In her memoir 'Easy Beauty,' CCooperJones confronts a subject she’d long avoided: her own experience of disability. A conversation with ameliaschonbek
Chloé Cooper Jones and her son, Wolfgang, at the Whitney Museum. Photo: Courtesy of Chloé Cooper Jones For many years, Chloé Cooper Jones tried to ignore her body. She was born with a rare congenital condition that shaped her physical self and often left her in acute physical pain.
I used to feel as though my body was something I had to wait for people to unsee. I could be wrong about this, but I really believed I could see the exact second in which somebody kind of forgot about my body. It was like a visual tension that was released. It would happen for some people really, really quickly. And for some people it would never happen — they’d always have a startle response. But I would just wait.
Often the public spaces or places that we go or don’t go are actually choices about where we feel that space is going to put us on that spectrum. So you could really chart this tension, this duality I referenced, geographically in my life. Me being in New York City instead of in a smaller town is absolutely about wanting to be in a place where there’s so much physical human variety that I’m not necessarily the oddest thing somebody’s seen.
There’s a scene in the book where I’m with another disabled person and that act of translation is dropped for a second — it was at this party where I met the actor Peter Dinklage. Coming home after that, looking at the people who unequivocally loved me more than and knew me better than anyone else, I realized, Oh, there’s this huge, huge part of my life that I just can’t share with them. And that is a really lonely feeling. But of course that is actually true for all of us.
My mind reaches for all of those things, but it also reaches for natural beauty in the world, for the love of and understanding of strangers and loved ones alike, and for a kinship with art and aesthetic experience — whether it be with Beyoncé or Bernini. The theory that I’ve read has also really shaped me as a thinker and helped me be in a better dialogue with myself and the way I see the world.
And I also love that it could be part of the intention of writing or making art to say, I want to pull out this thing that I think is in us, and I want to see if I can put it in a sentence or a brush stroke. If I can, when you look at it, we’re going to have a form of communication that we can’t have through casual language, can’t have any other way.
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