GM: You and your husband were also raising a young kid at the time.ĬCJ: At the time of this conversation, my son Wolfgang was four years old. And, in the midst of that argument, he also said, “I don’t think anyone would deny that disability inherently makes your whole life worse.” I was like, I do disagree with that, but I didn’t know how to articulate that disagreement. Greg Marshall: Can you talk about the decision to start writing nonfiction about your life and specifically about disability?Ĭhloé Cooper Jones: There was this night I write about in the beginning of the book where I was out with two friends and one of them made the argument that from the position of an ethical philosopher, disabled people shouldn’t be alive, and that eugenics actually had a great moral grounding to it, it’s just unpopular to say so. And to make us both sound exactly as smart as we are. My conversation with Chloé took place over Zoom and has been edited for clarity and concision. “This is ridiculous! Greg can do it.”Įasy Beauty is an exploration of that difference, a book that unflinchingly plumbs the paradoxes of dark tourism in Cambodia, the “blunt, triumphant” but ultimately redeeming spectacle of a Beyoncé concert in Milan and the ableist under- and overtones at a Sundance party where she shares a moment of bodily communion with actor Peter Dinklage.
If my big sister is in town, she’ll physically block my husband from going up the stairs to get my shoes. I walk with a limp from cerebral palsy and have a brain that, on good days, leads my husband to liken me to an absentminded professor and on bad days has friends and coworkers using words like “learned helplessness” and “weaponized incompetence” to describe my general state of disarray. Oh, yes, and we both have lived with disability our entire lives. It was only recently, though, that Chloé and I began talking about the thing most strangers notice about us right off the bat: we’re both stunningly gorgeous.
(Chloé gave a lovely reading I gave an ill-conceived toast that made light of my Mormon ancestry and featured jokes about incest and polygamy.) We’ve gotten drinks in a bar in Lawrence, eaten gourmet doughnuts from a food truck in Austin, attended a mutual best friend’s wedding in Salt Lake City.
I’ve known the writer Chloé Cooper Jones since 2011.
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