Easy Beauty: On Seeing and Being Seen

Chloé Cooper Jones' memoir, "The Neutral Room," is a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. It explores disability, identity, and the human capacity for more, challenging social taboos about the disabled body and unpacking myths of beauty. Born with sacral agenesis, Cooper Jones found solace in a dissociative space until becoming pregnant and reconsidering the power of beauty.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 04 May 2023
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

An exquisite exploration of disability, identity, and the human capacity to do (and be) more than we've ever dreamed, "The Neutral Room" is a captivating memoir that challenges the unspoken social taboos about the disabled body and unpacks the myths of beauty and our complicity in upholding them.

Born with sacral agenesis, a visible congenital disability that affects her stature and gait, Chloé Cooper Jones has always found solace in what she thought of as the neutral room - a dissociative space in her mind that offered her solace and self-protection, but also kept her isolated.

However, when she became pregnant (disproving her doctor, who had assumed it impossible), something necessary in her started to crack, forcing her to reckon with her defensive positionality to the world and the people in it. This prompted an odyssey across time and space as Chloé - while at museums, operas, concerts, and sporting events, and in the presence of awe-inspiring nature - reconsidered the consciousness-shifting power of beauty.

"The Neutral Room" has been hailed as a book of the year by numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Time, BuzzFeed, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and New York Public Library. It is a testament to the author's resilience, creativity, and ability to see the world through a different lens, and it will leave readers inspired and transformed.

Weight: 230g
Dimension: 127 x 197 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780349013800