“Bold, honest, and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name) Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself.įrom the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen-or not seen-has informed her lens on the world her entire life. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation.

So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or AutobiographyĪ New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Time, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Yearįrom Chloé Cooper Jones-Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient-an “exquisite” ( Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen.

Easy beauty by chloe cooper jones