Savala Nolan, DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body
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[1:07]Savala Nolan Tripinski is the author of Don't Let It Get You Down.
[1:12]Says on Race, Gender, and the Body.
[1:14]Savala is Executive Director of the Felton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.
[1:21]She is the author of Don't Let Get You Down, and she and her writing have been featured in the New York Times.
[1:26]Book review, Harper Spagazine, Time, NPR, and more.
[1:29]Welcome, Savala.
[1:31]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Time to Read books to talk about Don't Let It Get You Down.
[1:35]Says on Race, Gender, and the Body.
[1:37]Thank you, Savala.
[1:39]I am totally excited to be here and can't wait to dig into the conversation with you.
[1:44]Well, I just love the way you write.
[1:47]I love your point of view.
[1:49]I loved all these essays.
[1:51]I how you link them together.
[1:53]The way you talk about your body, your identity, your feet.
[1:58]I mean, honestly, it was so good.
[2:00]And I was just, it's just amazing when you read great essays like this.
[2:04]And I love essays.
[2:05]So I don't know.
[2:06]I just got very, very excited about it.
[2:08]Thank you.
[2:09]I mean, I love essays too.
[2:12]And these essays, you know, hopefully they kind of walk the line between personal and political.
[2:17]You know, they're very much obviously about me and my life.
[2:19]But they're also about things that we all deal with.
[2:22]Like our bodies and race and class and gender.
[2:24]So I love that, you know, as different as you and I are in some ways.
[2:29]I love that the books spoke to you.
[2:31]That's any writer's dream is to have what they do.
[2:35]Matter, you know, even to people who come from different different places and different experiences.
[2:40]Well, I mean, we all come from the same emotional place deep down.
[2:44]Like that's what I think so much gets in the way.
[2:47]You know, I don't, I'm not self conscious about my feet, for instance,
[2:50]but I have my things.
[2:51]Like we all have our things that we are embarrassed about about our bodies.
[2:55]We have the things we don't like.
[2:56]We have, you know, not feeling like we fit in and, you know, not sure about things
[3:01]and parts of our families in a bare system.
[3:03]And I don't know.
[3:04]There's like so much that, you know, the outside trappings are one tiny piece.
[3:09]I feel like that often take up a lot of the air in the room.
[3:12]Whereas the stuff that's really important gets left behind.
[3:15]But yes, the stuff that's really important tends to be universal.
[3:19]I totally agree.
[3:20]Yes.
[3:22]Okay.
[3:23]So let's back up for a second.
[3:25]Okay.
[3:26]When did you start writing this book?
[3:28]Why did you start writing this book?
[3:29]Did you always know it was going to be a book?
[3:30]Did you just start writing the essays?
[3:32]How did this whole thing come about?
[3:33]But and how did you even start writing?
[3:35]Like, let's go there.
[3:37]Well, I've been writing, you know, forever.
[3:39]I'm one of those people that, you know, was writing little stories
[3:42]when I was eight years old on a computer after doing maybe speaking,
[3:45]teach us typing, which is really going to date me for any of your listeners.
[3:51]So, you know, there's a way in which I think I've been kind of working on using writing
[3:56]to understand who I fit into the world and understand how different parts of the world
[4:00]fit into my own life.
[4:02]Since I was a really, really little kid, but, you know, this project came together,
[4:07]I guess over the course of about four years, essays are really intuitive form for me.
[4:13]So I always understood that, you know, if I published these pieces into a book,
[4:20]that it would take the form of kind of a memoir in essays.
[4:24]And, you know, I think this book is really my attempt to understand or reconcile
[4:31]or make peace with the fact that I don't really belong anywhere in our culture
[4:36]in a seamless way.
[4:38]And, you know, to kind of make use of the perspective that that dislocation affords me.
[4:46]I mean, you've read the book.
[4:47]So you know, I'm someone who embodies a lot of contradictions.
