Jones's preoccupation with outward appearance is one she shares with her father. So she sought comfort in a notion she’d later find articulated in Bosanquet’s definition of 'difficult beauty'-one that required the “insight, endurance, and…attention” of the beholder. Growing up, there was the high school crush who told her ('as your friend') that only 'desperate or ugly' men will ever want to date her, the strangers who stared, insulted, demanded explanations for her body. People are quick to clock the visible effects of Jones’s disability, and she notices them noticing her-first her height, then her walk, then “that legs from the knees down and feet are underdeveloped.” When she was born (“a ball of twisted muscle and folded bone”), the doctors warned her mother that she might not live, and if she did, she’d likely “never walk, never stand unsupported, never have a pain-free life.” They were mostly wrong Jones can stand and walk, though pain, she writes, “plays a note I hear in all my waking moments.” Those doctors were the first in what would become a long list of medical professional, teachers, strangers, and peers who would rush to predict her life’s limits-including, significantly, the doctor who told her she’d never be able to have a child, about a decade before she learned she was five months pregnant. Jones was born with a rare congenital condition known as sacral agenesis, meaning without a sacrum, the bone that sits at the base of the spine and connects it to the pelvis. This rejection is a defense mechanism hard-won after a lifetime spent pushed (or, later, retreating) to the margins.

“Anything of such mass appeal must be…merely facile pleasure,” she writes, “or what British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet called easy beauty.”

Recounting a former student’s insistence that Jones must see Beyoncé live in concert, describing it as the moment of a life-changing epiphany, Jones instinctively dismisses the idea that she might experience anything close to profound at an event so obvious, so loud, so broad as a pop concert. About halfway through Pulitzer Prize finalist Chloé Cooper Jones’s transcendent (and highly anticipated) debut memoir, Easy Beauty, she drops the meaning of the title.

Easy beauty chloé cooper jones