GOOD WOMAN

A defiant woman speaks out.

Director of the social justice program at the UC Berkeley School of Law, Nolan gathers 12 sharp, angry essays on what it feels like to be a Black woman “in a world that hates women and that seeks to compress us into domestic and sexual service no matter what else we achieve or might want.” As the daughter of a white mother and a Black and Mexican father, Nolan feels frustrated that her experiences have been interpreted by a host of people “consciously or unconsciously trapped in the pestilent muck of misgynoir.” These include “the police, tax collectors, social workers, landlords, bankers, trial courts, psychologists, sociologists,” and even artists, like Picasso, whose evocation of African tribal masks in his paintings “read as primitive and beastly.” Being Black intensifies widespread misogyny: Men, she notes, have been the template for everything from CPR dummies to the height that paintings are hung in museums. When Apple launched its AI, “Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack,” Nolan asserts, “but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’” Misogyny informs a woman’s desirability, which led Nolan to decades of dieting and disordered eating, modeled by her weight-conscious mother. “[It] took me half my life,” she admits, “to see that a thin me would be no improvement upon a fat me.” As a mother of a daughter, she aims to break that cycle: “I want my child to have choices. And to have true choices in her body, she can’t be afraid of it, or hate it, or be brainwashed into controlling its every urge.” Race, marriage, sexual desire, and motherhood recur as themes in impassioned essays on freedom, disillusionment, and yearnings.

A raw, forthright memoir.