On one trip, Cooper Jones covers a match of Roger Federer for GQ. She communicates nuanced experiences of disability, motherhood, and beauty in unpretentious and non-academic writing that will be accessible to all readers. Her inward work while traveling to various locations constitute the payoffs of the memoir, as Cooper Jones crystallizes experiences into nuggets of wisdom. Without her husband Andrew and son Wolfgang, she lands in Rome.

This is common… the argument and the way I’m forgotten in it…The men bicker over … my unfortunate birth (1, 2).īy humanizing a routine experience of verbal dehumanization, Cooper Jones undergoes a rupture of perspective that prompts her to leave Brooklyn to travel. The men debate this theory, speaking through me. With self-deprecating humor, she details a conversation among colleagues that she has heard all too often:Ĭolin…an ethical philosopher…argues for a vision for a better society, one where a body like mine would not exist. When her book begins, Cooper Jones is at a bar. Amidst the gaze of others, who respond to her with remarks of pity and insensitivity, she has an unusual gait and small stature. Born with sacral agenesis, Cooper Jones does not have a sacrum and her hips are out of alignment. Cooper Jones is a journalist, sports and travel writer, and philosophy professor with two PhDs. In her memoir, Easy Beauty, Chloe Cooper Jones deepens the narratives surrounding her body a body with a congenital disability, who also happens to be a mother/scholar living in Brooklyn.

This misrepresents or erases the voices of real, living individuals that do not classify neatly as “normal.” Rather than examining assumptions that distinguish normal and abnormal, the dominant American cultural narrative stigmatizes some individuals as abnormal in an otherwise normal world. It is also so widely accepted as to be commonplace.

Americans think, talk and write about disability, they usually consider it as a tragedy, illness or defect … that is as personal and accidental, before or without sociopolitical significance (2). Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson write in Disability, Rhetoric and the Body, The tendency to flatten the lived experiences of people with disabilities is well known. Popular culture flattens the lives of disabled people beyond caricature, reducing the complexity of lived existence to a simplistic narrative that either wallows in pain and exploitation or relies on sports cliches of odds-defiance and triumph in the face of adversity.

Easy beauty chloe cooper jones