The New 2022 Nonfiction
Chloé Cooper Jones
Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press, April), a debut memoir about moving through the world in a body that looks different than most—Jones was born wi th a rare physical condition, sacral agenesis—and a probing interrogation of the myths underlying traditional standards of beauty and desirability as well as the author’s own complicity in upholding those myths. Agent: Claudia Ballard. Editor: Lauren Wein. First Lines: “I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening as two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life is worth living. Jay is to my left and Colin to my right. Colin, an ethical philosopher trained in my same doctoral program, argues a vision for a better society, one where a body like mine would not exist. The men debate this theory, speaking through me. This is common, both the argument and the way I’m forgotten in it.”
I had no intention of ever showing anyone the material that eventually became Easy Beauty. I’ve always been a person who journals, but I’m also an inconsistent person. When life is well and happy enough and boring, I neglect my journals, but I’ll become very dedicated to them when I’m trying to work through a specific problem, decision, or unwieldy emotion.
A few years ago I was sitting in a bar in Brooklyn, New York, with two men, my friends. They began a debate about whether the disabled life was worth living. One man believed that eugenics had been a good idea, an idea that more people would espouse if not for the fact that it wasn’t particularly in vogue to say that disabled people should not have a crack at life. But this man wasn’t worried about what was popular; he was concerned only with his sense of right and wrong—he was an ethical philosopher—and he believed that if one was born with disability, they were born inherently lesser.
Nothing about this shocked me. As a congenitally disabled woman, I’d heard this argument and its many variations again and again. What did surprise me was how easy it was for me to disappear within myself and pretend like the conversation wasn’t happening. I realized that I