[4:52]Like, I am black and white.
[4:54]My father was black and Mexican and my mother is white.
[4:58]I'm descended from enslaved people on my dad's side and slave holders on my mom's side.
[5:04]I happened to be raised in a place called Marin County, which, you know,
[5:10]the time that I was growing up there had the highest per capita income of any place in the country,
[5:15]but within Marin County or pockets of more middle class and blue color and poor people.
[5:22]And I was more in that pocket.
[5:24]So I had access to some of the benefits of being in this really wealthy place, including private schools,
[5:30]but on my dad's side of the family and when I was with him and his side of the family,
[5:35]I was experiencing, you know, generational poverty that was really intractable and deep.
[5:41]And, you know, I'm also someone who has been fat and thin over and over pretty much my whole life,
[5:48]because I was put on my first diet when I was about four years old.
[5:51]And as anyone who's dieted knows, you know, they don't tend to work long term.
[5:57]So I've gone on and off diets.
[5:59]I don't know until I stopped dieting all together about five years ago.
[6:05]So I think, you know, being a woman and being someone who's so tethered to how I look in the culture,
[6:11]like having had kind of the quote unquote, right kind of body and the wrong kind of body over the years has taught me things.
[6:18]So, you know, not belonging neatly into these major categories that are so definitional in our lives, gives me a unique perspective.
[6:28]And I wanted to write about that and share it with other people.
[6:32]And also, you know, selfishly see if maybe I could kind of map out a place for myself at last, you know, and this book is the result of that effort.
[6:45]And do you feel like you did that? Like, do you feel like you came to some sort of conclusion or that you feel more sort of, you know, at home, like, did it work for you?
[6:59]You know, I think in many ways it did work in the sense that, you know, I'm way less interested now and trying to fit into a neat category than I was when I began writing this book.
[7:15]Or then I've been for most of my life. I think we all desire kind of a seamless or easy belonging, you know, that's a very natural desire to just feel that you fit neatly and easily and organically with a given group.
[7:30]So, of course, I still have that desire in a certain way, but I'm much happier and more at peace with just being someone who's in between and who's kind of, you know, on the balcony and the dance floor at the same time and so many different ways.
[7:46]And I don't have the same level of interest in and trying to get rid of that aspect of myself that I used to have. So, in that way, yeah, I would say I definitely got something that I wanted from the process of writing these 12 essays.
[8:04]So, one thing that sort of haunted me is the wrong word that I can't stop thinking about is your relationship with your mom and how it's changed over time and how you lauded the fact that she raised you with such, you know, all these black culture influences, right?
[8:19]I think from singing at the church choir to just making sure that you had that, even though your dad had left and how important that was to her that you understood that part of your own identity, which I thought was awesome.
[8:30]And as you got older, you started feeling like more of a separation from her until you had this one scene of her is like this like, trailer older white woman and like this difference, you could feel the sort of space between you as you wrote about it.
[8:48]Tell me a little bit about your relationship and like where it stands and where it stands today.
[8:54]As you say, really lucky to be a mixed black person who was, you know, raised by a white person who understood that she was going to have to go out of her comfort zone out of her way to connect me with black culture, black politics, black aesthetics, you know, black history.
[9:17]Once my dad left our family and no longer lived in the house because, you know, I would have absorbed those things just probably automatically if he had been in my house all the time, you know, again, my dad was black.
[9:30]But since he wasn't and I saw him, you know, my mom was my primary caregiver I saw my dad regularly, but there's no comparison to the person who's in the home raising you right.
[9:41]So once my mom understood that I wasn't going to get those things, she just had the presence of thought to know that I as a mixed black person was not going to be welcome in whiteness.
[9:52]And so it was incumbent upon her to make sure that I felt my connection to black.
[10:00]And I'm, you know, I'm incredibly thankful for that.
[10:03]I honestly can't imagine my life if she hadn't done that
[10:06]from a young age.
