Our October 2021 Book Club Selection Is Here!
Dear Good Ancestors,
A new season of the year is here and I am so happy to be back in your inbox as my team and I have returned from our summer break. We have missed you!
You might remember that I wrote to you at the end of June to let you know we would be taking a break from producing the podcast and hosting the book club through the summer.
Our last book club read was (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman by writer and scientist Pragya Agarwal in July, and it was such a great read. I highly recommend it if you haven’t had the chance to read it, and of course you can check out our wonderful conversation on the podcast.
Our last podcast episode was with my friend Leesa Renée Hall (anti-bias facilitator and mental wellness advocate) back in July.
Through the summer I took the time to (finally!) finish my manuscript for the Young Reader’s Edition / Young Adult Edition of Me and White Supremacy. Yay! I cannot tell you just how excited I am about this book. I will be sharing more about it soon, including book covers, release date, and preorder information. But in the meantime I just want to say that writing this book changed me in ways that I am so grateful for. It reinvigorated me in my purpose and mission to be a good ancestor, and I cannot wait to see teens and pre-teens holding this book in their hands.
On a personal note, if you follow me on Instagram you may know that I shared in July that I was diagnosed with GERD (gastro esophageal reflux disease), which I believe was brought on by the chronic stress of living through the pandemic. It is a chronic condition which can be healed, but which takes a long time to heal. I’m happy to report that I am further along in my healing journey, and while there is still a long way to go, I am no longer in the same level of pain and exhaustion I was in and I am grateful to have the medical support I need.
Truth be told, there is so much about myself - about how I look and how I feel in my body that I no longer recognise - but I am making peace with that and learning to be with where I am at now, and not where and who I used to be. I think many of us can relate to that as we continue to endure this global pandemic.
That all aside, my team and I are happy to be back to work! We have some brand new episodes of the podcast coming for you, and our next book club selection.
In October we’ll be reading Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body by Savala Nolan.
ABOUT savala nolan
ABOUT SAVALA NOLAN:
Savala Nolan is executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She and her writing have been featured in Vogue, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, and more. She served as an advisor on the Peabody–winning podcast, The Promise. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
about don’t let it get you down
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.
If you are not currently a member of the Good Ancestor Book Club, we would love to have you join us!
You can find out more about the book club at www.goodancestorbookclub.com. To join the book club simply join or upgrade your membership to the Good Ancestor Book Club member tier, where both monthly and annual subscriptions are available.
We begin our book discussions next week on Monday 5th July, and our author event with Pragya will be on Thursday 29th July.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. Looking forward to another incredible ride with another phenomenal book.
