Poured Over: Chloé Cooper Jones on Easy Beauty

“You know, beauty is such an interesting term. I think it’s really important how vast and complex it is….we call people beautiful, I call my dog beautiful every day. I call food I eat beautiful, I call it bitter, bitter coffee, beautiful, I call an idea beautiful. A mathematical concept can be beautiful, a sunset, the natural world, a performance, a song, certainly works of art, but…I’ve heard myself say, What a beautiful attempt, a failed attempt, but a beautiful or like a beautiful mistake, what a beautiful mistake that was, a beautiful error or a beautiful cutting remark even, so it’s such an interesting term, because we can use it in so many ways.”

Easy Beauty is Chloé Cooper Jones’s first book, and it’s an incredibly smart and provocative combination of memoir, travel essay and philosophical treatise on beauty and our experience of beauty. Chloé joins us on the show to talk about what beauty looks and feels like to her, how it feels to live in a body that people stare at (and touch without invitation), how we talk and think about disability, vulnerability and self-acceptance, and so much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc.

Featured Books: Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays), here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I am so, so excited to be starting my week with Chloé Cooper Jones. Her new book is called Easy Beauty. And it is ambitious. And it is smart, and it is wild. And it is so interesting. And it is not like anything anyone has read before. It’s a combination of memoir and travel essay, and philosophical treatises, on beauty and our experience of beauty. So it’s really, you cover a lot of ground, my friend, you cover a ton of ground, but this is also partially a memoir of your life as a woman and a mother and a daughter and a wife living with a physical disability. Can we start with the title of the book? And how we got here?

Chloé Cooper Jones: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And that description of the book is so generous. One thing certainly I was concerned about when writing the book was whether or not readers would be willing to embrace how many different sort of I think like formal choices I make in the book to make it memoir and philosophical treatises and travelogue and love story and an identity story and, to have all those things together. So it’s just wonderful to hear that description of it. The title Easy Beauty comes from a theory by a philosopher named Bernard Bosanquet who had this idea that we experience two rough categories of beauty. And he didn’t mean these two categories to be exhaustive, but had us look at two different categories, what he just calls easy beauty and difficult beauty. And there’s no intended value judgment on either one of these forms. They’re just categories. So easy beauty is what he calls blunt, triumphant, beauty, beauty that arrives to us instantly, the moment our eye seizes on it, he gives the example of a rose or a simple spatial rhythm, many things in nature, a beautiful sunset, you know, looking at the ocean roll in and out. These are things that when they arrive at the eye, we recognize their beauty instantly. And then he also thinks that there’s a category of beauty called difficult beauty that requires patience, that often requires a high level of education about a subject. And he says often the more you learn about things, the more you are receptive or sensitive to more difficult forms of beauty. He also says that you have to be able to sit within the necessary tension that like a difficult or resistant form of beauty might give you and also have the capacity to enjoy complexity. And he says he thinks it’s actually a quite rare mind that loves and seeks to sit within an experience that is complex, is tense is maybe even contradictory does not reveal itself right away, and to sit in that experience and seek out the beauty in it. And so those two concepts definitely play a role and how I’m sort of evolving throughout this book sort of toggling between those two experiences of easy and difficult beauty and my own ability or lack thereof to sit within certain types of complexity to seek the beauty that I’m looking for.

B&N: So what does beauty look like and feel like to you, Chloé?

