Patriarchy Has a Racist Flavor with Savala Nolan

[00:00:00] What's good, family? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams, the host of Black & Published Podcast, and the author of the novel The Seven Daughters of Dupree. This historical fiction novel is about the secrets kept between mothers and daughters over the course of seven generations, and is told backwards in time from 1995 to 1860. The Seven Daughters of Dupree was published January 27, 2026, and is available everywhere books are sold.

[00:00:28] So if you can, please consider getting a copy of The Seven Daughters of Dupree today. This is the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. The single most important thing that I did as a woman, outside of my decision to stop dieting and trying to control the size and shape of my body through what I ate, was leave my marriage.

[00:00:54] What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams, and this is Black & Published, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. Today's guest is Savala Nolan, author of the essay collection, Good Woman, A Reckoning.

[00:01:13] It's a collection of 12 essays where Savala breaks down why she refuses all attributes ascribed to women by patriarchy, misogyny, and capitalism that make them good in an attempt at liberation. I hit my kind of late 30s, early 40s, looked around, realized I had spent my entire life really trying to be a good girl and a good woman.

[00:01:41] On the theory that if I was good enough, I'd be happy. All of that stuff doesn't make you happy. It makes you a good woman in this culture, but that's really different than a happy and whole and free woman. Savala is a lecturer at UC Berkeley and an attorney by trade.

[00:02:04] In our conversation, she explains how her training as a lawyer prepared her to write her books. Plus, why she says she was more self-possessed with her publisher for her second book than her first. And in throwing off the good girl cape, Savala questions whether women, like men, should start paying for sex. So did she? That and more is next when Black and Published continues.

[00:02:40] All right, Savala, when did you know that you were a writer? I think I knew very early on, like age seven or eight, I knew that I loved to write. We had, this is really going to date me. Okay, I was born in 1980. Okay. Like covered wagon era. Don't do that because I am not that much younger than you. Don't do it.

[00:03:08] It feels like it. My daughter is like, you were born last century, mom. So back in the day, late 80s, we had a little computer that you could pretty much only type on. And it had a printer. And it was the kind of printer where the letters were pixelated and you could tear off two strips on the sides.

[00:03:35] Oh my gosh, you're making a face like I'm describing an ancient artifact. Wait, the dot matrix printers? I think so. Yes. We had one of those. Okay, we had one of those. Okay. Okay. That's what you call it. And you would tear off those two skinny strips on each side. Yes. We had one of those in the living room.

[00:03:55] And I would sit down and just write, they weren't really stories, but they would be, you know, a paragraph about somebody in my mind or a place. And like, I would write about New York. I would write about a woman who lived in New York and the neighborhood she lived in. You know, I've never been to New York. I grew up in California. But my point is like from a fairly early age, I like to sit down and mess around with words and create stuff.

[00:04:24] And that has never left me. Okay. So from loving language and words and stacking them together from the age of six, how did that carry you into law school? Because you are an attorney. I am an attorney. And it's a funny thing. One thing I did not know before I went to law school is just how much lawyers write. Like it's a very big part of the profession is writing. Briefs, memos, orders, opinions.

[00:04:53] It's a lot of writing and a lot of reading. So I went into law school after working on the Obama campaign, his very first run for president back in 07 and meeting speech writers. And they were lawyers. And so I thought, well, this might be something interesting to me. Maybe I'll be able to learn how to write speeches and like work at the White House. I mean, I was very ill-informed about what I was getting into.

[00:05:22] I was kind of living in this like West Wing fantasy world, if you know that TV show. And coming off the Obama campaign, which was like, you know, everyone was high on life. Yeah, hope and change. Come to find out in law school, you're not working on writing speeches for potential presidents at all.

[00:05:43] Like you're writing 20 page memos about contract law that are in defense of a mega corporation. You're just learning something very different than what I thought I was learning. So in that period of time when I went to law school, I didn't really write in a way that nourished me at all. You know, I just completely lost the creative part of my voice.

[00:06:10] I had written right up to law school, you know, publishing op-eds here and there. And I had a little blog back when that was the thing and hoped I would be able to continue doing that through getting my graduate degree. But I didn't. I just didn't. I lost that part of myself. And then it came back, I would say a couple of years after I left law school, I started to feel that creative itch.

[00:06:33] That part of me that wanted to write things that were beautiful, not just argumentative, you know, things that were transporting, not just trying to convince a judge of something. That where your first book came from, Don't Let It Get You Down, Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body? Yes and no. What I learned in law school was how to analyze a problem in a way that I did not know how to do before law school.

[00:07:02] I learned how to take a problem and turn it over and over and over like a rock and look at every side and every facet of it. And that's a skill that I think suits anyone who wants to write is the ability to like look at a scene from the perspective of every character. Or take an idea that you want to write about and flip it on its side and flip it upside down and investigate, right? And like probe a question.

