“ I think whole is always better than good”:
Savala Nolan on her career as an essayist and professor
April 23, 2026
André Derain, “Bords de rivière” (c. 1904)
You can listen to this interview on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
With her latest book, Savala has accomplished the rare feat of building on a widely celebrated first book with a second book that—already, in its first month post-publication—is on track to be equally if not more so. (Ms. Magazine, for example, has proclaimed it a most anticipated feminist book of 2026.)
The 12 timely essays of Good Woman: A Reckoning offer a striking blend of cultural commentary, reporting, and memoir across topics like the surge in GLP-1 messaging that’s reshaping expectations around our bodies; the ways that racism amplifies misogyny; how women have been socialized to be agreeable and ‘good’; and why compliance didn’t bring her wholeness, happiness, or safety. It was a joy, when we spoke, to get to learn more about this collection alongside the experiences that have shaped her career.
Jana M. Perkins, PhD
Host, Women of Letters
P.S. I am so excited to be able to gift two copies of Savala’s latest amazing book, Good Woman. Head over to our Substack to enter to receive your copy. 📚
Savala Nolan is an essayist and professor who writes about race, bodies, and gender. She helped create 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.
How did your childhood shape your ideas about what work looked like and what was possible for you?
Savala Nolan: First, I want to say thank you for having me on and bringing me into your community, the Women of Letters community. It’s really a delight to have this conversation with you today.
My childhood shaped my ideas about what work looked like and what was possible for me in interesting ways. This is not a question I’ve ever been asked before, so I appreciate the opportunity to think about it. The first thing that came to mind is that I was raised by a single mother—like a truly single mother, not a co-parenting mother, but one who really did not have any financial or practical help from my dad or from my sibling’s dad. So I observed her working a lot, and I think that gave me a sense that work was inevitable.
I never imagined for myself a life in which I wasn’t working, because I just didn’t have that modelled for me. And I suppose now reflecting back, if I had grown up in a way or an environment in which I didn’t observe my mom working, I might have had a really different relationship to my own professional ambitions for better and worse. So it’s interesting to think about, but I certainly always understood work to be a non-negotiable. I think that was fundamentally a good thing, right? I think it fundamentally helped me imagine myself out in the world doing interesting things. My mom was a licensed clinical social worker, and so she had really interesting work and it enabled me to imagine myself out in the world doing interesting and helpful work.
Another aspect, though, of my childhood that was not so positive, and that impacted what I imagined was possible for me, was growing up in an environment that was quite thick with anti-Black racism and also fatphobia and anti-fatness. I happen to be a fat woman, although I have been all kinds of weights over the course of my life. And I was a chubby child, and I’m also a mixed Black woman: my mom is white, my dad is Black—was Black, he’s deceased. So I had these two sort of highly visible aspects of myself, of my body being non-white, being Black, and being chubby, that subjected me to quite a bit of marginalization kind of on the lighter end, and emotional abuse from the culture and from my community on the more intense end.
Of course, when people are marginalized and mistreated, it often shrinks what they think is possible for themselves. The aperture of what is possible in your life tends to get smaller, or seem smaller, until you are in a different environment, or until you find little ways to push the aperture open. So from that perspective, I think that I was raised to view myself as small and inferior and fundamentally wrong in some inescapable way, because it was rooted in my body and our bodies are pretty inescapable. Breaking out of that is an ongoing process.
Fast-forward to today. How did the path to what you’re doing now unfold?
Savala Nolan: I have sort of two professional identities. The first is as a lawyer. I am a member of the California Bar. I don’t practice law anymore; I work at a law school—you know, much more of an educator—but I am a lawyer. And then my second identity is as a writer. Of course, they kind of overlap, but they’re two different hats.
My path to becoming a lawyer was just incredibly unexpected. The long and short of it is that I was a volunteer during Barack Obama’s first run for the presidency, back in 2007—feels like a millennia ago. But in that process of being a volunteer, I just kept meeting more and more interesting, fascinating, hardworking, very sharp-thinking people, and a lot of them had gone to law school. So I decided to go to law school.
As far as being a writer goes—it’s funny, because a lot of what lawyers do is write. I don’t know if that’s necessarily appreciated outside the profession, but a massive amount of paper and ink are used by the legal profession, and the good lawyers of the world are also great writers. So it’s not wholly separate. But the writing that I do is not really legal writing; it’s much more for a lay audience. And that is something I have done, golly—for pretty much as long as I can remember.
