Don't Let It Get You Down

May 24, 2021
Lawyer Nolan ponders her “perpetual, prismatic, in-betweenness around race and class” in her deeply personal debut collection. The child of a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan recounts her parents’ separation when she was two and her mother’s “own internalized racism that she never totally cleaned up.” “The Body Endures” sees Nolan examining her own privileges compared with those granted to her white husband (“Even with my money and education and light skin, I am still three times more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman”), and “Fat in Ways White Girls Don’t Understand” tackles the “Mammy” stereotype. Particularly insightful are Nolan’s “lonely” experiences nannying for the über-rich, captured in “Nearly, Not Quite,” and her pressing need to learn about her family’s past in “To Wit, and Also.” At times, the episodic nature can lack immediacy: “On Dating White Guys While Me” boils down to a sort of list of men. Still, the mix of cultural criticism and thoughtful personal writing will be just right for fans of Roxane Gay. Agent: Farley Chase, Chase Literary Agency.

May 15, 2021
A lawyer, writer, and social justice advocate examines the intersection of race, class, gender, and body issues. In a collection of 12 essays, Nolan processes personal dislocation as a plus-size "in-between," a "mixed black woman" and Daughter of the American Revolution who grew up surrounded by--but not born into--privilege. Her opening essay, "On Dating White Guys While Me," which muses on her "body-bigness" especially in regard to White men, establishes the deeply corporeal nature of the author's intersectional musings. She speaks especially of her "bear paw" feet, which marked her "otherness" from the White elites with whom she lived, studied, worked, and, in too many cases, fell into ambiguous, unreciprocated love. In "The Body Endures," the author remembers how, as a youth, she tried unsuccessfully to achieve White standards of beauty, thinness, and desirability as portrayed by the young Britney Spears. As she meditates on how the "Mammy" stereotype has haunted her concept of body image throughout her life, Nolan reflects on the many facets of her complex personhood. In "White Doll," the author discusses how her White mother "sought ways for me to socialize with black adults." Yet she only succeeded in making a daughter already too aware of her difference from other Blacks feel even "more white." By contrast, Nolan's Black and Mexican father, who praised his daughter for enduring the pain of hair-braiding, made her feel comfortable in a body that later become a racialized medical "spectacle" when she became a parent. White doctors dismissed the pains--later diagnosed as acute pancreatitis - that threatened both her pregnancy and her life. 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 articulates the complicated--and too often overlooked--nature of personal and cultural in-betweenness. An eloquently provocative memoir in essays.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2021

In her book of vulnerable yet voluble personal essays on weight and multiracial identity, Nolan (executive director, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Univ. of California Berkeley Sch. of Law) shares her experiences of feeling "like a spy," an outsider in the relationships she formed with people whose privilege invests them with "layers of meaning even they didn't understand because fish never fully understand the water." She describes her writing as a new cartography--a body mapping of sorts, through which she takes the relentless dislocations that created her identity and transforms them into her own narratives. She writes with humor and power about seeking approval from white men because of their aura of authority, and she telescopes out of specific experiences to explore how we uncomfortably navigate society to carve out our own valuable space within a social hierarchy. Nolan writes that her self-loathing led to a series of destructive romantic and platonic relationships. She's notably honest about navigating various contradictions in her life and demonstrates how the insistence on "either/or" rigidity limits relationships, both between and within individuals. VERDICT Nolan's writing on identity and self-worth is captivating from start to finish; her words will resonate long after the last page.--Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.