Chloé Cooper Jones with Christine Smallwood: Easy Beauty

Pulitzer Prize finalist Chloé Cooper Jones’s new memoir weaves memory, observation, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability.

“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, the way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and she sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself.

Jones speaks with critic, journalist, and author of the novel The Life of the Mind, Christine Smallwood about what it takes to move through the world in a disabled body. 

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A live transcript will be provided. ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org. A pre-filled Gmail template is available by clicking here. Any media will be accompanied by alt text to reference before the program or by audio description.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Chloé Cooper Jones is the author of Easy Beauty. She is a Whiting Award winner and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Christine Smallwood is the author of The Life of the Mind, published by Hogarth in 2021. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, and is a founding faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

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