[00:07:29] So my first book and my second book, Good Woman, A Reckoning, to some extent flow from that skill set that I picked up in law school of how to really analyze a problem, argue any side of a problem, see any side of a problem, spot, you know, the weak parts of an argument. All of that serves any writer, I think.

[00:07:53] But neither book is a legal book, you know, both of my books are essays and they're personal and there's a narrative arc to them. And they include history and art and sex and higher power and, you know, all kinds of things that aren't really legal. What was the question of the first book? The question of the first book was what do you do when you don't fit anywhere in your culture? That was the question of the first book.

[00:08:21] I'm a mixed Black woman. My mom is white. My dad was Black. So I think of myself as Black, but there is a mixed quality to the Blackness. That's a kind of an in-between space in some ways, depending on where you are, what circle you're moving in. I grew up in a family with no money, like no money.

[00:08:46] Like when I was at my dad's house, quote unquote, there was a tarp over a hole in the ceiling and we went to the bathroom in a bucket. Like no money on that particular side of the family. But I had full rides to private schools. So it was kind of this in-between in this class and money way. I'm also someone who's been very thin and very fat multiple times in my life.

[00:09:13] So I've had the quote unquote bad body and the quote unquote good body. And it just has given me a perspective about being in a woman's body that is kind of in between. So that was the question of the first book is like, what do you do with yourself when you don't fit anywhere? How do you think about the facets of your identity that you can't map because there's nowhere on the map for them to be? So then what's the question of the second book, the one that we're here to talk about, Good Woman? Oh, yes.

[00:09:43] The question of the second book is, what is the cost of the way that women and girls are socialized to be good in this culture? And what is possible for us if we reject the directives of that socialization to be agreeable, to be quiet, to protect the feelings of men, to be proper?

[00:10:09] All these pressures that women and girls face in this culture are constricting and are confining to us in many ways. What is the cost of that over the course of a lifetime? And what kind of freedom can we reach? Can we create for ourselves if we decide I'm not going to fucking be so good all the time in every facet of my life anymore? What are your answers?

[00:10:39] Like what happens when you decide to stop being so fucking good? People maybe don't like it. Like there's the saying, when you stop people pleasing, people stop being pleased. Right? Like a lot of women, I hit my kind of late 30s, early 40s, looked around, realized I had spent my entire life really trying to be a good girl and a good woman.

[00:11:07] On the theory that if I was good enough, I'd be happy. That's kind of the bargain that little girls are enrolled into. Right? And that we sort of tend to carry out for most of our lives. If we can be pretty enough, likable enough, helpful enough, obedient enough, as daughters, as members of a religious community, as girlfriends, as friends.

[00:11:32] You know, if we can be quiet enough, like if we can just keep it to ourselves when we're really pissed about something. You know? If we can be good enough, we will end up having a sense of deep fulfillment and meaning. We will be probably chosen for marriage by a man. We will be a sort of respected, beloved member of our church community. We will be a good daughter. You know, all of this stuff is part of the bargain.

[00:12:01] If you can be good enough, you'll be happy. But as it turns out, you can focus on being good in all of these ways and reach a point in your midlife, like many women do, where it becomes clear that that bargain is bullshit. And you've been sold a bill of goods and you've been drinking snake oil.

[00:12:21] And all of this kind of silencing and being super helpful and kind of scanning the room to see who needs something and contorting yourself to fit what a man wants. All of that stuff doesn't make you happy. It makes you a good woman in this culture, but that's really different than a happy and whole and free woman. Those are two different things, you know.

[00:12:48] So there's 12 essays in this book and they cover a lot of ground from like my relationship with God to sex to art to how I mother to how I am a daughter. Because what I found was that this conditioning to be good showed up in every aspect of my life. It was like I was flooded with it. So there was no part of my life that wasn't wet from the flood of this conditioning, you know.

[00:13:13] And the cost, I think, is that in every area of your life, you are compressed and silenced. And you perhaps never get to experience yourself in a way that isn't mediated by gender hierarchy, by patriarchy, by racism. If you're not white in the particular way that patriarchy has a racist flavor, you know.

[00:13:40] If you stay in this prison of goodness, you might never, ever get to see who you are in a way that isn't contorted by sexism, patriarchy, etc. That to me seems like a massive cost, a really massive cost. And when I was writing this book, when I first started it, my daughter was five years old.

[00:14:03] And I was looking at her realizing, oh, if she lives the kind of typical trajectory, she too is going to be in her 40s before she understands that there's a whole other realm and layer of freedom that's accessible to her if she lets go of needing to be good all the time. But the thought that she might be like her life half over before she got there was sort of unbearable, you know.

