Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones
“I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life is worth living.”
Born with a rare congenital ailment called sacral agenesis, Chloé has lived her life on the margins. Doctors told her parents that she probably wouldn’t be able to walk, that she won’t be able to have children; her friends assume what she can’t do, angering her in their misplaced displays of helpfulness. These comments on her body, what is and what is not best for it, strip back her sense of autonomy. After a harrowing conversation between a colleague and his friend, Chloé is propelled to leave her family to travel across the globe, to envelope herself in those spaces and experiences she always felt had been denied from her.
The memoir begins in Rome, between the four walls of the Galleria Borghese, encircled by an array of classical sculptures: Pluto, Venus, Proserpine, Cupid, and so on. The art is founded on concepts of symmetry – Grecian and Roman notions of beauty – an archaic aestheticism that has ebbed into the present. When considering age-old ideas of beauty, we are immediately drawn to how disability functions in the context of looking, gazing and seeing. Ancient beauty is ‘symmetrical’, ‘orderly’, and ‘easy’, Chloé remarks; all the things she has never felt about her body – a body that has caused her pain and drawn the eyes of those around her. She notices a man in the gallery and the encounter becomes charged with another type of seeing – that of the erotic gaze, of voyeurism – only to immediately crumble when she feels her disability come into play. It is as if John Berger’s Ways of Seeing has been superimposed onto the opening; it is clever and scholarly, alive with philosophical questioning.
But what is also inherently clear from this scene is how art is a form of interpretation, and how artists decipher the same stories and figures differently. Inherent in each sculpture is a unique way of seeing. And this is the same for each of us, that is, if we take the bold step to re-examine ourselves from new angles. To compensate for how she feels about her body, Chloé seeks out spaces of intellectualism and philosophy to elevate herself beyond what she feels has been denied her – a bodily sense of belonging. She searches for those kinds of beauty that can take us outside of ourselves, as if testing a philosophical hypothesis.
Chloé turns to philosophy and art to examine, not only beauty, but seeing, spaces, and ownership. She travels to the Cambodian Killing Fields to examine why tourists enter these sites, and to a Beyoncé concert and Roger Federer tennis match to gaze upon the celebrity body in all its glory. Chloé experiences life through the lens of those social constructions and gazes that others have bestowed on her. But as the novel progresses, it is clear how much Chloé has internalised the demeaning gaze of others, how complicit she is in her own othering, and how she is sometimes wrong about the way others see her. She consistently expects others to make the worst interpretations of her and seeks out comfort in the margins. It is when she sees how her child, Wolfgang, is absorbing her attitude to life that she realises she has to change. She cannot continue to hold this private space inside herself. She has to realign and re-examine her own ways of seeing.
Although the love she feels for Wolfgang is an undercurrent throughout the novel, learning how to be authentically part of her own family is a struggle. And while she may travel across the globe, Chloé ultimately journeys to return home, to family, and to herself. Candid and truth-seeking, this memoir charts the act of refocusing and realigning the way we view and interpret ourselves.
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