Tressie McMillan Cottom’s debut collection of personal essays, Thick, mines for meaning everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. In eight piercing pieces, McMillan Cottom reveals precisely how the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same. She is joined by one of today’s most astute cultural critics, Roxane Gay, the author Bad Feminist and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.