CCJ: You know, beauty is such an interesting term. I think it’s really important how vast and complex it is. So if we just think about how we use that term linguistically, we call people beautiful, I call my dog beautiful every day. I call food I eat beautiful, I call it bitter, bitter coffee, beautiful, I call an idea beautiful, a mathematical concept can be beautiful, a sunset, the natural world, a performance, a song, certainly works of art, but also even we use that term in sort of negative valences too. So it’s like I’ve heard myself say What a beautiful attempt, a failed attempt, but a beautiful or like a beautiful mistake, what a beautiful mistake that was, a beautiful error or a beautiful cutting remark even, so it’s such an interesting term, because we can use it in so many ways. And people have this tendency to want to say it’s all subjective, or it’s all sort of a loose thing that the individual mind can process however they want. I don’t like that. Because if we say that beauty is anything and it’s subjective, then we’re also saying it’s absolutely nothing. You know, philosophers like to look at these very difficult to pin down terms and try to pin them down and which is an impossible task. But it’s such a great task of sort of a cognitive dissonance desiring to put a really good definition on beauty when you know, instinctually that’s impossible, but not being willing to give up the idea that beauty actually is tracking something in the mind that there’s something that’s happening when you use that term, and Plotinus uses this great definition for beauty that I really like. And I think I feel not that it’s wholly correct, but it’s maybe more correct than other definitions, which is maybe the best you can do in philosophy. You’re not gonna get the truth but you might get slightly closer than anyone else. So he believes like the soul has a capacity for beauty and that what that feeling is, is a recognition of kinship with something else. I love that idea of kinship as a sort of way of tracking what’s happening in the mind, when we say something is beautiful. This is his idea, like something of your own soul is rendered tangible in the outside world. And you feel when you see it, a kinship to that. And I think we’ve all had that experience where you’re walking in a museum, and suddenly you see a painting. And you may not know exactly why, but something about it is speaking to something that’s essentially you. And for a moment, you have a recognition of kinship, or you read a sentence that just strikes you in a way that is so startlingly true. And you think, the author and I are seeing each other for a second, and we’re having this moment of kinship. And I think often when we’re making things, you know, when artists are making things for other people, I think explicitly and implicitly, our hope is to spark that feeling of kinship in other people, and those are often the moments where we go, so beautiful, the sentence was so beautiful, or that painting is so beautiful, or that meal my god so beautiful, or you know, Federer’s backhand. So beautiful.

B&N: That kinship extends, and we build community around art, right? Fans of a book fans of a painting fans of an artist, fans of a musician, all of these things, the kinship thread is by far the strongest explanation I’ve ever heard for beauty. But beauty can also as you said, be as simple as walking down the street and looking at the sky and thinking, wow, that is just the most perfect blue or being at the ocean. I mean, I’m frequently surprised, just on my walk to work in the morning, where I see something ridiculously beautiful. And my walk is not that extraordinary. It just makes me really happy to start my day, just walk into the office. And I sort of get to think through my day and everything else. But here’s the thing that kinship can be tricky to navigate when you have a physical disability like you do, because people see you and they make judgments. And they make very quick judgments about your body, they frequently touch you a lot. And I have to say if anyone tried to touch me as randomly as you get touched throughout this book, and I’m sure it’s not just this book, I would just not be okay with this. But you open the book with a line that is pretty much seared into my brain. I’m in a bar in Brooklyn listening to two men, my friends discuss whether or not my life is worth living. Mm hmm. Can we talk about sacral agenesis, which is what you have, which is a bone disorder?

CCJ: So sacral agenesis means literally without the sacrum, and so I was born without a sacrum and sacrum is a bone at the end of your spine that connects your spinal column to your hip bones. I was also born with hip dysplasia, which is the source of largely the source of my pain disorder that I have hip dysplasia, simply, the ball and socket joints of my hips didn’t form fully. Instead of having a true socket joint that the ball jointed my hip can rest in, it’s more of a smooth plane. So the ball joint rubs very uncomfortably along my hips. But in order for me to walk, I have to sort of roll the ball joint around in the socket. So I have some much shorter than most women that’s because we’re most adults period, because my sacrum controls a set of nerves that tell my legs for my knees down to to grow and so mine didn’t. So I’m much shorter than the average person. Technically, I have dwarfism. Although dwarfism is often associated with achondroplasia, I don’t have that. So it’s a form of dwarfism that’s a little unusual, or less common, and also this very pronounced side beside gait walk, I find that that to others that look at me, the way that I walked seems very precarious to them, I look, I think, at first glance, quite unstable. And that I think creates like an immediate anxiety in people who don’t know me or who aren’t used to looking at me, of course, I don’t feel unstable, I just feel like I’m in my body that I’ve lived in my whole entire life. So it also certain things are difficult, like going upstairs takes me a long time, or I have to sort of do a more pronounced measure of effort to go upstairs. So, and I live in New York City, so I’m going upstairs all the time on the subways. And people often will kind of crowd around me and get anxious or, you know, be like take your time sweetheart, take your time. Or often I would say this happens like 50% of the time, which is a huge percentage is if I’m carrying a bag, up the stairs of the subway, someone will come and like try to carry my bag for me or like grab my elbow and try to like move me up the stairs, which ironically actually makes it much harder. I have to use my arms in ways that other people wouldn’t necessarily for balance and for support and things like that. So there is a way in which people kind of immediately misread my body because it’s really unusual.

