Get your first book for just $5.

Join today!

We’ll make this quick.

First, enter your email. Then choose your move.

By pressing "Pick a book now" or "Pick a book later", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Get your first book for just $5.

Join today!
undefined

You did it!

Your account is now up to date.

get the appget the app

Our app is where it’s at.

Unlock our Reading Challenge, earn prizes, and get notified of new books on our app.

Our app is where it’s at.

Unlock our Reading Challenge, earn prizes, and get notified of new books on our app.

get the ios appget the android app

Already have the app? Explore here.

get the ios appget the android app
Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Essays

Thick

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Excellent choice

Just enter your email to add this book to your box.

By pressing "Add to box", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Quick take

Insightful perspectives on blackness, body image, and BBQ Becky.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Feminist

    Feminist

  • Illustrated icon, Social_Issues

    Social issues

  • Illustrated icon, Critically_Acclaimed

    Critically acclaimed

  • Illustrated icon, Snarky

    Snarky

Synopsis

Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom—and of course Black Twitter snark—about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. In form, and in substance.

This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.

McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Thick.

Thick

I was pregnant at thirty. Divorced at thirty-one. Lost at thirty-two. How else would I have ended up in a place called Rudean’s? Rudean’s was an institution. It sat in a strip mall on a street, Beatties Ford Road, that had once been the heart of the new black middle class in Charlotte, North Carolina. As went the fortunes of black homeownership, entrepreneurship, wealth creation, citizenship, and health, so went Beatties Ford Road.

Rudean’s held on. So did Rudean. The establishment was named for its owner even though it perhaps would have sounded better were it not. But I do not tell old black people nothing. It is rude. What wasn’t rude was Rudean’s reputation. You grew up on jokes about the old players and aging Tressie McMillan Cottomfly girls living out their glory days at Rudean’s, the nightclub that also sold fried fish plates and chicken wings. You had to get there early because parking was slim pickings. And there were only maybe a dozen or so tables pressed up against a long wall on the empty side of the room. The other wall had the bar, wrapped in tufted pleather and papered with liquor ads featuring smiling, glorious black people living the high life.

Create a free account!

Sign up to see book details, our quick takes, and more.

By pressing "Sign up", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Why I love it

Too often, I’m led to believe that I don’t belong anywhere. I don’t quite fit the contours of our society: I’m at an age that firmly situates me between boomer and millennial. I don’t fit the projected expectations of what a woman of my size and shade should be. American society is selective when choosing to recognize the fullness of my humanity—and too often, it chooses to deem my existence a problem.

“Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems,” writes McMillan Cottom in Thick. “We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome.” McMillan Cottom situates her personal stories as the lens to delve deeper into social constructions that perpetuate inequities and harm. In these eight essays covering her own pregnancy, beauty, culture of competence, and black girlhood, as well as eviscerating critiques of whiteness in American life, Thick centers black women experiences and asserts black women wisdom.

Thick is incisive and heady, cerebral and “black-black,” layered in its storytelling and sharp in its rigor. As a sociologist, she is able to strip away social conventions to interrogate how limiting we view black women. McMillan Cottom moves from the finite to the expansive, exacting in her deconstructions of race, class, and gender work in tandem with the sprawling realities that shape policy that governs black bodies in the public square. She creates space for a layered, complex, nuanced black body, black woman intellectual and social critic, wide-eyed and aware, visible. McMillan Cottom is a stylist and intellectual who defies category and genre, and this collection captures these multitudes that dwell within her.

Member ratings (1,685)

Essays
Calypso
Trick Mirror
Thick
Essays
View all
Calypso
Trick Mirror
Thick