Staff Writer Helen Chen attended the latest installment of Nonfiction Dialogues, featuring Chloé Cooper Jones on encounters with beauty, art, and the journey that inspired her newest book.

Chloé Cooper Jones, newly minted professor at the School of the Arts, sits down in Dodge 501 with legions of her student-slash-fans and Liz Harris, Chair of the Writing Program at Columbia University, to discuss her acclaimed novel, Easy Beauty. Jones is a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (“Pulitzer Loser,” as she humors.) 

Easy Beauty engages deeply with aesthetic philosophy, drawing upon Jones’ expertise as a philosophy student and scholar. Our experiences with beauty in the world offers us “contemporary reprieve.” Jones engages with Iris Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing,” a process “where we can free ourselves from the palace of self-regard.” 

So much great pleasure in our lives derives from easy beauty. Easy beauty, as Jones describes, is embedded in the everyday: sunsets, chalk of moon, melody from a favorite song. Difficult beauty is the plane Jones feels like her value has existed on. It is an experience of pondering, interpreting, and intellectualizing. In other words, the threshold of understanding—to extend empathy— towards Jones’ unique struggles navigating the world is much higher than, say, perceiving the beauty of a sunset. Born with sacral agenesis, a condition that brings daily pain, Jones constantly has to make “pain calculations” for her body everyday, but for Jones, articulating and advocating for herself these experiences is often difficult. 

In fact, Jones’ entire project is, as she explains, “mired in the struggle of what it takes to change oneself internally.” Following this, Harris and Jones discuss the pervasive cultural messaging that dehumanizes the disabled body by making it less whole—less human—through on-screen and literary representations that reduce disabled lives into tropes. 

“They’re either extremely angelic” or  “a bad omen” or “the character that dies first.” At a Peter Dinklage party (the bouncer did let her in after she asked nicely:) At the party, she was immediately thought to be associated with Dinklage and became his “translator” despite their vastly different experiences. Constant acts of translation with others who don’t understand your lived experiences and what your body experiences is a difficult one. While communicating her experiences, whether to her loved ones or strangers is inevitable, when she spoke with Dinklage, the spark of mutuality made her “feel seen.” 

“I want to be seen as whole, real, and inherently worthy,” said Jones. As a result, “I must extend the same humanity to others.” It’s why there’s no “villain” in Jones’ stories. She resists simple interpretations, instead focuses on presenting people in their full humanity. 

In discussing her book, Liz Harris noted the stunning attention to physicality and keen observations of places. Jones has always been interested in observing dimensions of the body and the experiences of traveling. She is recognized for her (dazzling!) sports and travel writing, spaces Jones notes, that often exclude disabled women. Her work has appeared on GQ, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine, and has been anthologized by The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Sports Writing. Her profiles for Denis Shapovalov and Juan Martín del Potro can be found here. 

She concludes by reading the last sections of Easy Beauty, which begins like this: “I return from Italy so hopeful, but I return to Brooklyn, still myself.” By the memoir’s end, she confesses, in response to an audience question, that she didn’t accomplish—nor did she set out to achieve—dramatic change. She did however gain, through her mediations, “heightened self-awareness and a lifetime project of continued growth.”

This event is part of the Creative Writing Lecture Series hosted by the School of the Arts.

Photo via Matty Davis for Columbia School of the Arts