This memoir is about how Chloe moves through life as a disabled person. And it goes without saying that I had to do the audio when I found out she was narrating the book – I just love hearing an author tell their own personal story. I had never heard of Chloe Cooper Jones before picking this one up and yet, she is now someone I know I will continue to think about as I go on with my daily life. I love picking up memoirs…I always find them to be so inspiring and that was absolutely the case here. With its emotional depth, its prodigious, spiky intelligence, its passion and humor, 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.” Source: Print – ARC Paperback via Avid Reader Press / Audio – ALC via Simon & Schuster Audioįrom Chloé Cooper Jones-Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient-a groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and a journey to far-flung places in search of a new way of seeing and being seen.
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster Audio
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