Survival of the Thickest
Essays
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
*Now a Netflix series—Season 3 coming soon!*
Stand-up comedian and star of Netflix’s Michelle Buteau: A Buteau-ful Mind at Radio City Music Hall and creator and star of Survival of the Thickest delivers a collection of “hilarious…bracingly honest” (Real Simple) essays in her unique voice, cheeky swagger, and unapologetic frankness that’s “one of the year’s most relatable books” (Bustle).
If you’ve watched television or movies in the past couple of years, you’ve seen Michelle Buteau. With scene-stealing roles in Always Be My Maybe, First Wives Club, Someone Great, Russian Doll, and Tales of the City; a reality TV show and breakthrough stand-up specials, including her headlining show Welcome to Buteaupia on Netflix; and two podcasts (Late Night Whenever and Adulting), Michelle’s star is on the rise. You’d be forgiven for thinking the road to success—or adulthood or financial stability or self-acceptance or marriage or motherhood—has been easy, but you’d be wrong.
Now, in Survival of the Thickest, Michelle reflects on growing up Caribbean, Catholic, and thick in New Jersey, going to college in Miami (where everyone smells like pineapple), her many friendship and dating disasters, working as a newsroom editor during 9/11, getting started in stand-up opening for male strippers, marrying into her husband’s Dutch family, IVF and surrogacy, motherhood, chosen family, and what it feels like to have a full heart, tight jeans, and stardom finally in her grasp.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stand-up comedian Buteau takes a zesty and hilarious look at her life in 19 essays. Buteau grew up in New Jersey as the only child of a customs broker Jamaican mother and a traveling businessman Haitian father, and faced weight issues in her youth. She would raid her father's closet to borrow his button-down shirts, while explaining to readers that, of her larger size, "Thick means that you've got meat on your bones, bitch." In college in Miami in the mid-'90s, she had a group of friends who supported her ("We all had such different backgrounds, bodies, and goals in life. But what matters is that we had each other's backs"); and after graduation she landed a job editing video for WNBC in New York City but eventually decided to pursue her love of comedy. Now in her 40s, Buteau writes with side-splitting humor about the men she dated (during a hook-up with a trainer she writes, "Just to make sure he knew what size he was dealing with I sat on his face a little too long") and the night she met her Dutch photographer husband-to-be at a club in Manhattan (her first impression: "Ugh, another white boy trying to be woke"). The had a long-distance relationship before marrying; together they endured IVF and multiple miscarriages before the birth of twins via surrogacy. Buteau's spot-on essays combine laughter with wise life lessons.
