Chloé Cooper Jones in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling, Kimberly King Parsons & Casey Parks

From Chloé Cooper Jones — Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, and Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient — comes an “exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen. “I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen — or not seen — has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths. Jones will be joined in conversation by Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State; Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light; and Casey Parks, author of Diary of a Misfit.

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