[00:14:29] And it put a little fire under me to write this book. All right. So, like, you have a daughter. She's five. You have this epiphany and it lights a fire under you. What is the publishing process like for a book like this? Ah. Well, okay. So this is my second book. Yes. So second time at the rodeo.

[00:14:57] The first time I published with Simon & Schuster, I worked with Dawn Davis. She was my editor for Don't Let It Get You Down. And she's a phenomenal top of her game type of an editor. But, you know, that first time, it's like giving birth for the first time. You really have no idea what to expect. You know, you're just kind of along for the ride in this state of ignorance, really, because you've never done it before. You know?

[00:15:24] The second time around, it's like you kind of know how the sausage is made for better and worse. You know kind of what the real talk is on an industry level. And you know what to ask for and what you don't want and what you do want, maybe a little bit more.

[00:15:41] So just because it's my second time around, the process of publishing this book with HarperCollins and with Rekia Clark, my wonderful editor there, has been better, I think. Not because of anything that was wrong about the first time, but because I have done it before. So I'm more self-possessed, you know? Like I knew what questions to ask.

[00:16:09] I knew what I wanted from an editor and what wasn't helpful when somebody was editing me, you know? So I think the second time has been really phenomenal. It's been really phenomenal. I sold the book through my agent, Farley Chase, who I love and adore. And from the time I sold the book, it was maybe a year contractually before I was due to hand in the first draft. Because, you know, you sell a proposal. Well, I don't know.

[00:16:37] I guess in fiction, you sell the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For authors who debut authors, and so Seven Darn of Dupree is like my traditional debut. Yeah. I sold a whole book. But I think for authors who get like two book deals, even if you're a debut and you get a two book deal or anything after that, after your debut or whatever, that's fiction, you can sell it on spec. Okay. Like you can sell it on spec and write the proposal and like, you know, this is what this book is going to be about.

[00:17:07] Right, right. I think, well, that's what I did with both books. You sell a proposal, you know, that includes a few chapters and what you think the other chapters are going to be. And then you have about a year to deliver it. I went over a deadline by four or five months and we worked that out. The editing process was rigorous and good. I say rigorous, you know, just to be real. When your editor comes back to you and is like, this isn't working, you know, that can sting.

[00:17:37] But if you trust them and they're good, and I do trust Rekia and she's fantastic, you work your way through it. And it's easier the second time around to hear the criticisms of the work. You just developed more of a callous. You know, you're more of a professional. You're more coachable in a way because you've done it before.

[00:17:56] And then once you finalize the manuscript, you get into all the fun stuff like picking the cover and meeting your marketing team and, you know, seeing what font they want to use for the inside of the book. I mean, all of those things are exciting, you know? So this publishing process has been fantastic. It really has been wonderful. I want to go back to what you said about this time around, you were more self-possessed. Is it because of what you were writing about or because you had done it before or a mixture of both?

[00:18:26] Because like, I know like you hit, everyone says you hit 40 and it's like, fuck it. Right? Yes. And so I'm wondering if there's a correlation between like the age, the topic, and the experience that's just like made you so into yourself. And I mean that in the best of ways that it's absolutely a compliment. Thank you. I will take it as a compliment. I think it's both. I mean, writing the book was kind of an exercise in like taking my own medicine, you know?

[00:18:55] I'm writing this book, encouraging women to speak, speak up, honor your hunger, honor your curiosity, honor your appetite in every facet of life. You know, I'm not just talking about food, although that's part of it. That's certainly a place where women are taught to control and compress their appetites. But it's like, am I going to take my own medicine or not?

[00:19:17] You know, and even my editor at a couple points was like, girl, because we had meetings with the publicity and the marketing team and she felt like I was being a little quiet. And she was like, pick up your book and read it, Savala. You need to speak up in these meetings about what you want and don't want. So she had to kind of nudge me a little bit.

[00:19:36] But yeah, I think part of it was the exercise of writing the book itself made me stronger and more self-possessed and more attuned to the inner voice that was telling me I wanted something or I didn't want something, you know? And part of it was having done this whole thing before. It's like when you have your second child, you can be like, absolutely, I want the epidural or get the fucking needle away from me. Yeah.

[00:20:05] Whereas the first time you're like, I don't know, you know, whatever you think is best. But the second time it's like you have an informed opinion. So it was a combination of both. What year did you sell the proposal for Good Woman? I sold the proposal in October or September, like early fall of 2022. Okay.

[00:20:27] The reason I asked that question is because as I am experiencing and have talked to other authors who are also experiencing the same thing, the environment that a book is sold in and the environment that a book is released in are not the same. Mm-hmm.

[00:21:17] And people's appetite to learn or to explore new ideas was more abundant and welcomed under one administration than it is under this current one. Yeah. So in publishing your book now in March of 2026, how does it feel knowing the kind of sociopolitical climate that we are in versus the one where you sold it and wrote it in?