I think I was probably nine or ten when I first started writing these little sort of intense, richly imagined paragraphs about random characters that would pop into my head. I remember there was a girl named Maybelline, who lived in Little Italy in New York in the 1930s. And, you know, I was ten, so who knows how accurate my thoughts about this character and her environment were. But I would fall into these scenes in my own mind and write about them, and that has really continued through my whole life.
In some ways, being a lawyer really sharpened my writing. But, thankfully, I never lost the kind of rich, creative aspect of it too. At a certain point—oh, maybe six or seven years ago—a friend who I knew professionally read some of my personal writing and said, “Hey, this is really good. Let me introduce you to my agent.” And I met the agent, and he agreed, and the rest flowed from there.
Jana M. Perkins: What was it that made you not want to practice law?
Savala Nolan: I practiced law for maybe three or four years after law school. I was a corporate litigator in San Francisco, with a really fantastic firm, and then I also did a little bit of civil rights work, you might say on the side.
Ultimately, I just found the professional lifestyle to be really at odds with my artistic soul. I think, at my core, I’m an artist, and artists need a certain amount of freedom and vast acreage in which to roam around mentally and internally. The level of structure and the rigours of existing as a practicing lawyer in a firm—they just didn’t work for me. The same way someone who’s, like, a phenomenal tennis player, when they’re on the basketball court it’s like, “This just isn’t working.” It was just a bad fit in some constitutional way.
I enjoyed a lot about practicing law: I had great colleagues, I loved deposing witnesses—that was always really fun—I loved the writing. But, at the end of the day, I’m just more of a creative, I think, than really works in the professional, active practice of law.
How do you get your work in each day? What does that process look like, and what are the conditions that help you perform at your best?
Savala Nolan: Well, I’ll tell you this: as a working mom, it is really difficult to also write. Maybe to do any kind of creative endeavour, but certainly to write. I said earlier that writers need kind of wide open spaces, and expanses of time, and vast, undeveloped acreage internally in which to roam, and time, time, time, time—lots and lots of time, including time when you’re not writing. It might look like you’re kind of doing nothing, but actually it’s part of the creative process.
It’s like when dough is rising. You’re not really doing anything, but it’s an essential part of the process to let dough sit there and rise. I think something really similar happens with writers: there’s times when the material has to kind of proof, and so you’re not working it, but it’s being worked on nevertheless. That is completely at odds with motherhood, first of all, which is a full-on onslaught, especially when your kids are younger. It’s like drinking water from a fire hose. And then if you throw into that a 9-to-5-y job, finding the conditions, creating the conditions that really deeply support work as a writer are very, very difficult.
I’m lucky that I’m in academia, so depending on what I’m working on I can sometimes do it during my workday to a degree. I’m very lucky, in my instance, that I co-parent, so I have a couple of days a week when I have a little more space in my schedule. I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to take advantage of a couple residencies, where you have two or three or even more weeks of just solitude to work. I mean, those are so incredible. If there’s writers listening who have never tried to avail themselves of the opportunity of a residency, I highly recommend it. So it’s a little bit of a patchwork, in terms of finding that space, and, honestly, most of the time, I just don’t have enough. I have enough to get the work done, but I don’t have as much as I would like or love.
I think also one of the very important things that you learn as you become more seasoned, as a creative person—and I’m certainly not the first person to articulate this—is that inspiration is just kind of not your friend. There’s a romantic idea of inspiration, but if you wait around to be inspired, you could be waiting for like 50 years, right? Habit is much more powerful than inspiration, and so I just don’t wait to be inspired. I don’t wait for those moments of like, “Aha!” You just have to work.
Who is it? There’s somebody—I can’t remember his name—who says inspiration is for amateurs, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I am eternally trying to answer your question—like, how do I create the conditions to write, when I have a life that does not create the conditions to write? It’s a bit of a patchwork, as I said, and it’s a lot of just, frankly, discipline. You just can’t wait to be inspired; you have to seize the moments as they present themselves to you, even if you’re not inspired. Ursula K. Le Guin said that inspiration usually comes during work, not before it, and I think that that is really true.
Jana M. Perkins: What did that look like when it came to the broader question of putting together an essay collection? Were there sort of some cornerstone pieces that you built everything else around, or?
Savala Nolan: Putting together an essay collection is a really interesting process, because each essay has to stand on its own, but it also has to connect with the other pieces. So you have to both craft pieces that are interesting in and of themselves, and that can be read without reading anything else, and the reader gets something from them. But you also need them to all kind of work in tandem. I think of them as like spokes on a wheel: each spoke is separate, but they’re all part of the wheel.
