Thick

And Other Essays

By: Tressie McMillan Cottom

Narrated by: Tressie McMillan Cottom

Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

Recommended by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, Book Riot, BuzzFeed, Bust, LitHub, The Millions, HelloGiggles, and UrbanDaddy

“The author you need to read now.” (Chicago Tribune)

“To say this collection is transgressive, provocative, and brilliant is simply to tell you the truth.” (Roxane Gay, author of Hunger and Bad Feminist)

Smart, humorous, and strikingly original essays by one of “America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time.” (Rebecca Traister)

In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society.

Ideas and identity fuse effortlessly in this vibrant collection that on bookshelves is just as at home alongside Rebecca Solnit and bell hooks as it is beside Jeff Chang and Janet Mock. It also fills an important void on those very shelves: a modern Black American feminist voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms as she covers everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. Thick speaks fearlessly to a range of topics and is far more genre-bending than a typical compendium of personal essays.

An intrepid intellectual force hailed by the likes of Trevor Noah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Oprah, Tressie McMillan Cottom is “among America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time” (Rebecca Traister). This stunning debut collection - in all its intersectional glory - mines for meaning in places many of us miss, and reveals precisely how the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.

©2019 Tressie McMillan Cottom (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"To listen to sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom narrate her prose confirms that no other narrator could do better.... As narrator, Cottom is a divine spinner of tales who knows the right amount of sarcasm to add to certain words. She also knows the right words to express her points and delivers them in such a hypnotic rhythm that one does not want to stop listening." (AudioFile Magazine)

Not too anything-- just right.

In the first essay in this collection, Tressie McMillan Cottom says that a publisher once told her she was "too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country Black to be literary, and too naive to show the rigor of [her] thinking and the complexity of [her] prose." And yet, this is everything I loved about "Thick." Cottom is wickedly intelligent, and yet her prose is down-to-earth and highly readable. Listening to this just after finishing "Backlash" was perfect-- listening to George Yancy was like listening to....well, a philosophy professor. Listening to Tressie Cottom was like listening to a friend who makes you laugh and calls it like she sees it, and who also happens to be a brilliant and incisive intellectual. This has always been my favorite combination-- the way Walt Whitman writes about deeply philosophical issues with common, Anglo-Saxon language. or the way my favorite professor in grad school would blow me away with intellectual discussions about history and culture and then write "Boffo!" in the margins of my paper. Cottom writes about European beauty standards and how they impact Black women, the trap of wanting to be seen as competent, how Black people "know their whites," Black female sexuality and how men wield control over it, why there are no full-time Black female writers in major newspapers (and yet David Brooks can write about deli meat) , and much more. Most importantly, she give voice to issues that Black women understand and experience and that the rest of us should pay attention to. This and "Heavy" are by far my favorite books so far this year.

Insightful and engaging

Tressie McMillan Cottom 's essays are original and at once hilarious and gut-punching. I learned so much from her deconstruction of systemic discrimination and am just sad that the collection came to an end when it did.

Riveting

I will be writing her to tell her how piercing her writing was. Beautiful

Content, tone ,delivery is honest & unapologetic

Reminds me of safe space conversations with my sister, daughter, wife & female college friends. Long overdue & much needed. Never change.

The realness of being a black woman

I liked hearing about her personal growth and how she continued to educate and seek understanding

Definitely a re-listen!

Thoroughly enjoyed! The fact that Dr. McMillan Cottom read her work herself puts such a personal emphasis on the recording, I sat straight in my chair to listen intently. This is storytelling and scholarship in one, easy to listen to, yet I paused at times to ruminate. I will definitely listen again.

Enjoyed

This audible was very insightful and entertaining. I love that the author is the narrator.

Excellent!

It was a joy to hear Tressie’s nuanced thoughts on issues that are deeply relevant for me. It was especially rich to have this volume read by the author to hear her inflections and dialect which made it feel as if I were having a conversation with a good friend.

This book was everything I didn’t know I needed

Amazing story telling and great writing . I’ve read it twice excellent read Tressie McMillan Cottom is a gift from God .

Piercing, challenging, amusing

How can a modern intellectual conceive, write, and deliver such penetrating, painfully accurate, and entertaining analysis of our contemporary life? I don't know - but Dr. McMillan Cottom has done it. From the moment I began listening to this book, I've recommended it to others at least once every day. I feel enriched, challenged, and inspired by her work - and will never read the opinion pages of the NYT again in quite the same way. In fact, I will join in agitating for more black female voices there and elsewhere.
Thank you, Dr. Cottom, for making this your "third job" - for taking whatever crap the world throws at you from whatever directions for your bravery and insight, and for inviting us all into your life experience in a deeply personal and seriously intellectual way.