The author you need to read
Cottom embodies intelligence, humor
January can be a slow month for publishers. Having disgorged their premium titles and projects from big-name authors in the fall, and with readers potentially sated from holiday book gifts, the pace of new releases seems to slacken.
But there is a new book coming out Jan. 8 that signals the arrival of a writer who should be listened to. The book? “Thick: And Other Essays.” The author? Tressie McMillan Cottom.
In truth, Cottom, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, has been here for quite some time. Her 2017 book, “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy,” was reviewed in The New York Times and landed her a guest spot on “The Daily Show.” In the universe of academic types online, in which I occasionally travel, she is a superstar. I read her twicemonthly online newsletter — The
First and 15th — the moment it arrives in my inbox. By the time I’m done, the Twitteratti is already chattering about it.
Please don’t mistake this for a review. It is not some kind of attempt at faux-objective analysis. I am a fan. This is an enthusiasm. I will — and have — read anything that Cottom writes.
Consisting of six essays — which cover issues of race, body image, beauty, wealth, real estate, education, segregation, consumerism, meritocracy and HGTV (among others) — “Thick” is an invitation into the life and mind of a person with ferocious intelligence combined with a wicked sense of humor, stunning erudition and a spirit of not giving a hoot about what others think in the best possible way.
Cottom’s work is intersectional, a word that some have tried to place in scare quotes, wanting people to believe that intersectionality is a trick pulled by pointyheaded academics who want to make simple things complicated. Don’t listen to those people. 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. The world is complex. Knowing how issues of race and class and education and consumerism intersect and intertwine is a good thing.
Critics will reach reflexively for Roxane Gay (who blurbs “Thick”) as a comparison and justifiably mean it as a compliment the same way it seems impossible to read about Ta-Nehisi Coates without a mention of James Baldwin. But let’s move beyond a world where black writers must be stacked against other black writers, as though our room for those voices is limited, and entry can only be gained through the imprimatur of another. Gay is an important voice, but Cottom is her own writer, her own voice.
Cottom’s essays make me think of Molly Ivins, if she had a Ph.D. and wrote about culture at large instead of politics. Her tongue is sharp, and it can and will wound, and if you are in the group she is targeting, you may feel taken aback — as I have at times. But when the shock passes, you will know yourself and the world better.
I read “Thick” as a kind of manifesto. It is the story of Cottom’s life — “pregnant at thirty,” “divorced at thirty-one,” “lost at thirty-two,” as she opens the title essay — but it is not only memoir. Ten years after being lost, she is a Ph.D.-holder, a widely respected professor, scholar and writer. “Thick” serves an announcement of someone who is ready to assume her full voice in public, the type of voice that society often refuses to make room for because it challenges so many defaults.
Take a look; have a listen. You won’t regret it.