"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...

"In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black women are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to a diagnosis of heart failure at age twenty- nine, Dionne tracks her relationship with friends, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image. Along the way, she...