With Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones has written – and please let it be known I don’t use this term readily – a masterpiece. By this, I mean that it’s unlike anything I’ve read before, and my mind is altered for having read it. I’d be envious of her ability to translate her thoughts and experiences to the page so concisely, and with such wit, if I wasn’t so in awe.
On the surface, this is a memoir that recounts the reality of navigating life as a disabled person (I use “navigating” here both metaphorically and literally – Cooper Jones’s accounts of her difficulties tackling staircases, or even wet or icy paths, are somehow fascinating and revelatory, and never, ever self-pitying). In actuality, it’s a meditation on how to be a person, any person, existing in the world.
We learn of how Cooper Jones’s disability causes her terrible pain, how it can be frustrating, and how she is constantly dismissed and diminished by people’s lesser expectations. Yet she also explores, with scalpel-wielding honesty, how she manipulates her position.
“My main access to the esteem of my peers – who were, with few exceptions, mostly young, white, able-bodied men with family money – was in how little I had despite how hard I worked. This, plus my disability, plus motherhood, bathed me in a tragic light, which, if I stepped into it just right, lit me up with a look of moral superiority.”
Paul Mescal on Saturday Night Live review: Gladiator II star skewers America’s bizarre views about Ireland
Joan Baez: Do I ever hear from Bob Dylan? ‘Not a word’
The 50 best films of 2024 – the top 10 movies of the year
Late Late Toy Show review: Patrick Kielty is fuelled by enough raw adrenaline to power Santa’s reindeer
This is set against her own equally dangerous sense, inherited from her disappointed dreamer of a father, of being exceptional, thus above the mundanity of everyday living – a problem many millennials may find relatable.
One might assume, as I did, that Easy Beauty is a pity memoir. This is, defiantly, what it’s not. Cooper Jones is far too intelligent for that. She repeatedly mentions a friend asking why she’s never written about disability. She makes clear that the very possibility of being perceived as a self-professed “victim”, or of having used her disability for traction, is what has made her so resistant. Thank God she succumbed. Herein, Cooper Jones does exactly what any philosopher worth their salt ought to do – uses the particulars of her own experience to formulate ideas that are at once universally applicable and genuinely profound.
