Chloé Cooper Jones

An Avid Reader Press book. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

Easy Beauty

Christina Pappas

Faith Ho 

probably the most beautiful memoir i've read.her reflections are both incisive and beautifully expressed. she doesnt shy away from her own flaws as a human (her process of growth through reflection & learning unfolds quietly & slowly but wonderfully even if not dramatic) nor the discomfitting lenses of human responses to her physical disability (the self-concerned need to be appear "good" or justify our own human "goodness" through "helping" someone). she travels, but what's astounding and captivating is not what she does or where she visits but the probing voice throughout, on her & our collective (often drawing on philosophical conceptions but the messiness in arguing with those) & individual ideas of beauty (not just in appearance but in the world), and what that means - for her as an existential question, and all of us no less. 

"I'd wished for beauty to be a single, pure feeling ringing through me clearly, undeniably, creating truth, shining a beam so strong that it illuminated the entirety of my life. But what had come instead was a dense and drifting pile that carried with it a challenge: Could I see the salient thing? [...] We'd not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, nor gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we'd not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we'd been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise."

Beautifully written, insightful, philosophical memoir on belonging (and not belonging), difference, and disability. Writing about her life, her parents, relationships, travels, interactions with strangers and students and peers, the writer traces how exclusion works and how it gets imprinted on the psyche of the excluded, leading to a kind of self inflicted isolation, which kinda blew my mind. It’s obvious though: When people constantly make you feel you don’t belong, you learn that you don’t belong. Lots of big and little examples throughout this book that helped me see / think about some of my own experiences and perspectives. 

Easy Beauty

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