[00:21:46] Yeah. It is a mixed bag of emotions. I mean, you're right. There is like almost certainly a two to three year minimum between when you sell a proposal and when a book actually comes out. I mean, minimum two to three year, you know, and a lot can change in that time. Also, very little can change or both, you know.

[00:22:16] So because Biden was president when I sold this book and I at the time could not imagine a second Trump presidency. I mean, I could imagine it, but it was like, come on, we're not going to do that again. You know, I almost remember worrying that by the time the book came out, people were not going to be thinking about misogyny, patriarchy, misogynoir, gender hierarchy.

[00:22:42] Not that they wouldn't be issues, right, but that they wouldn't be something that the culture was thinking about. You know, we'd be preoccupied with some other thing. And that was like a bummer. It was a bummer to kind of think, oh, I may have already missed the moment a little bit, you know. But I still had to say what I had to say. The book was coming. It's like being pregnant. It's like this is happening. I am just submitting to the process.

[00:23:10] I still wrote the book, you know, and then it's going to be born into whatever it's born in. Now, as it happens, I mean, yeah, I do think the kind of data around like attention span and like, you know, reading is disheartening in general.

[00:23:26] But it's also a moment where, I mean, my sense based on the circles I move in and kind of the media I consume is that a lot of women are thinking very deeply about the way that patriarchy has impacted their lives. Even if they don't call it that, because like you move in very academic, rigorous intellectual circles. Yes, I do. I do. I do. I do. Although I love, you know, some trashy reality TV and stuff.

[00:23:56] I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not up in the clouds, you know, all the way. But like, even just like the Epstein files and just the unabashed, proud woman hating of the man in the Oval Office and the liberty he takes with treating women like shit, you know, to their faces and behind their backs means that I think there is some appetite for the questions I'm trying to excavate and talk about.

[00:24:23] But even that is kind of a mixed bag because it's like, it's wonderful to speak into a moment as it unfolds. That feels like a blessing and a gift. Do I wish that we were culturally in a different moment? Kind of. I don't wish that the world was dripping in gender hierarchy right now.

[00:24:43] It's like my first byline in Vogue was a piece I wrote about my own family history that mirrored Breonna Taylor's death. I had a great grandmother who was killed by the police, a black woman. And I wrote right around the time of Breonna Taylor's murder about the reflections between my family history and her family history in Vogue published it. And it was very exciting to be in Vogue.

[00:25:10] It was very weird to feel celebratory given the bigger context. The trauma. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So it's both. It's a mixed bag, I think, of being happy that what I have to say does feel like a meaningful offering and being sad that the offering is needed in a way. Can you read something from Good Woman so I can ask you specifically about the book and hopefully I will not break down in tears.

[00:25:38] Savala Nolan's essay collection, Good Woman, A Reckoning, is comprised of 12 essays that pick apart traditional gender roles, norms, and the overall limited binary of the hierarchical structure of gender to find the essence of wholeness as a woman. Tackling the image of God, the prevalence of rape culture, her own divorce and motherhood journey,

[00:26:04] Savala makes it abundantly clear that being good does women no favors and certainly won't make us happy. Here's Savala. This is the first chapter of Good Woman and it's the first page of the first chapter. The chapter is called Refusal. I refuse to be good. This is a matter of survival, not inclination or mood.

[00:26:34] 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. I refuse to do what I was trained to do. Instead, I refuse to be good.

[00:26:56] Instead, I refuse whatever lies beyond my social conditioning, even if I'm still looking for it, still spurring it into being. This is work of the mind, cerebral and tough. This is work of new language, new concepts, new intonations, and my thinking must expand to fit the scale of all existence.

[00:27:20] It is also body work, work that is nailed to my flesh. It is the gestating of new bones and anointing of muscle and fat. It is passing through the stomatous black opening of my own cervix to the bright field waiting on the other side in the wilderness.

[00:27:45] It is a lot to take on, but I welcome the challenge and the mystery and the darkness. It was in darkness that the universe was made. It is in darkness that each day is made new. Thank you. I'm going to ask my first question from there. Was it in darkness that you were made new? Ooh, girl! Hello!

[00:28:16] She a journalist a little bit. Oh my God! That is the best question I have ever been asked in an interview. Damn! I have chills. I'm almost like have tears in my eyes. And I have to, I mean, the answer that is coming from my gut is yes, 100%.

[00:28:42] And the darkness that I'm thinking of is the lowest point, the lowest place in my life, in my imprisonment, in trying to be good. That might sound like kind of lightweight, like, oh, trying to be good, like trying to be polite or whatever.

[00:29:06] But I'm talking about, like, staying in a marriage that was poisonous and toxic because good women don't ask too much of their men. And good women don't break the family for the sake of their children. They don't do that. And good women stay chosen. They aren't single, right?

