Staff Pick
Straddling academic expertise and personal memoir, Cottom's sociology-inflected essays are a sucker punch that forgo abstract platitudes in favor of embodied intersectionality. Ranging in subject matter from money and beauty to the elasticity of whiteness, these stories coalesce as a reminder to resist individualist mythologies and instead look toward a future where we must all work together collectively if we're going to survive. Words for your head and your gut. Recommended By SitaraG, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award
As featured by The Daily Show, NPR, PBS, CBC, Time, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly, Well-Read Black Girl, and Chris Hayes, "incisive, witty, and provocative essays" (Publishers Weekly) by one of the "most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time" (Rebecca Traister)
"Thick is sure to become a classic." The New York Times Book Review
In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom — award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed — is unapologetically "thick" deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore).
This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies.
Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).
Review
"To say this collection is transgressive, provocative, and brilliant is simply to tell you the truth. Thick is a necessary work and a reminder that Tressie McMillan Cottom is one of the finest public intellectuals writing today."
Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist
Review
"This book is essential for anyone who wants to think deeply about race, feminism, and culture."
BookRiot
Review
"Cottom's intersectionality is merely the work of a writer seeing the world clearly and deeply, and connecting the dots in fresh and revealing ways." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Thick is sure to become a classic of black intellectualism, one that ought to be read not only in African-American and gender studies departments across the country, although its lens is irrefutably and irresistibly black and feminist. It should be required reading for anyone interested in making 'trust black women' more than a hollow social media mantra."
The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Lower Ed and Thick (The New Press). Her work has been featured by the The Daily Show, the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS, NPR, Fresh Air, and The Atlantic, among others. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.