Book Report: Easy Beauty

22. Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty: A Memoir (2022) (10/14/22)

[Apologies in advance for this report, which does not feel like one of my best. I read the book on Kindle. I blame that. Kindle and I do not get along...]

I learned about this book through Ezra Klein's podcast, which that week was hosted by the sociologist and columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom. Her guest, the philosopher and journalist Chloé Cooper Jones, suffers from a disability known as sacral agenesis. As Jones explains,

People usually notice my height first. I’m short. Then they notice the way I walk, then that my legs from the knees down and my feet are underdeveloped and disproportionate to the rest of my body. My spine is curved, which makes my back arch forward. I have hip dysplasia, which means my hip joints are misaligned and unstable—the ball part of the joint grinds on a flat plane of bone in search of a socket that never formed. This hurts and I’m never not aware of it; pain plays a note I hear in all my waking moments. I walk by rolling my hips, which gives me a side-to-side gait. If I wear my hair in a long ponytail, it whips back and forth like a pendulum. I move slowly. I’m slow on stairs, but I can go up them if there is a railing. My arms are strong and I pull myself up as much as walk up stairs. The medical name for my disability is sacral agenesis. I was born without a sacrum, the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis. Agenesis, from the Greek, meaning a lack or failure to generate. My missing sacrum, my omitted element.

I put that explanation upfront, because the rest of this beautiful book is not really about her disability per se. It's about being human. Because don't we all have doubts, insecurities, failings, pains? But that said, Jones's disability is part of who she is, it marks her visually, and physically, as different—and she has to grapple with people's insensitivity. Or what she sometimes assumes is insensitivity, but in fact is something else—some slight that she has manufactured, having little to do with her at all. How do we escape our preconceptions, our reactiveness? A thing I appreciated about this book is the depth of self-awareness, of self-inquisitiveness. Nothing is necessarily as it at first seems.

Except, perhaps, beauty. The thread of beauty as a sort of savior, as a thing that can take us out of ourselves, "unself" us and set us free, even if momentarily, is woven throughout the various stories told here. Which begin in Rome with a visit to a museum and some thoughts about the sculptor Bernini. We are not told why Jones is in Italy, but we follow her willingly on her peregrinations, which she narrates interspersed with flashbacks to recent conversations, to scenes from her home in Brooklyn with her husband and son, to memories of her departed father and still-present mother. Eventually she lands in Milan, at a Beyoncé concert: surprise! But it also makes perfect sense. Beauty, confidence, connection: these are some of the themes of this book. Also patience and acceptance.

Along the overall journey of the book she also encounters Peter Dinklage, the essayist Geoff Dyer, Roger Federer (and I mean all of those in an in-person kind of way), and travels to Lake Como, Miami, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Here's a conversation with her husband near the end of the book after she's had an epiphany or two, or three. It's followed immediately by a scene with her son and another musing on beauty. I really enjoyed the way she hopscotched from thought to thought, each one connected in its own way.

“Do you think I can change?”
     “Yes,” he says. . . . “We’ve both changed. . . . Remember who I was when we met? I was eating one large pepperoni pizza a day and smoking too many cigarettes and playing video games all night. Do you remember who you were? We’ve both changed, but the difference is that I didn’t know who I wanted to become, and you did, that was clear, and so I knew I needed to stay out of your way and just let you become the version of yourself you wanted to be, which I knew was, at its core, good. I knew you wanted to be good.”
     “How did you know that, and I didn’t?”
     “I can see you,” he says.
     “So, you didn’t care that I left?”
     “I care if you are happy. I’m in love with your happiness. My focus is on how you feel, not what you do,” he says.
     We stay in each other’s arms for a long time. Our breathing synchs. A car alarm, a siren, people shout on the street.
     “You could have made me come home,” I say.
     “No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”

Wolfgang [Jones's son] and I stand below a sulking sky. He’s done with school for the day but wants to stay on the playground with his friends for a while before I haul him off to the bodega and then home. I let him have ten more minutes and watch him hurl his body around a jungle gym. He plays easily and happily with other children. Clouds form above. They make shapes upon which I can force a category—pig, shoe, hat—but the categories don’t stick. Shapes dissolve; reality remains in restless motion; it was beautiful, it was Beauty, this engagement, this grasp and release, this brief but real discerning of the fleeting and how it redirects my focus from myself and toward the world.
     We get our groceries. Wolfgang clutches a frozen pizza to his chest on our walk home.
     “What shapes do you see in the clouds?” I ask.
     “Just a buncha Pikachus,” says Wolfgang.

Now I'm kind of interested in seeking out Jones's journalism. And as a bonus, here's a LitHub interview with Jones about her memoir.