With this particular collection, very early on, I started with the three or four essays that I had sent to my agent, and that became part of the book proposal. Those covered very specific ideas, right? One kind of covered marriage more broadly, one covered sort of sexuality and racism, one covered how being socialized to be good and pleasing impacted my art and the art of other women. So I had a few spokes of the wheel. And then as part of the process of selling the book and having initial conversations with an editor, I sketched out some of the other things that I thought might become the other spokes.
Like, well, I definitely want to talk about religion—that’s a spoke. I want to say something about dieting and body control—that’s a spoke. I want to say something about motherhood and pregnancy—that’s a spoke. You map out what you think the spokes of the wheel are going to be ahead of time, and then you start getting into the material and you realize, “Oh, you know what? This spoke doesn’t work, but this is how I’m gonna replace it.” And as long as you’re making sure that each piece stands individually, while also connecting to the bigger wheel, and the hub—which is this idea of what it means to be a good woman, and how to not be a good woman—what you end up with is a cohesive collection.
That’s kind of the particular work of when you’re doing a book of essays. I’m sure it’s a little different if you’re writing a straight memoir or a novel, but there’s a tension with essays: you can’t have every essay talk about your trip to San Diego, but they do all have to have, like, San Diego in common. You have to figure out how to thread that needle with a collection of essays. And it just takes time. It just takes writing; you just have to write the work and see what’s working and what’s not working. It takes editing, which means space to put the work away, and let it kind of cool down after it’s come out of the oven of your mind. And then you go back and look at it. You have a trusted reader look at it. You figure out where it’s too repetitive, which pieces feel like, “But how does this connect to the whole?”
It’s an iterative process that, in my experience, takes at least a couple years to get it all finally gelled where everything is talking to each other. But there’s a harmony, right? Beautiful chords are being played by the book, so there’s no dissonance, but not everyone is singing the same note.
Tell us about a time when you had to take a big risk in order to move forward. What did that experience teach you about how to navigate difficult circumstances?
Savala Nolan: The first thing that comes to my mind is choosing to end my marriage. That was a very, very difficult decision, or maybe series of decisions is the more accurate way to put it. And it felt like a massive risk on a lot of levels.
It felt like a risk as a mom, because I of course worried about my daughter’s wellbeing, although there is obviously a risk to children who grow up with two unhappy parents in the same house. But I worried about the risk to her of ‘breaking up the family.’ I worried about who I would be without the imprimatur and social gilding that comes with the identity of ‘wife.’ I worried about having income disappear and sort of very practical things, like the check engine light coming on, which is something my ex-husband dealt with. So there were risks from the very mundane—like, “Oh, gosh: who’s going to put up the Christmas lights?”—to the incredibly profound, like, “How do I make sure my daughter is okay?”
What I learned is that—well, a few things. One, you can’t rush the process, meaning you can’t rush your own decision making. You’re not ready to make a decision until you’re ready to make it. You can plant a seed in a pot of soil and water it and give it sun; you can’t rush how quickly it grows. It just simply takes the time it takes to complete the different phases of its cycle, and I think that is often true internally. When you talk to women—well, the data is really interesting. Something like 75 or 80% of [divorces] are initiated by women. Here’s the interesting part: who have been thinking about it for five-to-seven years. So you can’t rush things in that way. They just have to unfold in their own time. That was an important lesson.
The other thing I learned, and which there’s a whole essay about in the book, is how deep my willingness was to silence myself for the sake of a relationship, meaning my relationship with my ex-husband. I just—it was so important to me, for so long, to be a wife, and to have the type of family that this culture honours. There’s many types of family, but there’s really only one that our culture honours. I just shrank, and shrank, and shrank, and shrank. I let my voice become quieter and quieter and quieter until I finally realized, “Oh, I’m dying. I’m dying here. I’m shrivelling up and drying out. There’s not that much green left in this plant that is my life, and I have to get out.”
So that was intense, to realize how important it was to me to be in this marriage with a man: so important that I was willing to risk my own life. Not in a literal sense—I was never in danger of ending my life, or of him ending it. That’s gotta be crystal clear. But of losing my life force, right? Losing my vitality, in a way that was gravely serious. Those are two things that I learned from having to take the risk of leaving my marriage.
Jana M. Perkins: And that’s exactly what we’re socialized to do from such a young age. I hear that from so many women.
Savala Nolan: I’m sure you do. And I hear it from so many women, too.
