All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman” in January, excerpted from Thick.
Pieces of these essays were published elsewhere, so if you want to get a sense of the power of her writing, Time published “ I Was Pregnant and in Crisis.
Cottom sees, experiences, interacts with, and deals with the world. And it’s really difficult to say what the book of essays is about, precisely, because it is about so many things and so much, but also it is very much about how Dr. I was sucked in easily because the style of writing is wise and welcoming, then merciless and honest, and I wanted to keep reading and reading. But each chapter requires time afterward to think and digest and re-examine after the dust raised by the words roaring through my brain had a chance to settle.
This is not a book that I could breeze through. Cottom says Thick “sits at the intersection of memoir and manifesto,” and that description is very apt. David Streever in a Richmond Style Weekly interview with Dr. Cottom writes in a viscerally funny and hyper-focused manner about the minutiae of her own life and experience, then zooms way, way out to locate that experience in a larger context, then a still larger one, before plummeting back in to focus again on the individual, and all the individuals like her.
There are eight total essays and they knocked me over, over and over again.ĭr. In this book of essays, she starts off by reclaiming the personal essay format for women of color and for herself specifically. Sharp Academics and Paranormal Romance: An Interview with Kelly Baker, PhD, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, PhD) and she remains one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter and listen to online. This is the type of writing that gives me what I think of as “complete cellular-level stillness.” You know that feeling when you’re listening to, reading, or watching something completely extraordinary, and your entire body goes still? Maybe you have scalp tingles or you’re covered in goosebumps, but you are entirely focused on not missing a thing because it’s freaking incredible? That’s my experience with this book of essays.
0 kommentar(er)
