A 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 Year
From 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.
"I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss
whether my life is worth living."
So begins Chloé Cooper Jones's bold, revealing account of moving through
the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early
on to factor "pain calculations" into every plan, every situation. Born
with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects
both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. 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. She resisted this reality by
excelling academically and retreating to "the neutral room in her mind"
until it passed. 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.
From 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.
"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.