[00:29:27] I'm talking about some very, very heavy darkness trying to be good in order to survive in a room that did not have any oxygen in it. That's what it was like for the last maybe five or six years of my marriage. Like trying to breathe in a room that had almost no oxygen. But trying to act like you were fine, you know?

[00:29:48] And probably the single most important thing that I did as a woman outside of my decision to stop dieting and trying to control the size and shape of my body through what I ate. The single most important and most difficult thing I did was leave my marriage. That was the darkness. Absolute darkness. But on the other side of that decision was absolutely renewal without question. Without question.

[00:30:18] Profound renewal. Renewal so brilliant and nourishing that it's like I wish I'd left that marriage a lot sooner. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, if I'd known what was on the other side of that toxicity, I would have left when my daughter was three months old. I wouldn't have stayed, you know, for years and years and years and years trying to make it work. So yes, I was made new in darkness.

[00:30:46] And you, my friend, should be a preacher. That's a preacher's question right there. Shit. I've said it on here so it's not anything new. But I can understand being made new in darkness. Like my publishing story literally starts with the day of my divorce. The day of my divorce was final. My agent made me an offer. Like that's not new news. And at the time that I knew my marriage was over and that I left my.

[00:31:14] You knew my marriage was over in the delivery room with my daughter. Damn. And she was three months old when I retained the attorney. Granted, I have a son who's older than her by six years. But something about those girls where you get these little baby girls and you look at them and it's like, you know what? I want your life to be different from mine. Yes. Yes.

[00:31:34] And it's something about, at least for me, and I'm assuming for you, looking at a girl child that you created, you grew from scratch. Mm-hmm. And then looking at your life and the people in it, including their father, and saying no. A hundred percent. What the urgency of the book Good Woman for me was I cannot watch my daughter live half her life in this box, you know?

[00:32:04] And as far as, like, my divorce goes, I do remember having a very specific insight of seeing my daughter when she was little. So too little to understand what she was doing. But she was maybe three or four talking to me the way her dad talked to me. Mimicking the tone and some of the phrasing that he would use. But being like, oh my God.

[00:32:29] You know, the reason she's talking to me like that is because she has heard her dad do it. And having a kind of moment of clarity there too. Still took me a little while to get to the action part, but it was a moment of clarity. It's a process. It's a process. We live in a binary world where if one thing is something, then the other thing has to be its exact opposite.

[00:32:54] Your book is called Good Woman, which implies in a binary world that there is such a thing as a bad woman. How would you recontextualize the definition of a woman who is refusing to be good in terms of what their body looks like? Who or how they choose to partner if they choose to partner, if they choose to mother, if they choose to pay for sex? Because you talk about that too, okay?

[00:33:20] What? Like all the things that you talk about in this book, instead of calling that badness, which is very reductive, what some people might do in a very surface level reading of this book. How would you recontextualize what that version of womanhood and femininity is? Yeah. What I would say is that it's wholeness. W-H-O-L-E.

[00:33:46] Wholeness is what I'm after, you know, and what I think we are after. It is getting to experience the full range of human emotion, including the things that aren't ladylike, you know, like hunger, rage, ambition. It's wholeness.

[00:34:08] It's getting to swing 360 degrees around what it means to be human and not having to limit yourself to just this narrow angle that the culture says is appropriate for you.

[00:34:25] And it's the space to be very curious about your appetite for all things, including rest, including sex, as we said, you know, all things.

[00:34:40] Solitude, partnership, to be curious about your appetite for all things and to be curious about what parts of your appetite are you coming from your whole soul, not from what patriarchy, misogyny, misogynoir says you should want.

[00:35:01] And then being able to respect that appetite the way you would respect the appetite of a lion growling, like to take it seriously. That's what I think makes a good life for women. Amen. What have been the best indulgences of your appetite and curiosity in your refusal to be good?

[00:35:30] You're going to make me talk about paying for sex. Shit. For sex. It's been something you ate, friend. But you went there and I was hoping that you would. Oh, Lord have mercy. Well, I will. Let me give this away without giving it all away. Right? Because nobody buys the cow if the milk is free. So let me tell the people what comes to mind with that question. And there's actually two things. I'll start with the sex piece.

[00:35:59] So I left my marriage. I had been with that man for about 12 years. At a certain point, however far out from him leaving the house, I was ready to have sex. Like sex is, you know, it's a human appetite for many of us. It's just a basic need. And I felt it. I was ready to have sex again. However, I had a serious problem, which is that I did not want to date at all. I mean, at all.

[00:36:27] I didn't want to spend 10 minutes at a bar, you know, trying to ask this dude a few preliminary questions before we left. I had literally nothing to pour into a man or relationship. And the reason I had literally nothing is because I had spent six or seven years emptying myself out to try to resuscitate a marriage that was at that point gone. You know, that's a problem.

