Thick: And Other Essays

McMillan Cottom describes herself as pregnant at 30, divorced at 31, and lost at 32. As part of being lost, she finds herself at Rudean’s, a bar in a strip mall in Charlotte, North Carolina. During her first visit to Rudean’s, a man approaches her at the bar, and says, “Your hair thick, your nose thick, your lips thick, all of you just thick” (7). McMillan Cottom uses this anecdote to describe her experiences of “being too much of one thing and not enough of another” (5) as a theme in her life. She has a strong personality which was not considered an asset, for Black girls are supposed to shrink to allow White girls to shine. McMillan Cottom tries to discipline her personality and body to take up less room, but her thinking is also “deemed too thick:” (7) too accessible for academics and too intellectual to be popular. She describes her methodology as using “thick description,” (26) a way of writing that links personal narratives with sociological analysis.

McMillan Cottom is Southern but was born in Harlem to a family that was respectable and churchgoing, a family that “did not want to be problems” (12).