Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt

GOOD WOMAN

Savala Nolan

A Reckoning

GOOD WOMAN interrogates what it means to be a woman today.

Told through lyrical storytelling and reportage, this powerhouse collection asks how women give up power versus what it costs them to get it, the nuances of navigating the hypervisibility and invisibility of (racialized) womanhood, and the limitations faced even by women who have made significant progress in developing a multifaceted, internal feminism, among other themes. GOOD WOMAN will sit comfortably next to books like Thick, Bad Feminist, The Will to Change, and the work of Rebecca Solnit, Caitlin Moran, Samantha Irby, and Morgan Jerkins.

GOOD WOMAN is a celebration and vindication of many aspects of womanhood, certainly, but it's also a plea for a way of being more than just a woman. "I am not talking about changing my gender. I am talking about changing the universe. So I can be someone with no social identity and no political identity. Someone who is untethered, undefinable... I'd like to be me, but have me be free."

Savala Nolan is essayist and professor who writes about race, bodies, and gender. Her first book ("A standout collection", NYT) is DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN. She helped created 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. She also writes a monthly essay for Medium.

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Book Published by Mariner

Comments

This good woman thinks boldly and writes with exhilarating passion. Whatever the subject gender, sex, race, class, art, politicsshe disrupts piety and honors complexity. These are smart and bold essays to learn from and revel in."

I devoured this book. Good Woman does what an excellent friend would doprovides 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.

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.

UK: The Indigo Press

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.