On Being Good
Last night my husband was disappointed about a hot dog. He wanted a braught.
Not metaphorically. An actual hot dog — the wrong kind, because I’d gone to the store and grabbed a veggie one and we had some hot dogs. He didn’t make a scene. He was just quietly, visibly disappointed. And something in me lit on fire. I am not good at letting his disappointments not affect me.
Because he had taken a nap. He deserved a nap. We all do.
I stood in the kitchen doing the math that women have been doing forever — the meal planning, the grocery run, while doing laundry, the pickups, the social planning, the bedtime routine, all of it running parallel to a full time job — and I thought: I have spent my whole life trying to be good. And this is what it looks like.
I’ve known Savala Nolan for a few years, since her first book Don’t Let It Get You Down stopped me cold. So when Good Woman came out — one of Ms. Magazine’s most anticipated books of 2026 — I couldn’t get my hands on it fast enough.
Savala is a social justice lawyer, a mother, a writer, and about a thousand other things. And in Good Woman she asks the question I didn’t know I’d been waiting for someone to ask out loud: what does it actually mean to be good? Not good in the abstract — good as a woman. Good as a daughter, a partner, a mother. Good in the way we were all quietly handed a blueprint for and told to follow without question.
Her argument is not gentle. We have been sold a lie. The lie is that goodness — the performing of it, the exhausting maintenance of it — will make our lives good in return. That if we are pretty enough, helpful enough, quiet enough, we will be rewarded with happiness, contentment, safety. That the hot dog will be appreciated.
It won’t. It never was going to be.