[00:36:57] Like, how do you get laid? If you don't have the energy to spend five minutes getting to know someone, you know, well, one thing you could do is pay for it. That is the thing. About a third of men say they have paid for sex. I'm going to assume that number is higher than a third, right? That's how many say they've done that. I would definitely say it's higher. The same way that they say that women like reduce their body count. And so like, they're always like, they always have, if a woman says her body count is this, then double it.

[00:37:27] Exactly. Same thing for men. I talk about paying for sex. Especially when you add on like only fans and like, if you kind of expand the definition a little bit, you know, but about 30% of men say that they have like paid a sex worker for the physical act of sex. For women, it's non-existent. And it could be that it's higher, but it's like zero, you know, like 0.1% of women will say that they have done that. And I think it's because men are just simply allowed in this culture to be more forthright

[00:37:56] with their hunger for sex. And because they're allowed to trade their money for it, right? Like legally, okay, maybe they're not, but at the level of just kind of culture and what people will accept. If a guy told you, yeah, you know, I didn't one time. It's like, you're kind of like, okay, whatever, you know, but you're not going to clutch the pearls the way you might, you know, for a female. And that's because women are taught to trade their relational labor for sex and their emotional labor for sex.

[00:38:26] We're allowed to trade that. You know, we're allowed to take care of people as part of the way that we get laid. We're not allowed to give our money away. So what was I to do? The funny thing is, I realized as I was going through this thought process of like, should I try to find a sex worker and just pay somebody? Is that I actually had kind of already paid for sex in a lot of ancillary ways. Like we all do like cocktails and push up bras.

[00:38:54] And like, you know, we're all funneling money into this sexual ecosystem. It's just like, how direct can you get it? How directly can you do it? So yeah, I guess the question is, did I, and I'll say readers should read the book to find out. The other thing that I have done that I guess you could say would be an indulgence is 10

[00:39:18] years ago, I stopped dieting, meaning I stopped eating and exercising in ways that were meant to control the size, shape and weight of my body. And I was put on my first diet when I was maybe three or four. I was kind of a chubby toddler, like many toddlers, but I was in a very, very fat phobic atmosphere. And so it wasn't okay that I was chubby.

[00:39:45] And like many people who have ever been on one diet, one leads to another because intentional weight loss generally doesn't work for more than a couple of years. For most people. So my whole life was just a kind of up and down cascade of dieting that veered into subclinical eating disorder territory. And then the sort of free for alls that were in between the diets.

[00:40:10] When I finally decided to get off that roller coaster and learned about the connection between the control of women's bodies and anti-Black racism, colonialism, all of this stuff and the economic piece of it and the sort of political sedation piece of it and the way that health and thinness are not the same thing. You know, I just began to learn more. That felt indulgent is an interesting word to use in the context of like food.

[00:40:38] But I will say it felt incredibly liberating. And it still is. And I would never go back. But also there is a little bit of a cost because women often use diet culture to be legible in our culture and to bond with each other. And so when you stop doing that, you lose a certain dialect that people use to be seen and respected in our culture.

[00:41:06] But yeah, no, I would never look back because it's too good on the other side for me personally. How do you assess the value of a woman who is refusing to buy into the current value scales that place a premium on beauty, on thinness, on proximity to whiteness, on modesty, on silence

[00:41:32] or being quiet, on being demure and chaste and all of the things associated with being good. The reason they're associated with being a good woman is because they're also associated with how a woman's value and worth are determined. Yeah. It's possible that you can't. And that is part of what's scary about stepping outside of the system of goodness, right? Because it is a system of value.

[00:42:00] It is a way that you earn respect in our culture. It is a way of showing that you understand the rules of the culture, that you're quote normal, you know? If you decide you're not going to play by the rules, it's almost like saying I'm not going to use the dollar. It's like trading currency, you know?

[00:42:26] It's like, I'm going to live in the United States, but I'm going to use the euro instead of the dollar. Like there's some way that you just don't compute, you know? And- We don't have change for that. We do not have change for that. You can't pay for that with that currency, you know? So in a way, you can't assess the value. And that is both the risk and the power, right?

[00:42:55] That's the risk is that you're not as legible to people anymore. The power is that you can't be assessed in the same way. And there's freedom in being someone who just cannot fucking be assessed, you know? Stepping off the map is scary. You know, there's something very comforting about the mapped territory of a culture. But it's also quite confining.

[00:43:24] And I talk a lot about the wilderness in this process and that if you're embarking on shaking off all of these directives and sort of constricting ideas about what a good woman is, you are stepping into the wilderness and there's a cost to that, but there's also great value to that. Especially if you're in a society that's kind of sick, you know? Like, do you want to be of great value to a sick society?