[10:08]But it's true, you know, that as I became older,
[10:12]like any child goes through a process of
[10:14]individualating from their parents, you know.
[10:18]And when I was really young, I didn't understand us
[10:22]to be so different racially.
[10:25]And as I began to just become more my own person
[10:28]and the world racialized me more, you know,
[10:32]I became really aware of how, in a way,
[10:36]how deeply segregated our experiences of the world
[10:40]were going to be because we didn't share
[10:42]a racial identity.
[10:44]And there were times when that has been really sad
[10:48]and times when it's made me angry, you know,
[10:50]and times when we've been able to become closer
[10:54]by having, you know, frank and loving
[10:56]and candid conversations about race,
[11:00]relying on the intimacy of our relationship
[11:03]to kind of get us through the more difficult moments.
[11:07]And my relationship with my mom is really, really good.
[11:09]I mean, at this point, it's really, really good.
[11:12]But it's, you know, it's been a complex road
[11:14]because her efforts were honest and purposeful
[11:18]and not contrived, you know, they were genuine.
[11:23]But of course, they were imperfect
[11:26]because she's not black, so she couldn't, you know,
[11:29]she couldn't translate everything perfectly to me.
[11:33]And one of the things I write about in the book
[11:35]is sort of the difficulty of having to contend
[11:37]with her racial blind spots and like her unprocessed
[11:41]anti-pack racism as a kid, you know.
[11:45]And occasionally that pops up now too,
[11:49]but you know, we can talk about it
[11:50]because I'm not eight years old or something,
[11:52]I don't internalize it.
[11:54]Of course, you know, the other thing
[11:55]that that impacts my relationship with my mom
[11:58]so much is dieting.
[11:59]She was a chronic dieter.
[12:01]She learned that habit from her mother
[12:04]and she enrolled me in it as I said earlier
[12:07]in a really young age.
[12:08]So that's another part of our journey
[12:10]that's been very, very complicated
[12:13]and has a racial aspect of it too, you know.
[12:16]So yeah, I don't know if you want me to get into that.
[12:19]Well, let's go.
[12:21]I was looking for this quote, which of course,
[12:24]I can't find now when I want it.
[12:26]But well, let's, there's so much I want to talk to you about.
[12:29]Well, here, I'll just read this passage that you wrote.
[12:31]I think that was in the same essay that we're talking about.
[12:33]But you said, it's hard to describe how the particular
[12:36]resignation of American blackness sometimes feels.
[12:39]It swallows sound.
[12:41]It's an impassive reflection in the mirror.
[12:43]So massive, you must look away.
[12:44]It feels like stopping time and disappearing,
[12:47]sliding through that tiny rip you used
[12:49]to press your eye two years ago when you were little,
[12:52]but what you saw made no sense.
[12:53]Candle, lit, ships bobbing on still Atlantic waters.
[12:57]The hedge of the new world green at the horizon,
[13:00]the smell of sex and menstrual fluid
[13:01]and pus from somewhere.
[13:02]And is that the sound of a violin?
[13:05]Oh my gosh.
[13:06]You're, I mean, you're like an amazing, right?
[13:08]That's like amazing writer.
[13:10]But anyway, when you talk also,
[13:12]and I don't want to only talk about race
[13:13]because I do want to go back to your body,
[13:15]which personally, I'm like super interested in,
[13:17]but I mean, I'm interested in all of it,
[13:18]but the moment on the swing set,
[13:21]where you were pushing,
[13:23]the moment on the swing set,
[13:25]when somebody assumed you lived
[13:27]in like this bad part of Marin County,
[13:28]and you had this whole internal dialogue with the woman,
[13:32]like where you said all the things,
[13:34]like why did you assume that just because of how I look,
[13:37]I lived in that particular neighborhood,
[13:38]like don't you realize that's racist
[13:40]and all these like small,
[13:41]slights along these little things
[13:43]that just keep like jabbing away at you.