B&N: You have friends who are able bodied friends who it does turn out both actually have been wrestling with depression for quite some time. But because your quote unquote disability is visible and causes anxiety and other people, the response that people have to you is much more infantilizing than these two guys happen to have because their condition is not visible to the human eye. Yeah, in ways that your gait necessarily is. And the idea that these friends of yours, it’s the philosophical argument, but it’s wild to me. And this brings in eugenics and bioethics, and you had a doctor tell you that you would not be able to get pregnant.

CCJ: Mm hmm. Absolutely. So I think it is a common instinct for people to want to infantilize the disabled for a lot of reasons, I think I have an even higher rate of that than maybe some others just because one, I’m female. So that adds to it. And also, I’m small and very short. And then, you know, as I was saying, the sort of precariousness all sort of creates an anxiety of, of wanting to care for me, but also seeing me as living a sort of inherently lesser, almost childlike existence that can also because of that, cause people to desexualize me and to also have pretty lowered expectations for what they expect me to be capable of. It’s a very common thing for disabled people to get a lot of credit for inspiring people when they’re just like doing very normal things like going up subway stairs, or going to school or having a life. You know, there have been people who are like, Oh my god, I can’t believe you eat your cereal with a spoon just like me. It’s amazing. And it’s sort of like, well, this deficiencies in your head, it’s not in reality. So these two men that I had this conversation with, my friends who were both, as you said, ethical philosophers. So they’re approaching this with the scaffolding of theory and the scaffolding of ethics, which has a long history and philosophy of debating the inherent value of the disabled body or the ill body. So they have a good long philosophical history to back up there eugenic. Well, one one of the friends position on eugenics and that the interesting thing about that is, when my friend, Colin says, you know, it’s not debatable that your life is not worth living. Or he also says that any pregnant woman should be forced to have testing to find out if their child has any sort of disability, and if so, that child should be immediately aborted. And you know, if a woman has a baby that has a disability, she should be heavily fined or put in jail. That’s not a new argument at all. And there’s no disabled person that I’ve ever talked to who is shocked that that happened. They’re all like, yeah, of course. And it’s because there’s so much, not just in the history of eugenics, which had a huge presence in the United States for a period of time, and was largely based in the medical field. So not just because of that history, but because there’s so many things in a culture that reinforced this idea that living with a disability is a fate worse than death. In fact, if you think of disabled lives rarely feature prominently in literature in film, and television. And when they do, those characters are most often sexless without agency, tragic, die at the end, if I start a book with a disabled character, I’ll be like, they’re going to be dead, and they’re going to die. And they’re going to show the able bodied person how to live their own life better. So there is this cultural belief that permeates so many aspects of the disabled life that we are in some way inherently tragic. And then conversely, there aren’t a lot of places you could sort of look at, to see a cultural saturation of inherent value and the disabled life. Even if you have a disabled life that doesn’t, you know, die at the end of your book, there also isn’t a place to look and go, Wow, like I see this cultural saturation of inherent value around disability. I see them on the cover of magazines, I see them as the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, I see them as movie stars, it’s like, no, there’s very little of that period, very little visibility.

B&N: You know, it seems to me, after reading Easy Beauty that you spend a lot of time in your life having to translate your self and your own experience to able bodied people and the way people feel very comfortable touching you and moving, physically moving you, there’s a scene in a Beyonce concert that you go to in Italy, where people physically remove you from where you’re standing. And I was so profoundly uncomfortable and angry because I’m sure they thought they were well intentioned, and ultimately, you end up watching the show from the side of the stage. So you win, but the idea that you were physically lifted out of a space, so irritating to me, and that’s the politest thing I can say because I try not to swear on the podcast, thus far have succeeded. But the idea that you’re translating this experience for the able bodied who are frequently saying to you either get over it or why aren’t you madder? It’s like you can’t even in your own space, and this is part of what brings us to the book. Because you’re sending yourself to Italy after this conversation with your two friends in the bar, you end up going to Cambodia to work on part of your second PhD. You’re putting yourself into situations where physically you’re walking up the side of a hill to go to your hotel on Lake Como after being on two funiculars and dragging a suitcase up behind you. I mean, there are probably easier places for anyone to stay. But if you’re looking for beauty, an isolated monastery carved into the side of a mountain, near Lake Como sounds pretty great.

CCJ: Oh, it was the best. It was the most incredible. It was when I left that hotel, I really felt significant sorrow, in a really melodramatic way where I was like, oh, gasping that I had to leave like such a stunning place, the way that I wrote this book, I think I had to really think a lot about a reader’s knowledge base about disability, or possible lack thereof. Because when we read anything about any life, we are always bringing our knowledge base our understanding of cultural narratives, our understanding of various stereotypes and our understanding of histories. And if you’re a very avid reader, then you’re also bringing with you perhaps the history of narratives by a person like this, right? You’re reading a campus novel, and you probably have the history of campus novels. And that writer also knows the of the history of campus novels. And then they can write something that’s like an addition to the trajectory of campus novels. And if you’re writing about race in America, there are certain things that you can think like, what’s my audience already going to know about race? What are their expectations about race or certain spaces of power or privilege that I can use those expectations to create a layer of tension or a layer of context that I don’t have to say explicitly on the page, but I know the reader is most likely going to bring with them to the page. If you’re writing about disability at this exact moment in time and hope this changes, it’s much harder to think that the audience has any knowledge of any disabled narrative before you. They’re really classic examples in the field of very influential disability writers or authors that almost no one I talked to, has ever read or heard of, there are very few people who could tell me the details of the ADA fight in the 90s. And who were like really important activists as part of that fight, or the kinds of things that the disability community is constantly fighting or struggling for. And so, as I was writing this book, there is this sort of constant thought for me of like, what are the sort of structural or formal moves that I need to make in order to bring somebody who may not have this grounding a little bit closer to the thing I want them to see. And so I think traveling and pointing out sort of like the absolute hardest aspects of that travel is really, really important. It’s important for me to explain that, yes. And there’s a line as you’re talking about the going up the hill with my suitcase, where I say, some people are watching me lug my suitcase up this hill, and I get a little anxious about it, because they’re getting anxious. And I have this line where I say, like, I’m struggling, but I’m not helpless. And that’s a distinction people don’t always make about disability, it is harder for me, it is a struggle, it doesn’t look very pretty when I’m pulling my suitcase, but I can do it. Like I’m not helpless. And I think the other thing is, I try so hard in talking about other people in the text to also flush out the various struggles that they’re having, that I’m not having, and to say, you know, like our experiences might look on the outside extremely different. But in reality, I think almost everybody is on the spectrum of overcoming some factor about themselves physiological, psychological, emotional, whatever it is, like we’re all sort of doing battle with ourselves all the time. And mine is like stairs. That’s a big one. In the grand scheme of things. That’s pretty lucky if my big struggle is stairs, but I am, you know, constantly trying very hard to bridge a gap between my mind or the disabled, what seems to be, the disabled experience and any reader’s experience and my genuine hope is that this book feels like it’s about and for everyone, and it isn’t about saying here’s how I’m different or here’s how I’m marginalized or here’s how I’m othered.

B&N: You know, part of it, too, is I think so many of us connect beauty to perfection. Somehow there is the standard and it is usually impossible, whether it’s weight or skin and then we move on to money and, you know, lifestyle, things like that. And it’s extraordinary. You have have a moment in the book to where you talk about your dad and how he feels in proximity to beauty. And the example you use is your mother, she’s a very beautiful woman, and your dad feels better about himself when he’s with her because she’s beautiful. And she’s technically classically beautiful in the eyes of other people, your mother’s beauty has no true connection to him, she’s his wife, and that’s great. It’s not his to hold in the way he holds it. And I should mention to your parents have been divorced for a number of years. But it’s so interesting to me the way you challenge these ideas that I think a lot of us walk around with, I know you have kinship with those two friends in the bar because of their depression. And that does put you sort of on the same plane, but then you’re in Cambodia, and you’re talking to your tuk tuk driver. And you realize that not only do you not share language, you don’t share experience. And that disconnection is pretty profound.

CCJ: I think, going back to my dad, I mean, my dad was this great lover of beauty. And in all of its forms, he was really obsessed with all the things the world could give him. And he was extremely hungry for an experience of beauty, an experience of newness and experience of moving itself around the world. But I do think he had a hard time appreciating it for its own sake, which doesn’t make him all that different from anybody else. Like we all have a hard time appreciating it for its own sake. And I think he really wanted like many people do for the experience of beauty to somehow reflect his own worth back to the world. I think this is so common, I think there are many, many people who want a beautiful or socially recognizably attractive partner, because then that reflects worth back on them. If this beautiful creature has chosen them among all the men that you know, she could choose like that that must inherently spark worth in him. And I think sometimes when I travel, and I post a beautiful picture of the sunset, on my Instagram, there’s a little part of me that wants anybody that sees this beautiful sunset to be like Chloe’s experiencing beauty. And that makes her a little bit more interesting or a little bit more sparkly in some way. So I’m certainly not, nor do I think anyone is, is immune to this desire of like using any form of beauty or experience of value. And I’m certainly this is a big reason why people want wealth beyond what they need for comfort is that that wealth, or what you can buy with that wealth, or the beautiful Aston Martin or something parked in your mansion’s driveway, the all of that is an external signal to others of your worth. And don’t we want that because people can’t see our interiority, we need to show people in every possible way we can that we’re valuable. That’s all very understandable. I think all of us share some version of that I think the interesting threshold that I’m really interested both in my father but then also in myself with especially chatra. And my story of being you know, with him in Cambodia is where that threshold is crossed into using people and reducing people to the value that they reflect back to you or using them as a mere symbol of the thing that you really want to tell yourself about yourself. And my mother has this line about my father where she says we were all playing a role in the tableau of his life. That wasn’t unique to me, he didn’t intentionally want to hurt me or my mother. It’s just that’s the only way he could see anything, and anyone and any experience and his career was how it formed, you know, a tableau vivant of his worth. And when I see that I’m capable of doing that to another person in that Cambodia chapter, and that it is not just an experience, it’s happening to me from like, able bodied people who might have some sort of prejudice, but I’m capable of putting all that reductive tendencies or that hurt, like right back into the world that creates a big shift for me and in the book.

B&N: One point, too, you’re talking about how you and your dad were both trying to find direction and purpose in books and art and stories that you were both looking to escape to certain extent as well, but that beautiful books and art are are part of that. So what were you reading to connect with your dad?