[00:43:53] And when it comes to gender, I believe our society is quite sick. It's quite ill. So let's stay in the wilderness for a little while. Jesus went in the wilderness. Yes, he did. The Israelites went in the wilderness and it was a time of growth and growing pains. Your first chapter after refusal is about Mother God. It's called Mother Superior. Why is God a woman?

[00:44:20] Well, let me start by saying, I don't know what God is. Okay. You know what I mean? It's like my personal belief about God, emphasis on personal, because we all have our own ways of thinking about God, is that at God's essence, there are metaphors for how we talk about God. And there's ways that we imagine God. And in this culture, we imagine God as a father and we talk about God as a father.

[00:44:49] And when I say this culture, I mean Judeo-Christian, you know, the West America of the current era. And all Abrahamic religions. Yes. Yes, indeed. But I was taught to imagine that God was my father and to think of God's love as fatherly. I was also taught to imagine God's love as infallible, constant, dependable, like capital D

[00:45:16] dependable, round the clock care, that God's love for me was selfless. Right? So what I'm trying to imagine is a father who loves me in this selfless, around the clock, completely dependable way. Okay. That's what I'm being told to understand and to worship and to feel in my life. Well, I could never feel it all the way. You know, my granddad is a minister.

[00:45:42] It's not like I didn't have any access points to try and like have the feeling. There was just always a speed bump, like a pebble in my shoe on my walk with God. I just was never quite comfortable with this idea. And I could not figure out why. I could not figure out what the problem was until I became a mother. And when I had my daughter, I began to experience what it actually means to mother and the around

[00:46:09] the clock dependable up all night with the child that has the fever throwing up. I mean, round the clock care. And I began to see that all the mothers I knew who had, you know, young children were doing that and none of the fathers were. So it was like this moment of everything breaking, but also snapping into place at the same time. Cause it was like, oh, wait a minute. God's love.

[00:46:37] It can't be fatherly and utterly dependable at the same time around the clock. Well, it just can't, it just can't. That's not the right metaphor. You know, the right metaphor. If God loves me around the clock, that's a mom. That is a mother. That is a motherly kind of love. And once I got that, once I understood, oh, that was the problem.

[00:47:05] The problem was I was being told to imagine God as a father behaving in a way that fathers don't behave. You know, there's a glitch. Once I was able to undo that glitch through my experience of motherhood, it completely transformed my sense of my relationship with my creator. It became much more easeful, much more honest, much more genuine to me.

[00:47:29] So yeah, that is why I think motherhood is really the only set of human behaviors through which we can glimpse what we say God is. And that's why I believe motherhood is the right metaphor for thinking about God. It is important for me to note that like mothering is often something women do for their children that they gave birth to. But that's not the only way to mother.

[00:47:58] Motherhood and mothering, it's a quality of care. It's a level of attunement. It's a level of devotion more than it's like a set of biological parts. It's, you know, the broader point I'm making is about motherhood kind of as a verb. What do you want women? And I mean that in the most expansive version of the word. What do you want women to take from your book?

[00:48:21] What I hope women take from good woman is a sense of being opened and a sense of curiosity about who they might be, what they might want, if they could tap into it without the fog of gender hierarchy obscuring their vision, right? It's like the night sky.

[00:48:48] If you live in a city and you look at the night sky, it's beautiful. It's a wonderful thing. But it's no comparison to the night sky when you're in the middle of nowhere. And you get to see the stars without the light pollution and the smog. You know, I want women to leave this book curious about their inner sky without the fog

[00:49:12] and the pollution of patriarchy standing between them and who they are. That's what I want. All right. I want to move to a speed round in the game before I let you go for the afternoon. What is your favorite book? It has to be Beloved because what book could I honestly say is better than Beloved? Like the language is so transcendent. The skill set is so deep. It just, you know, it has to be Beloved.

[00:49:40] So I think I know the answer to this question, but who is your favorite author? Toni Morrison. Okay. Because who the fuck else could I say? Author who is still on this side with us in the earthly realm? Margot Jefferson. Who is your favorite artist in the medium? Prince. Because Prince takes you everywhere. Sacred. Profane.

[00:50:07] Wherever you want to go, Prince can take you there in like three beats. You know? One chord. What do you think is the best book to movie or book to series adaptation? Ooh, I really want to see the seven daughters of Dupree. Me too. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to answer it. The future. In the future tense. Because think about the cast. I have. I have.

[00:50:36] I have documents. With random celebrities headshots. Maybe not so random. Yes. If money were no object, where would you go? What would you do? And where would you live? I would go to a very tropical beach for about six months and not pick up my phone, not do anything for anyone. I don't know where my child would be. I guess she'd be with her dad because I'm not doing anything for anyone.

