Easy Beauty: A Memoir

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography

 

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.

Author: Chloé Cooper Jones
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 04/05/2022
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.20w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781982151997


Award: Pulitzer Prize - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 11/01/2021 pg. 21
Publishers Weekly 01/10/2022
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2022
Booklist 02/15/2022 pg. 13
Library Journal 03/01/2022 pg. 142

About the Author
Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosophy professor and journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, and, in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing.