[Jones] long believed that the only way to deserve anyone else’s respect, much less desire, was to 'be extraordinary in all other aspects,' brilliant and witty and humorous and cool. If the book is any proof, Jones is all these things. But there’s more to this gorgeous, vividly alive memoir ... Jones concisely sketches her family, childhood and adult life, but she also chronicles a series of adventures ... When she was a child, Jones’s father told her bedtime stories. 'My father understood a good story is a circle that finds the hero back where they started, but with new knowledge,' she writes. Easy Beauty is a good story in this way.
Transcendent ... In keeping us close as she navigates the world, Jones lets us in on the effort required to move through it in a disabled body. She translates this effort to the page clearly, elucidating movement that able-bodied readers might take for granted ... The power of this memoir: Jones so closely analyzes the relationship between work and beauty, pain and pleasure, without ascribing a moral value to either, hinting at conclusions but then challenging you when you think you’ve settled on one ... Quiet profundity ... Jones’s genius lies in her fluency in ambivalence. If she lands firmly on any truism, it’s that nothing—and more significantly, no one—is just one thing.
Jones’ soul-stretching, breathtaking existential memoir chronicles her reclaiming of body, mind, and self ... A profound, impressive, and wiser-than-wise contemplation of the way Jones is viewed by others, her own collusion in those views, and whether any of this can be shifted. She shares her ultimate answer—yes—in superlative writing, rendering complex emotion and unparalleled insight in skillfully precise language ... Her debut is a game-changing gift to readers.
Jones...presents, with unflinching honesty, this memoir about living with disability ... Readers will appreciate the book’s portrayal of self and of living with disability, and the author’s honest confrontation of beauty standards and motherhood ... Cooper Jones’s book will encourage readers to view bodies (their own and others’) in a new, more graceful light. Recommended for most memoir collections.
A genre- and paradigm-bending memoir ... In Easy Beauty Jones begins the difficult, painful and nearly impossible task of turning her remarkable intelligence and curiosity inward to ask whether or not the experience of beauty can become an agent of change to help her become more present in her own life and with her family ... In 12 lucid and flowing chapters, Jones encounters different experiences of beauty...and approaches them through the lenses of philosophy, motherhood and accessibility ... By combining these threads, Jones instead presents an incisive, biting exploration of discomfort and the ways that humans retreat from and engage with it. In writing through, about and with her disability, Jones not only forces herself to face the ways in which she has become complicit in her discomfort, but asks readers to consider the times that they have done the same ... If Easy Beauty sounds like a heavy memoir, it’s because it is. Jones’ intelligence and interest in various philosophies, pop culture moments and far-flung countries can at times cause the text to feel inaccessible. But she is careful to never alienate her readers, even if she discomforts them, which she does courageously. What makes the book so profound is not her easy ability to tie together complex philosophies or long-held definitions of beauty, but the deep, all-encompassing current of love for Wolfgang that informs some of her most invasive interrogations of herself, and the sharp, brutal humor that accompanies it. Her memoir, if that is the best label for it, feels less like a slice-of-life look into the life and body of a woman bound to a seriously painful and physically limiting condition, and more of a generous, compassionate conversation with a person who is not only wise and intelligent, but endlessly gracious in her probings of the world around her ... Easy Beauty is a rare, poignant gem of a memoir. In sharing with the world her own experiences of beauty, Jones has given readers something equally transcendent: a beauty of mind that is not always easy, but is undeniably necessary.
Cooper Jones...quotes myriad authors and philosophers on the subject of beauty, including Plotinus, Kant, Iris Murdoch, Maria Popova, and others ... Parts of the book are repetitive ... By turns revelatory, tedious, entertaining, and entirely human.
