years of being "bad" has yielded more joy, wholeness, and creativity than decades of attempting to be good. I needed to share this experience. I wanted to help other women, especially my daughter, get to this clarity and self-liberation sooner than I did. Before midlife, before life is half over. Maybe even to avoid the snake oil altogether.
Good Woman is poised to resonate with readers across the age divide. Was this your intention?
It was certainly a hope! This book's dedication is, literally, for daughters, especially mine. Daughters who are 99 and daughters who are in the womb. I write about giving birth, confronting death, and all the stages in between, so I hope there are many access points. I hope it's a mirror in which many women see themselves but also a window in which women see parts of life they haven't experienced. Above all, if the collection helps women and girls understand that a rich, potent, wonderful life awaits them beyond the strictures of being "good" then I'll be happy. And if it helps some of them see this well before their 30s and 40s, I'll be overjoyed.
Good Woman boldly delves into some private traumas, including sexual assault. Has the cathartic process of writing altered your relationship with the past?
Like many, I'm often writing to figure out what I think, and as Terry Tempest Williams said, to "meet my ghosts." Drafting the essay about my sexual assault and the anxiety of not knowing which men are safe required me to access the outrage and heartbreak I'd repressed for decades, which was salutary. But it did not undo the assault. In that sense, the writing process altered my relationship with the present more than with the past. That night will always have a pound of my flesh. I'll always be missing something hard to articulate--you might call it the wholeness you have before you're injured. Nothing changes that. But having finished the essay, which involved figuring out what I think about that night and meeting the ghost not only of the night but of the man I was with, I can at least carry the experience in the present with more ease. I'm confident in what I believe about that night, and I'm confident in the lessons I learned from enduring it. The confidence came from the writing. Would I trade my confidence for being un-assaulted? Yes. But here we are. We have to take life on life's terms. We try to make sense or use of it, or even beauty.
Who do you consider to be some of today's female antihero role models?
Fat women who live juicy, joyful, unhidden lives are my antihero role models. The ones in bikinis at the beach. The ones who let their partners pinch their rolls with appreciation and sweetness. The ones who model radical weight neutrality to their children. These women are always close to my heart, but especially now as we ride a fresh wave of antifat/pro-thin bias that's accompanying the GLP-1 gold rush and the conservative tilt of national politics. It takes substantial resolve to forswear intentional weight loss these days, even when you know intentional weight loss is basically a gimmick and still harmful for so many of us, and even when you know life is ultimately better on the other side of body control, fear, and compliance.
In embracing body neutrality, is it possible to entirely erase the seductive, deeply socialized pull of diet culture?
No, I don't think so. I liken diet culture to a first language. You're fluent in your first language, and no matter how fluent you become in a second or third language, that first one will still occupy your brain. Diet culture--which is to say, the systems that exert pressure on women's lives by promoting specific body types while denigrating others--is baked into American life. Our first brushes with it often occur weeks after we're born, as our mothers try to lose weight they gained in pregnancy, or "bounce back." We don't consciously grok this as two-month-olds, but my point is that we're exposed to it almost instantly, and then continually. It would be unfair to ask anyone to completely rid themselves of diet culture, just like it would be unfair of me to ask you to unlearn your first language. But we can learn new grammar and vocabulary. We can embrace new concepts and practices. We can develop new goals. I was put on my first diet at two or three; if I can break free, anybody can. Building new ways of existing doesn't require us to banish all prior knowledge. It requires us to be daring, discerning, and deliberate.
How do you balance motherhood with work and your writing life? What is the most challenging aspect of this balancing act?
Writers require long stretches of uninterrupted time, and vast mental acreage in which to wander and think. Put simply, we need to be left alone. This need is completely at odds with motherhood, which, though the greatest gift of my life, is more like drinking water from a firehose than expanses of personal space. As a mom, clawing the conditions writing requires into existence is a constant challenge. I'm lucky that I've had access to residencies, and childcare that lets me occasionally go away for a couple of weeks. As to the how of your question--how does one balance the competing imperatives--it's a moving target! I try to give myself grace instead of feeling guilty, and I try to remember that selfishness can be good. Even essential. --Shahina Piyarali