[13:46]How do you resolve that
[13:47]and just sort of like move on?
[13:49]How do you like be like, okay,
[13:50]like I'm not gonna yell at this woman?
[13:52]I'm gonna just like, you know, tell me about that.
[13:57]Well, yeah, I do remember that moment,
[14:00]and I still think about it,
[14:01]even though I wrote about it, you know,
[14:02]which is a form of processing,
[14:04]but I still think about that moment a lot.
[14:06]And, you know, I have this internal reaction
[14:10]of kind of the, you know, pot boiling over,
[14:13]but externally, I was very calm and polite to her
[14:17]and just corrected her, you know,
[14:20]her wrong assumption about where it was from,
[14:22]but in a very polite, friendly way.
[14:24]So, you know, which is to say I shoved down
[14:27]what I actually felt and stifled it,
[14:30]which, you know, if you do that,
[14:33]you either have to process it at some point
[14:36]or, you know, it goes rancid inside you,
[14:40]you know, you put things in the disappear box,
[14:41]they don't actually disappear,
[14:43]they just get moldy, you know?
[14:45]So, I mean, did be your question of like,
[14:47]how do you process the thousand slights?
[14:51]That's a million dollar question, you know?
[14:53]Like, I think about it racially,
[14:56]because that's where I personally,
[14:58]that is where I sense them,
[15:01]and that is the way that they harm me most.
[15:04]But like, you know, any woman has had to sort of
[15:09]just politely respond to a dude who said something
[15:13]or did something, you know,
[15:15]because she doesn't want to risk seeming, you know,
[15:18]like she's out of control,
[15:19]or she just wants to like get along,
[15:21]or you know, whatever, like this is something
[15:22]that anyone who has a marginalized part
[15:25]of their identity relates to.
[15:28]I think for me, you know, getting to write about it
[15:33]helps me externalize it, you know?
[15:36]Like, cause in the moment you do so often
[15:39]have to just kind of take a breath
[15:42]and like put it aside and decide
[15:43]you're not gonna let it derail your day.
[15:45]And like, it's them not you, all of that.
[15:48]But those, that pile of stuff, like it grows, you know,
[15:52]inside of us.
[15:53]And so I think for me, the, the, the straightest route
[15:57]to kind of letting it go is probably writing about it
[16:01]for me because that's how I understand the world, you know?
[16:04]But I don't, I mean, if I could,
[16:05]if I could answer that question with like a one, two, three stuff,
[16:09]you know, thing I could retire tomorrow.
[16:13]I wish that I, I wish that I knew how to,
[16:17]how to not feel rocked by those moments
[16:20]because they're part of life and, you know,
[16:23]they're not going away even as the world improves
[16:25]in many ways, like those little moments
[16:27]I don't think are going away, not in my lifetime anyway.
[16:30]And let's go back to the body talk if you don't mind.
[16:33]Okay.
[16:33]And actually when I was reading this,
[16:35]I made a mental note.
[16:36]I was like, I need to like go and see if she had posted
[16:39]any pictures of what she used to look like
[16:40]because you make all these references
[16:42]and I didn't even go back and check
[16:43]but I'm wondering if, because I'm like,
[16:45]what is it like to have such, you know, like,
[16:49]sometimes I post pictures of like a much smaller version
[16:52]of myself and I'm like, you know, my before is now like,
[16:56]what I would love to get to in my life.
[16:58]You know what I mean?
[16:59]So it's funny how that works.
[17:00]Yeah, I mean, I've had all kinds of bodies
[17:02]in terms of body size.
[17:04]I've been sort of like what you would consider
[17:06]in New York City, let's say,
[17:08]to just be like a standard thin, you know,
[17:11]I've been painfully thin when I was really deep
[17:14]in subclinical eating disorder behavior
[17:17]and over exercise.