CCJ: Well, my dad was obsessed with instilling the great history of Western thought in me and he would at a very, very young age, be reading the like Plato’s dialogues and talking me through you know, Socrates walking around the Agora and challenging people. And I mean, I learned a lot about philosophy very young. He read me Descartes meditations. He also just read me the great works of literature very early on in life, way before it could understand them. But it wasn’t just that history. I mean, he wanted me to share what he saw as his like very refined musical taste. So he was constantly playing me, you know, Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads and punk records that he loved and Bruce Springsteen records and he was teaching me Richard Thompson songs, you know, very young and teaching me the guitar and, and also showing me films that he loved. And I had this really strong memory of, of watching stop making sense as Talking Heads documentary, when I was about like, maybe six or seven, and my father just sort of watching me watch it to see if I could pick up the brilliance of it and, and the sort of uniqueness of that performance, it was important to him to really press his interests on me, but he also read me a lot of poetry and, and he also encouraged me to write so much. So, at one point, my mother says in the book, the love of the life of the mind, you owe that to him. And I have spent so much of my life with the great, you know, a lot of the agency that I’ve had in my life comes from that life of the mind. So he really showed me how much power I could find there. I think if I had been born into anybody, he still would have done that. But I think especially being a young disabled woman, my avenues to power, were certainly not going to be in my physical beauty or my strength. You know, we didn’t have any money, we didn’t have any access to famous relatives. So I think he knew that like the only access road I had to power was my mind and knowledge and the life of the mind. And he gifted that to me, and in such a very powerful way.

B&N: And you have two PhDs, one in English one and philosophy, you were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a piece that you wrote about Ramsey Orta. And yet, you’re still not related to Peter Dinklage. Which brings me to Sundance and your coverage of Sundance and you learning how to do celebrity profiles and movie coverage. And this is a whole different world. But once again, you’re back in the States. And yet, this entire experience at Sundance is the same thing. Doormen making sure that you have a place to stand and just this idea that you make people so anxious, and then, you’re at this party, that’s a birthday party, but Peter Dinklage, who is getting a prize or something and you guys meet, but there are assumptions made by other guests that have no factual basis in reality at all, you just happen in their way of thinking to look the same.

CCJ: I think that’s really common to like, I don’t think it’s disability. I think that happens with race. And if it’s you and one other Asian woman in a room, I think people are gonna go Oh, you’re with Miwa? Well, like what’s, how do you guys know each other from that club that you’re all in? So, I don’t think that’s specific to disability. And I also think it’s a very natural thing the brain does trying to make sense of the absolute chaos that is public life in the brain is constantly constantly seeking to build categories that are recognizable, and place unknown elements into those categories. Yes. So I went to Sundance, there was a period of time. And this book really covers this period of time where I would just sort of take any assignment anyone would give me. So I covered tennis, and I would travel anywhere, like any editor that could give me any assignment, I would go and I was asked to cover Sundance, and I was not invited to this Peter Dinklage party, which was a private birthday party, but also he was getting the star meter Award, which was the award for the most looked up person on IMDb that year, which is interesting, because this is still when Game of Thrones was on. So Game of Thrones is the biggest show in the world. But then also Peter Dinklage is a very beloved character on Game of Thrones, but also is probably the body on Game of Thrones, that creates the most curiosity. So for me that he got the star meter award, there were other people who were like really easy, that famous and I was like, of course, he’s the most looked at person, that body alone has sparked so many people’s curiosity, and then you double it with Game of Thrones. So I went to this party, and I was there before him. And there were all these people who would just be like looking at me, and then sort of be like, who’s Peter here then is Peter with you, like you guys came together? And it’s because we share a very similar physical stature. He has achondroplasia, I don’t, there are certainly lots of differences in our physical stature, but we’re about the same height, we move in sort of similar ways. We have fairly similar proportions. And so people immediately sort of associated me with him. And then we met at this party and had this very amazing moment. He’s like, just a magnetic and sexy and fascinating person who I was like, sort of just deeply starstruck by, in a way I didn’t expect but then after he left, there were several people, especially one woman who wanted me to answer very private questions about him. A woman started asking me like, why doesn’t Peter Dinklage want to play a Christmas elf? Can’t he be an elf, a nice little elf in a Christmas movie? And then also was asking me things like in the movie that he was there for Sundance, he drives a car. How can people like you drive cars And I had to keep reminding people like I don’t actually know him. And I’m not him. And I not an actor. And I can’t answer any of these questions. And the fact that I couldn’t caused a lot of cognitive dissonance. But I think that experience is actually pretty common. Like, I’m sure you’ve been asked to account for someone else, because someone has said to you, aren’t you two of a kind, but I think again, it’s to give people my empathy, I do think there is a lot in the mind, just in our the way that our brain functions that asks us to resolve any discomfort and resolve any cognitive dissonance. And that can lead people to say and do a lot of really strange and quite offensive things.