I mean, the fascinating thing is the silence that we have been taught to embrace—and then do embrace, in order to protect the relationship, and to sometimes protect the man—is truly staggering. There were so many things in my marriage that I did not tell my friends and family about because I was embarrassed that this is what my marriage was like, and that I accepted it. I knew if my friends and family found out, they would be shocked. And, again, I’m not talking about physical abuse. But what’s interesting to me is how many friends, other women, colleagues, people who aren’t friends but who I have some opportunity to hear from about their life through their writing or whatever, reveal the same thing: that they kept so many secrets. They silenced themselves, and were silenced by social pressure, and shrank and shrank and shrank, because that’s what they were taught to do. They just weren’t given any other way to show up.
It’s a huge, huge risk to step outside the norms of a gender role and socialization. And it can be existentially frightening, very frightening. But it sure is not uncommon. I believe that you hear it, and I hear it all the time, too.
Jana M. Perkins: Exactly. We were taught to prioritize having a relationship, being in a relationship, but we were never taught to—or at least I wasn’t, certainly—never taught to prioritize ourselves in that relationship, or our own experience of it.
Savala Nolan: That’s right. Quite the contrary. I mean, we’re taught to sacrifice, really, right? That is kind of the archetype that our culture celebrates, is the mother who sacrifices everything for the wellness of her children and her family. That’s what we celebrate.
In this one particular essay about the end of my marriage, I come to realize also that—well, how do I say this? I had viewed the end of my marriage as a personal failure, that I couldn’t keep it together. But what I came to realize is that the failure was actually in gender roles more than anything: that I was so, so crunched into nothingness in that relationship by gender roles that women have. But also my ex-husband, too. The only template he was given for how to show up as a man was not very helpful to him, either, and we sort of both fell victim to that in our own way. So I think that it’s not to say it’s equal, because men and women are socialized very differently and allocated power very differently. But I do want to acknowledge that, men: the hammer comes down on them, too, in its own ways that can be harmful and limiting. Not just for them, but also for their families.
Jana M. Perkins: Yeah. The patriarchy harms us all.
Savala Nolan: Exactly. In a nutshell.
How has your definition of success evolved over time?
Savala Nolan: It’s funny—I read some of my journals from my twenties the other day. I keep them downstairs in the garage, and was down there piddling around for holiday decorations, and came across the box. And, boy: I talk a lot about being thin and rich and married. That was the vision: skinny, wealthy, and chosen by a man, and kind of tucked under his wing. That was success. And it’s no wonder, right? That is the definition of success in like every Disney movie I ever saw as a kid. In The Little Mermaid, it’s like, “Oh, she literally loses her voice and becomes someone else to get the guy.” And that’s success. So, of course, I have no anger at myself for my desires in my twenties. But, boy, that’s not true anymore.
I think success for me, on a personal level, is having my kid be okay. Like, be pretty good. Life is challenging, nobody’s perfect, but if she’s doing pretty good then I can sleep well at night. Another thing that is success for me is—how do I say this? Not meddling with my body is a form of success for me, and particularly around weight. One thing that people learn in the kind of body liberation, anti-diet space, is that what our body weighs is really none of our business. Our job is to take care of ourselves in weight-neutral ways as best we can, and then our body will weigh whatever it weighs. It’s up to our body to figure that out. So living into that is success for me.
And then professionally, as a writer, success for me is time to work. It’s tempting to think of success as book sales, or how many people know my name, or that type of thing. But that’s completely out of my hands, and I think it’s quite risky to put your definition of success into someone else’s hands entirely. So I think of success as having time to write, and I learned that from an art critic named Jerry Saltz. He was at The New York Times for a long time, and New York Magazine now. His definition of success for artists is time to work: if you have time to work, then everything else is gravy. And that works for me.
What’s been an important part of your journey that others often miss?
Savala Nolan: I would say how critical it was for me to stop dieting, or really engage in any kind of exercise or eating that was tied to the size, shape, and weight of my body. Some people don’t use the word ‘dieting,’ but ultimately the way that they are eating or exercising is about controlling the size, shape, or weight of their body.
Photo credit: Senay Inanici
The amount of time, money, energy, mental real estate that that took up in my life was just astronomical beyond measure. And I did manage to be creative and productive even as I was constantly dealing with this thrum of body shame and devoting myself to try to become thinner and smaller and ‘prettier.’ But letting go of that—which, of course, is a process; you kind of have to let go over and over, especially at the beginning—freed up that astronomical energy and mental real estate. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have written two books if…