Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 224 pages
Audiobook Length: 4 hours and 50 minutes
First Published: 2019
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Publisher’s Description
Smart, humorous, and strikingly original thoughts on race, beauty, money, and more—by one of today’s most intrepid public intellectuals
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.
Quotes from Thick
Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history.
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that ugly is as ugly does. Both are lies. Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty. Knowing the difference is part of getting free.
Black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends.
Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender.
About Tressie McMillan Cottom
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of the books Lower Ed and Thick. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia. Visit the author’s website →
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