Thick: And Other Essays

Tressie McMillan Cottom, the “rigorous, incisive, empathetic, and witty” (Roxane Gay) writer, professor, and author of Lower Ed, now 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. The latest foray into the ever-expanding genre of the feminist essay, 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 Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Lindy West, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a space 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, mining for meaning in places many of us miss and revealing precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.