Philosophers and mathematicians - from Euclid to Fibonacci and Boethius -have tried to distill the formula for beauty into a numerical form, defining it so that it can be neatly understood and even reproduced in architecture, in fashion, and in human bodies and faces. My mother had objected to his choice of the word ‘inhospitable’ and the doctor had said, ‘OK, so how about incompatible for growing a life?’” The doctor explained that my disability rendered my body inhospitable. “At seventeen, when I had my first boyfriend, my mother took me to have some tests run so that we could be certain. What else might be untrue, then, about her capacity as a woman and a person in this world? She had, as many women would, assumed that a doctor’s verdict on her body was formidable, inarguable.

As much as it is Cooper Jones’ very personal story, it speaks to all women who have sought purpose and validation of their worth when it has been denied to them by the people around them.Īs a child, Cooper Jones was told that she would never become pregnant, so when she becomes pregnant as a near-broke student in New York, she is stunned. Cooper Jones fearlessly invites readers to question what we accept, what we allow, and what we can endure as women in a world that is largely designed to serve able-bodied men.

It is life-altering for both those of us who have and those who have not experienced chronic pain. In Cooper Jones’ memoir, Easy Beauty, the many men - and it is mostly men - who impose their judgments, assertions, and assumptions upon her is horrifying and disturbing.Įasy Beauty allows us to join Cooper Jones as she navigates adventures in seeking purpose, beauty, and meaning in a disabled, and often painful, body. She was born with a congenital disability that affects the joints in her hips, affecting her mobility and movement (“a woman with a body that could never be mistaken for symmetrical or orderly,” as she has written). Her body, in its differences, has proved difficult for the people around her to accept. That very transient, unexpected quality makes it nearly impossible to define beauty and to measure it definitively.įor author, journalist, and philosophy professor Chloé Cooper Jones, the question of beauty is both philosophical and a very real and practical concern. It is often a fleeting sensation: a surprise, a blissful transcendence, and an epiphany. From the moment we wake to when we fall asleep, our day is peppered with potential moments of beauty.

Easy beauty chloe cooper jones