Description:
A Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Ms. Magazine
"A stone cold, knock-out punch delivered with the caress of a silk glove. This book cracks you open." - Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage
"This good woman thinks boldly and writes with exhilarating passion.... These are smart and daring essays to learn from and revel in." - Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System
A raw and lyrical exploration of the confining expectations of womanhood and, if we dare, what lies beyond those limitations--from a writer Roxane Gay calls "vibrant and thoughtful."
Gorgeous, badass, and practically waiting to pounce, Good Woman: A Reckoning is acclaimed essayist Savala Nolan's follow-up to her "standout collection" (New York Times Book Review) Don't Let It Get You Down.
A lifetime of playing by the rules of female social conditioning is not what it's cracked up to be for Nolan. The years of making herself smaller (literally and metaphorically); the sexual advances that led to more than she wanted; the bad marriage she fought like hell to keep; all the ways others questioned her identity or choices and she let it slide to keep the peace; her silence when requested; her body when desired--none of it worked. None of it protected her the way it was advertised to.
Nolan noticed the same was true for the women around her and the women in history she read about. Across time and location, they were raised to be agreeable and "good." Hyper-visible as sexual objects but invisible as full people. Living in a physical world created by men for men. Taking on the ultimate role of birth-giver and caretaker, yet seeing it remain an unsung act, even as it's a God-like endeavor. Only in midlife did Nolan begin to realize she was capable of living outside these cages of conditioning so slyly insidious that they're nearly invisible.
Good Woman elegantly probes the knotty conditions themselves, the costs of adhering to them, and what happens when one refuses to comply. The twelve stunning and unforgettable essays blend memoir, reportage, and history to create a collection that is alternately bold, brash, and explosive ... and ravishingly tender, sensual, and joyous. Nolan takes aim at big and old ideas, and she does not miss. Hers is a testimony to witness and to savor.
Brief description:
Savala Nolan is an essayist and professor who writes about race, bodies, and gender. She helped create the Peabody Award-winning podcast The Promise, and directs the social justice program at UC Berkeley, School of Law, where she teaches about the role of identity in lawyering. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Harper's magazine, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Time, Forbes, LitHub, and more.
Review Quotes:
"Savala Nolan's Good Woman is a stone cold, knock-out punch delivered with the caress of a silk glove. This book cracks you open. Then, having done so, with Nolan's characteristic nerviness, she dares to tend to your tender places. This book will change you." - Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
"This good woman thinks boldly and writes with exhilarating passion. Whatever the subject--gender, sex, race, class, art, politics--she disrupts piety and honors complexity. These are smart and daring essays to learn from and revel in." - Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System
"The essays in this book are fantastic, affirming, infuriating, surprising.... I forced myself to read it deliciously slowly, talking out loud to each one, filling the margins with notes. Savala Nolan may not be a 'good woman' but oh my God, she is a great writer. " - Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex
"Savala Nolan's new book of essays grapples with almost everything: patriarchy, God, bodies, Thomas Jefferson, violence, the sweetness of love, divorce, slave-owning ancestors, paying for sex, linear time. This is a mind alive to the possibilities both within and in conversation with her own experiences of the world. She's thinking it through and pushing toward a more radical freedom -- for Black women, for all women, for everyone." - Alexis Madrigal, host of KQED Forum (local NPR station)
"Searing.... Nolan's lyrical prose and sharp observations make for exhilarating reading, reexamining old assumptions and opening up new possibilities. A powerful call to transcend the barriers imposed on us by society and establish new frameworks for living." - Booklist (starred review)
"Electrifying.... Startlingly clear-eyed.... Stunning in scope.... Revelatory.... Crafted with Nolan's intellectually curious, animated narration, Good Woman will resonate with readers who sense that things are not working out quite the way they should. For them, Nolan's essays offer a dynamic framework, a 'working compass' for redesigning our roles without altering or diluting the magical essence of what makes us uniquely female." - Shelf Awareness
"Good Woman: A Reckoning ... refuses the myth of the 'good woman' with clarity, anger, and striking intimacy. It moves fluidly between memoir and cultural critique, showing how systems of power embed themselves in the smallest details of everyday life. Nolan does not seek to resolve the contradictions she uncovers; instead, she insists we sit with them."
