Survival of the Thickest: Essays

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. (Dec.)