[17:18]I've been what you would call just like a little bit plus size.
[17:21]I've been really fat.
[17:22]And I've just, I've been all over more than once.
[17:26]And where do you feel the best?
[17:27]Like why did you, and how did you decide
[17:29]to stop dieting five years ago?
[17:30]What does that mean?
[17:31]And like where is your happy place?
[17:34]Yeah.
[17:35]Well, where I feel the best doesn't actually have much
[17:37]to do with the size and shape of my body.
[17:40]I mean, that's one thing because I was never thin enough.
[17:44]You know, when I was thin, my boobs weren't perky enough.
[17:48]Like, you know, it's just it's always something
[17:49]like the goal line is always moving.
[17:52]And so I feel the best right now.
[17:56]I'm probably the fattest that I have been,
[17:59]I don't know, that I'm aware of just going by like dress size,
[18:03]although I don't, I don't weigh myself anymore.
[18:05]So I can't say for sure, but just going by dress size.
[18:08]But I feel the best I have ever felt
[18:11]because I am not engaged in the project
[18:14]as perpetually renovating my body.
[18:19]You know, not really treating my body as a place
[18:21]that I was allowed to just linger in and enjoy and savor.
[18:25]But treating my body as a problem, as a mistake,
[18:30]as something that was just constantly out of control.
[18:33]I had to wrangle as something that scared me
[18:37]as something that felt out of control.
[18:38]I mean, that's how I always felt about my body
[18:41]regardless of how it looked
[18:43]because dieting is not really about how you look.
[18:47]You know, to my way of thinking,
[18:48]dieting is essentially a political sedatives, I think.
[18:52]You know, there's a quote that I love from Naomi Wolf
[18:56]where she says, a culture obsessed with female sineness
[18:59]is not obsessed with female beauty.
[19:02]It's obsessed with female obedience.
[19:05]And that captures quite a bit of how I feel.
[19:09]There's another quote by a scholar, Gilman Sander,
[19:12]I'm probably gonna mess it up,
[19:13]but the gist of it is that dieting is a way
[19:16]that women show that they understand their role in society.
[19:22]It's a way that they perform their gender.
[19:25]And, you know, as I became more politically aware
[19:30]of kind of the underbelly of diet culture
[19:34]because it's not natural or organic.
[19:37]You know, there have been periods of time
[19:40]and there are places on the planet and cultures now
[19:42]that prize fat women, right?
[19:45]Like it's not some natural law
[19:48]that women are supposed to be thin
[19:50]in order to be attractive.
[19:51]It's a cultural construct, you know,
[19:53]that kind of masquerades as something neutral.
[19:57]As I became more aware of the politics of diet.
[20:00]And the ways in this country that fear of fatness and the desire for thinness is very literally tied to anti black racism and chattel slavery.
[20:14]And you can see it in like women's magazines and entertainment, you know, from the antebellum era.
[20:21]As I became more aware of that, it fueled me to stop doing this to myself.
[20:27]And, you know, I only speak for myself, people are on their own journey, you know, and people can disagree with me.
[20:33]But for me, there's no question that the creative and spiritual and political freedom that I feel no longer dieting is worth more than I could ever possibly say.
[20:46]And I would never ever ever go back no matter, you know, what someone said my body would look like.
[20:51]Yeah, plus there's the fact that diets don't work for like most people, you know, so it's sort of like a cure that doesn't work for a problem that doesn't exist, I guess, is how I think of it in a nutshell.
[21:04]Or so.
[21:05]So what is coming next for you? You have this book out.
[21:14]Has it changed your life? What do you want to do next? Like what are you excited about?
[21:19]I want to write another book next, you know, I mean, this was truly a dream come true. This was like a childhood dream come true.
[21:28]And I will be writing until the day I die, you know, whether or not anybody reads it is a different question.
[21:35]And whether or not anybody publishes it is another question, but I'm thinking about what my next book will be about.