- The New Feminist
"Nolan provides full-throated anger, tenderness, and joy throughout these 12 essays that celebrate the many ways in which she identifies herself outside society's constricting expectations of 'good women.' ... Nolan's writing is at its best when negotiating the personal and the political. For example, she is drawn to retrace the steps of enslaved people in Virginia.... The essays end up in a place that isn't neat and tidy, crafting a liminal space that is all Nolan's own. Nolan's complex and honest cri de coeur will inspire readers to explore their own identities and the societal expectations they face." - Library Journal
"A defiant woman speaks out.... Race, marriage, sexual desire, and motherhood recur as themes in impassioned essays on freedom, disillusionment, and yearnings.... A raw, forthright memoir." - Kirkus Reviews
"A vibrant collection of poignant essays." - Essence
"A blistering assertion that there can be no true equality for women under patriarchy." - Publishers Weekly
"If a subtle discussion of girlhood isn't your style, perhaps a more direct approach in UC Berkeley scholar and Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice director Savala Nolan's new essay collection could be what you're looking for. Part memoir, part history, the essays featured in Good Woman explore the benefits -- or lack thereof -- of playing by the rules of the patriarchy. Nolan reckons with the harsh reality that her efforts to always be agreeable and make herself smaller, as women are taught from birth, have not resulted in the protections promised by the purveyors of patriarchy. Pick this up if you enjoy authors that make hard conversations easier to digest." - KQED's "5 Books You Won't Want to Put Down This Summer"
"I devoured this book. Good Woman does what an excellent friend would do--provides solace, conversation, debate, and opens up new frameworks for the good life. Savala Nolan writes about the end of a marriage, the birth of a daughter, the body, and occupying several identities simultaneously. She writes with grace, wit and insight, in the tradition of writers who understand that the personal is also political. If you love the essays of Roxane Gay or Rebecca Solnit, Nolan's book will be your brilliant new companion." - Sarah Rhul, author of Smile: The Story of a Face
"When Nolan says 'I'm not grinding an ax, I am sharpening a blade. There's a difference', believe her. This is a blade of a book, and it is ours to feel the power of, to wield. The first chapter of Good Woman left my jaw agape. It is a pistol whip of an opening, and what follows is just as potent. At a time when being a woman, particularly a Black woman, feels like being a living target, I am grateful for Nolan's sharp, clear-eyed, vulnerable look at what we have decided womanhood is, who it serves, and how we move through it. Good Woman is everything we have come to expect from Nolan: blisteringly intelligent, well-honed, sharp arguments laid next to the softest and most tender parts of herself -- bared to us, encouraging us to do the same. Having this book in my corner feels like armor, it feels like a shield, it feels, not like being in the woods with a man or a bear, but rather, an army of your very own. With Nolan at our side, the past, present and future are visible all at once, and all at once it is an arresting, sobering, electrifying work." - Eirinie Carson, author of The Dead Are Gods
"Good Woman is a must-read for any woman who is tired of being 'good' and ready to reclaim her life. Savala Nolan shows us how it's done -- with humor, heart, and blazing smarts. Somehow, this book is at once poetic, fierce, tender, sexy, and scholarly. It's equal parts moving memoir, intellectual romp, and rallying cry. I'll return to it again and again." - Tracy Clark-Flory, author of Want Me and That Kind of Woman
"Good Woman is simply incredible. It's heartbreaking, powerful, whip-smart, infuriating and right -- and it's crafted with extraordinary, ravishing beauty. Savala Nolan has written a masterpiece." - Khiara Bridges, author of Critical Race Theory and Expecting Inequity
"In Refusal, the opening essay of Savala Nolan's new essay collection, Good Woman: A Reckoning, she writes, 'I refuse to be good. This is a matter of survival, not inclination or mood. I refuse to be easy, and I refuse others' preferences. I refuse to be amicable, and I refuse to appease. I refuse to go along, and I refuse to agree.' Ever since I first read these words, I have rolled them around. I have whispered them. I have typed them out. I have tried to figure out how to get from where I am, overly invested in 'being good, ' to where she is, refusing to be good, refusing to perform goodness, as a matter of survival." - Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, Hunger, and Difficult Women
"Savala Nolan's new book of essays, Good Woman, contains so many underlinable passages that at some point in my reading, I simply stopped. Every other sentence is something you immediately need to text your group chat. Good Woman is a beautiful, defiant treatise on how to embody womanhood has been defined and redefined mostly by people intent on preventing women from defining themselves." - Sara Peterson, author of Momfluenced
"[A] standout collection.... Writers like Clint Smith, Emily Bernard, Nishta J. Mehra, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Mychal Denzel Smith and Robert Jones Jr. (among many others) 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. Another part is the author's voice -- vulnerable, but rarely veering into self-indulgence.... A brutal, beautifully rendered narrative." - New York Times Book Review on Don't Let It Get You Down