B&N: But I think the details, too, are what matters. It’s the details that build empathy, that we find the universal in these moments, and for you to walk around in the world and be so aware of other people’s anxiety because how you move in the world is absolutely, I think, something that a lot of people can relate to off the bat. For me, reading. You’re so honest about so many things. I mean, certainly Sex and the way people think that you approach sex or should approach sex, the way you talk about your parents. I mean, your mother is Filipino. You grew up in Kansas, I mean, growing up as a halfie, and then there’s that girl scout story that we’re going to let people read. But here you are. I mean, you’re a biracial kid in Kansas. You didn’t use the word disabled for a long time, because you kept getting slotted in with other kids who are differently abled as well. And you were like, Hey, wait a minute. That’s not me. So these labels that get applied to any of us for whatever thing that it might be, they’re so enraging, because they’re always slapped on by someone else. And then when I see people internalizing them, yeah, my head starts to explode. Are you less vulnerable? Now that you’ve written Easy Beauty?

CCJ: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Just because I have a language. And you said, I spent my whole life not talking about disability, not acknowledging it, not learning about it, not learning about my own history, not learning about other people who have had similar experiences and written about those experiences or fought for certain, right, like, I didn’t want it to exist, largely because there’s such a huge stigma still around disability that I wanted to reject. And it was impossible because I can’t hide it. There’s no hiding it, I can’t pass anywhere, anytime, maybe on Zoom. But nowhere else. Literally, anytime I stepped foot in a public space, I am reminded that my body doesn’t belong. And that is such a difficult thing. And so one thing I’m thinking a lot about it is very heavily in the book is what it means to live in a stareable body. And I take that term largely from the theorists Rosemary Garland Thompson, who wrote a whole book about staring what does it mean to live in a stareable body. And the truth is, is like every single one of us is in a stareable body, depending on context. And just before I’m talking to you, I was reading on Twitter, a Japanese woman talking about not wanting to speak Japanese on the subways right now and feeling a discomfort around herself and her body and her husband, who’s Japanese, and wanting to make themselves as small as possible. This idea of being in a stareable body, and the anxiety that can come from being a staree, the person being stared at, I think is quite universal experience. And the way that we respond to it is really interesting. So for me, I’m in a very stareable body, I go out into public and I garner the intense stares of everyone around me. And if you’ve been stared out, which everyone has, you know, you can feel it. I mean, and there’s actually like, physiological explanations of what’s happening in your brain when somebody’s eyes are on you. So you feel it all around you. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable experience. And what it directly signifies is, you are the odd thing in my environment, you are the odd, inexplicable, possibly dangerous thing in my environment, and to walk out into public and constantly, constantly feel that and in to be fair, for an individual starer that lasts maybe a second, a split second, they stare and they go on, so we’re disabled, we’re okay, I’m in New York, I don’t care, but it’s still happens. And it’s like these pinpricks of constant awareness of like how unusual I am in the visual field or environment of most people that I’m around, and I for a very long time, did not want to think that I had any responsibility in that dynamic that I as the staree could do anything to shape or mold that dynamic, what I wanted was for that dynamic to just go away and not exist and for me to get to go to the grocery store and buy my ice cream and go home and not have this constant friction of confrontation of my strangeness. And so the way that I would try to just resolve that was to pretend it wasn’t disabled and to just reject it as a part of my identity, rather than try to understand it, try to understand what’s happening in the minds of other people, and to really fully integrate it into my own sense of self. I mean, I was married and never talked to my husband about about it until I started writing this book, am I less vulnerable now? 100%, I’m way less vulnerable one just because the fact that I can even have this conversation creates a power and also an absolute rejection of my identity or have the ability to deny my presence in the world. But then I also think if the disabled form and the lives of disabled people are just more familiar to everyone, then that staring is going to dissipate. If we’re just exposed to the lives of others, the less bizarre I am in your visual field. So I do think the act of writing this book is not just an avenue to my own self acceptance, but it’s also a hope and possibly a vain hope, but hope nonetheless, that if you are willing to spend 288 pages in the mind and lived experience of a disabled person, that some of that cognitive dissonance, or some of those barriers, they start to ease maybe just a little bit, whereas if previously, your only experience with disabled people is like watching them die, like in people’s books, so the able bodied people love their lives more like that increases the distance between us and increases my strangeness.

