Easy Beauty

Chloé Cooper Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a rare condition affecting the development of the spine, and has lived her life in a body that people react to before they speak to her. The reaction is usually pity, sometimes disgust, and it arrives constantly.

The memoir is built as a series of journeys: bars and rooms in Brooklyn, sculpture gardens in Rome, a film festival in Utah, a Beyoncé concert in Milan, a tennis tournament in California, the Killing Fields at Phnom Penh. In each she is doing two things at once, being present as a critic and philosopher, and being read by everyone around her as a disabled woman.

What she is examining is what our standards of beauty and desirability are actually for, and she is unusually hard on herself about the ways she has upheld them. Motherhood runs through it. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.