[00:51:07] And just letting the ocean waves and the sun restore me. I think I'd live right where I live right now. I'd keep it simple. I'd buy my mom a house with no stairs because she's getting old and she needs something without stairs. But I would just stay right where I am. My little house in the bay. Name three things on your bucket list. I want to take my daughter to Italy. I used to live in Italy for a few years. Yes, you did. That's one thing. Yes.

[00:51:35] I want to take my daughter, I think, to Ghana. That's also on my bucket list. The third thing on my bucket list is to write a novel. Come on over. I'm trying. I don't know how, but you know, that's definitely, definitely bucket list. All right. What brings you joy? Oh, two things pop into my mind.

[00:51:58] One is the knowledge and cultivating the knowledge that there's nothing I can do to improve my body. Full stop. Period. That like the work of the universe does not need my touch-ups. It's good. The second thing that brings me a lot of joy is smoking weed, which I do like as a political

[00:52:22] act as a Black woman, and I also do as just because it's fun and fun is good. You know what I love about smoking weed? And for the record, I do it when my daughter is with her dad. It is very good for me as a working mom to separate myself from like industry clock time. And you know, when you're stoned, it's like, was that an hour? Was that a minute? I don't know.

[00:52:52] I'm just enjoying this music, you know? That is really actually profoundly healing for me as someone who being a mom and having a full-time job and like part-time jobs and an aging parent who needs care to just get myself off the clock and off the kind of productive hamster wheel of my life. So yeah, that gives me a lot of joy too. What brings you peace?

[00:53:19] A good night's sleep and prayer. I like to pray as I'm falling asleep and it settles me right down. I usually just do the Lord's Prayer, but I really think about each word and I get different things on different nights. You know, I like to meditate and see what I learn from each word. And that brings me a sense of really deep peace. So our game is called Rewriting the Classics. Classic is however you define it.

[00:53:49] I think I already know your answer to the first question, but we're going to go here anyway. What's one book you wish you would have written? Oh, come on. Beloved. I just pound for pound, word for word. I just don't think you can top Beloved. Name one book where you want to change the ending and how would you do it? I would make the ending of the novel Martyr less ambiguous.

[00:54:15] And I do respect to the writer, to the editor, to the process, do respect to the value of ambiguity. And I don't want to give any spoilers away. But there is a profound uncertainty at the end of the book that obviously was a choice and has meaning. And I respect that. But I personally wanted to know whether we were turning left or right. And it kind of leaves you right at the crossroads. All right.

[00:54:45] And my messy question. Name a book that you think is overrated or overtaught, Professor. And why? And you can do dead people. Do not make that face. Girl, I'm trying to sell books out here. So name dead people. All right. I'm going to have to go with A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Yeah. You know, which is like a very common high school read.

[00:55:14] It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. You know what? I just, I, here's what I'm going to say about that book. I get it. I get why it's taught. But I think you can get the kind of tons of characters, deep sense of place, multiple arcs of a story within a larger arc of a story, historically resonant.

[00:55:38] I think you can get all those things without yet another choice from the white male songbook. So that's what I'll say there. And so my final question for you today, when you are dead and gone and among the ancestors, what would you like someone to write about the legacy of words and work that you left behind? I'm trying to balance my grandiosity with the fact that I think humility is a good value.

[00:56:05] I would like people to consider my work, you know, whatever that body of work is, required reading. You know, I'd like it to be regarded in that way, that I made a lasting contribution to this world. Big thank you to Savala Nolan for being here today on Black & Published. You can follow Savala on the socials at Savala Nolan on Instagram and threads.

[00:56:31] And make sure you check out Good Woman, A Reckoning, out now from Mariner Books. You can get a copy of the Essay Collection from Mahogany Books and get 10% off your first purchase using code BLACKPUB at checkout. That's B-L-K-P-U-B. That's our show for the week. If you like this episode and want more Black & Published, head to our Instagram or YouTube pages.

[00:56:58] They're at Black & Published, and that's B-L-K-& Published. There, I've posted a bonus clip from my interview with Savala about the extra tax Black writers pay when publishing work that speaks to the current sociopolitical moment. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I'll holler at y'all next week when our guest will be Shayla Sabree, author of the essay collection, Turn Where?

[00:57:29] A Geography of Home. Where as a Black American will I actually feel like I belong? This is the country that frames my understanding of Blackness, that frames my understanding of what it means to be a queer cisgender woman with disabilities. Like this, my frame of reference is rooted here. And so, no, I don't feel like I belong. But have I ever? That's next week on Black & Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace.

[00:58:04] What's going on, family? This is Derek Young. And Ramonda Young. Owners of both Mahogany Books and the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. We really want to thank each and every one of you for listening to this episode. And if you enjoyed what you just heard, drop us a review and rate us on whatever platform you download podcasts on. We truly appreciate each and every one of you for supporting us and making us your go-to for Black books. And we look forward to connecting with you all sometime in the future. Thank you again, fam. And always remember, Black books matter.