[21:42]And I am, you know, in conversation with a couple different sort of writerly platforms about writing more regularly for them.
[21:50]And I'm really hoping that I get to, I mean, I'm a lawyer and I work at a law school and so that's kind of the other hat I wear.
[21:57]But I'm hoping that I can find ways to focus more on writing because it really.
[22:02]It's my place of joy, you know, even though it's sometimes, as you know, really difficult and exiting and it's a lot of work.
[22:10]It's the place where I feel kind of most alive and like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing on the planet.
[22:16]So yeah, that's my goal to have more time and space to write. That's what I want.
[22:22]That does sound nice.
[22:25]It's really nice.
[22:27]It's a wave of magic wand.
[22:29]I'm excited.
[22:32]I'm excited.
[22:34]But advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[22:37]Oh, my, my advice for aspiring authors would be I can't take credit for this advice because this advice that was, you know, has been given to me and that I rely on to focus on habits more than inspiration.
[22:52]Because inspiration is fickle and it like comes in and out with the tide.
[22:57]And you can't rely on it.
[23:00]And habit is just much more of a workhorse, I think.
[23:04]There's a quote from Madeline lingo who said inspiration usually comes during work, not before him.
[23:12]That's great.
[23:13]And I love that.
[23:14]I love that.
[23:15]Don't wait around for inspiration just keep chipping away because, you know, as you know, from writing, like, you can't get to the good draft unless you go through the bad drafts.
[23:27]So you just, if you're unwilling to go through the bad drafts, you know, or you're not, you're unwilling to work when you're not inspired, then you, you literally can't get to the good stuff.
[23:37]And you sort of have to walk through that hallway to get to the door at the end of it.
[23:42]So that, that's my one little bit of advice is go for habit, not inspiration.
[23:47]I love that.
[23:48]And just one question because I'm curious, the guys who you, the guys who you mentioned, particularly the one who like leaned over you at like a table.
[23:57]Do they, do they know, do they know about this bug? Do they remember those moments?
[24:02]Like have you heard from any of them?
[24:04]Oh, Zibi. So yeah, I wrote, there's an essay in the book called on dating white guys.
[24:09]Well, me or I write about my, you know, former, but very strong desire to be chosen by a white guy as a romantic partner because of the power of their approval in the culture, you know, and I do go through a number of guys that I have these.
[24:25]I don't even know what I would call them. I don't know like an asexual romance. I don't know like not a normal friendship, but not a full blown romance either. And let's see, there is one of that one of them knows for sure, but he hasn't gotten back to me.
[24:44]Another one, his best friend told me like, Hey, I saw your book in a bookstore and I suppose that means that, you know, his best friend who's the guy I write about knows.
[24:53]But yeah, I mean, I have no idea. It's out in the world. Maybe they come across it. And if they remember things differently, that's okay. You know, it's, that's the nature of life.
[25:03]And then wave essays less about their behavior, although I do think it was often strange and more about my process, you know, trying to get over this very strange.
[25:17]Yeah, the guy who weaned over me, like, I don't know. I still don't know what to make of that. Right. I know. I was reading a lot with him. Like, what was he doing, you know, whatever.
[25:29]But we'll never know. I love reading about it.
[25:31]Thank you. Thank you.
[25:33]I love the crazy little moments in life where you're like, what? Anyway, I know. We'll never know.
[25:39]Well, so well, thank you so much. This has been so fun. It's time would buy in like two seconds. And again, thank you for these beautiful essays. I really admire your writing and the way you look at the world and it's really cool.
[25:53]Thank you, Ziggy. I so appreciate the chance to chat with you. And I just love your book world, your world of books and really felt to be a part of it.
[26:04]Thank you.
[26:05]Awesome. All right. We'll take care. And I have to talk to you soon.
[26:09]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:13]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at ZB Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:18]Also sign up for my newsletter at ZB Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:25]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[26:29]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.