B&N: Yeah, and I’m just gonna quote you again, because this book is so infinitely, infinitely quotable. To seek the truth required one to endure dissonance. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. And that’s exactly what Easy Beauty is. But question for you. What’s next?
CCJ: Well, very briefly, I’m writing a book right now about devotion. And in a similar way that I turn the idea of beauty and the difficulty of beauty over and over and over in my head in this book, I think I’m doing a very different type of book but thinking a lot about devotion, and I am thinking about it for a lot of reasons. One is I’m looking at this painting daily at the Whitney, which is Jada Fails the Rose, a painting that she made over eight years, she worked every day on, she painted it with house paint, which had led in it and eventually gave her cancer and she died. She also got divorced. During this time, she lost her job because she got caught stealing house paint because she was so broke. So this painting cost her quite literally everything her career, her life, her husband, and yet when you read what she’s written about, or the interviews, it’s just this incredible act of devotion. I’m also watching my mother take care of my stepfather who has Alzheimer’s. And I’m watching that very personal act of devotion, one that’s also quite erosive to her life, as any caretaker in a very serious caretaking situation gives tremendously so much of themselves. And then also thinking about the acts of devotion that people have gone through throughout these last very difficult years. And the way that devotion can shift under pressure. So that’s not the greatest elevator pitch. But that’s loosely the next book.

B&N: I do think devotion and beauty are siblings in a way that we don’t often think about. And I think any opportunity we have to ask bigger questions, using literature is a very cool thing. Honestly, there are philosophers you introduced me to while I was reading this book that I had never heard of, because I get most everything through fiction. But now I get a little bit more of the study of philosophy. I’m not sure it’s suddenly going to become a huge part of my reading diet.

CCJ: Yeah, that’s fair.

B&N: But I’m really waiting for the next book as well. I’m really excited for people to experience Easy Beauty. I think there’s just a lot of really great, amazing moments, and some of them are difficult. And you’re really open about that. I think that’s the power of telling your own story. Yeah?

CCJ: Well, if I can make just a quick plug for philosophy. I don’t think anyone should read it if they don’t want to read it. But I do think like the absolute core of what philosophy you know, especially the origins of philosophy are doing is taking an idea that we think we know something about and expanding it. You know, Socrates walks around talking to people in the marketplace and in the street and saying, What is justice? What is love? What is friendship? What is beauty? What is doing the right thing? What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to be a bad person? Was it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to know something? And these are all things that people think they have a basic concept of, we all interact with this concept beauty, or this concept, goodness, or this concept truth. And what philosophy does, you know, over 1000s of years and 1000s of conversations is just expand those ideas and like create a tension. So my hope is that people who read my book, which is about this sort of idea of beauty, that they start it with one relationship to that concept, and they end it with a more nuanced, more complicated, maybe even more frustrating but still wider and more vast idea of it, but that they come to that on their own terms that it’s not me saying here’s where you’re wrong about beauty and here are the list of things that you should know about it but that I just asked them to sort of swim in this idea with me so that necessarily by the time you’re done your feelings and your thoughts and your concepts have grown and like to me what a gift that is that philosophy gives us that because every time those concepts grow you open more avenues for yourself to feel like a sensible to experiences of beauty right? The wider that concept goes with the more complex that concept gets, the more you get to experience and perhaps the deeper you get to experience it so I do think that is philosophy’s general aim and it’s certainly the aim for me in this book. We’ll see if I’m successful.

B&N: Okay, this reader says you were but I’ve read it twice. Chloe Cooper Jones, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Easy Beauty is out now.

CCJ: Thank you for having me.