Easy Beauty

I was in a bar in Brooklyn listening to two men discuss whether or not my life was worth living. Chloé Cooper Jones was born with a rare congenital disorder, sacral agenesis. Living with a visible, often painful disability, she set boundaries that sheltered her from the constant gaze of strangers.

It was only once she became a mother that she realized she had to give herself permission to live freely, in a way that honors the bodies we are born with, in a way that would be worthy of her son. Easy Beauty is a luminous memoir about fate and ability, but it is also a close philosophical examination of what happens when we look and are looked at. By taking on the greatest questions - personal and ethical - of her own life, Chloé challenges our own complicity with otherness and invites us on a journey across the world and into the mirror in search of a new way of seeing.