Reflecting on a life lived triumphantly in the margins, Good Woman: A Reckoning by Savala Nolan revels in the author's raw, unfiltered femininity and offers a compelling vision of womanhood unhindered by the "herd think" of cultural expectations. The author, now in her "thunderous middle years," spent her earlier decades flattening herself into the "good woman" mold, only to realize that it did not deliver on its advertised benefits. It was, in fact, a convenient, persistent lie women fall for all the time. What to be, then, if not a good woman? Over the course of 12 electrifying essays that lean into history, popular culture, spirituality and domesticity, Nolan demonstrates what it means to trust wholly in one's body, to honor one's complexities and to thrive "in a world that hates women." It's about embracing the antiheroes of our stories and tasting "the thrill of noncompliance."

Nolan (Don't Let It Get You Down) is an essayist and law professor with a gift for articulating with devastating precision societal truths women grapple with, from the proximity of sex to violence and the suppression of female hunger to a woman's contradictory desire for both independence and protection. For her, discovering what lies beyond goodness meant a powerful reckoning with diet culture, sex, intimacy, and the probing of her racial legacy as a Black woman with a white mother. It was a realization that marriage is not the only satisfying way to be in a relationship, that women "deserve the full range of human experience."

In the startlingly clear-eyed first essay of this collection, "Refusal," Nolan takes her sexual and emotional temperature and unravels years of social conditioning. She turns toward something far better, a counter-cultural pivot toward what the author refers to as "playing the villain." To be self-possessed and self-actualized in our patriarchal society is, she explains in a later essay, "downright villainous."

A central theme of Good Woman is motherhood, the sheer all-encompassing nature of it and the realization that Nolan's daughter will look to her as a role model. While society prefers us to be "perennially pleasant, agreeable, and pleasing," Nolan chooses to create a home life free from diet culture, one where "edgyplay" and identifying with the antagonist is encouraged. For a writer who sees her "otherness as a windfall and not a curse," it is about demonstrating for her daughter "the vitality and value of the margins."

The essay "Mothers Superior," stunning in scope, describes mothering as a "godlike function" and makes a persuasive case for motherhood as a far more accurate description of God. While her Judeo-Christian upbringing enforced the notion of God the father bathed in paternal grandeur, this never rang true for Nolan. She writes of her regret for the youthful years when God was an alienating concept that prevented her from tapping into the divine, but also much joy at a spiritual connection now enriching her life. Not one to dwell on missed opportunities, Nolan is instead energized by the present, feeling compassion for the person she was, and forgiving of those who tried to fit her into a wrong-sized, ill-fitting box.

Diets were always a part of the author's life. She absorbed early on that her fatness meant she was bad. The three-year-old who went on a starvation diet became the college girl fueled toward anorexia and bulimia by self-hatred and others' praise of her thin body. She and her mother went on countless diets together, dieting being a process "by which a woman shows she understands her role in society." How subversive then to liberate oneself and embrace "body neutrality."

Nolan draws an intriguing connection between the "cultural mistrust of Black women's actual appetites" and the cultural mistrust of their "creative appetites," and she offers a revelatory example to prove her point. The essay "Lest We Die of Hunger" opens with admiration for the artist Nicki Minaj's daringly seductive pose on the record cover of Anaconda. It originates from "a certain aesthetic strain of American Blackness," explains Nolan. Negative media reaction to the Anaconda cover was swift and damning. Nolan juxtaposes Minaj's "Black pose" with Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which depicts five brown and black nude female bodies. Picasso's masterpiece is universally admired, his use of women's naked bodies to produce art unquestioned, while Minaj's use of her own body to make art was considered "too raunchy." Exposing this breathtaking level of hypocrisy, Nolan uses it as an opportunity to engage in a conversation about Black female artists through history, including cabaret performer Josephine Baker of Folies Bergère fame.

Nolan skillfully deploys the past to contextualize and understand the present when writing with lyrical brilliance about the not-so-invisible thread linking women like Sally Hemings, the slave-mistress of Thomas Jefferson, to the author herself. Time is not only linear, Nolan asserts, it keeps circling back so that we are not far from our racist past. Sarah and Joel, the white great-grandparents who helped raise Nolan's mother, are connected through time's "loops" to Nolan's daughter, their Jim Crow-era upbringing "an alarmingly close connection" to the present day.

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. --Shahina Piyarali

Savala Nolan (photo: Senay Inanici)

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