Book description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * A Washington Post, Time,Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year * “Gorgeous, vividly alive.” —The New York Times * “Soul-stretching, breathtaking…A game-changing gift to readers.” —Booklist (starred review)
From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor,…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Easy Beauty as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book is a mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting biographical reflection that asks why we see beauty and disability the way we do.
Jones is herself a philosopher and is disabled. Through anecdotes of ways she has been treated (also by philosophers), stories of her own birth and her unexpected pregnancy, and accounts of her travels (including going to see a Beyoncé concert!), she upended my ideas about beauty and about being able-bodied.
She helps us ask why we think of ability the way we do and why expanding our openness to beauty could help build a more beautiful world. I finished it…
From Lydia's list on women who asked why.
The best way to learn how to write a memoir is to read a lot of memoirs. It expands your sense of the possibilities (“what? I’m allowed to do that?”), provides you with techniques to steal for your own work, helps you identify your distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and inspires you to keep going when self-doubt and weariness swoop in. I could recommend memoirs all day, but here’s a brand new one I’m reading right now that I love. It’s written by a philosophy professor with a skeletal disorder (like me!) and combines reflections on art, beauty, and disability…
From Helena's list on to read if you're thinking of writing a memoir.
If you love Easy Beauty...
These Blue Mountains
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Want books like Easy Beauty?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Easy Beauty.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,340
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like Easy Beauty, you might also like...
Foxfire in the Snow
It's a time of change, between magic and alchemy.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
The Main Gate
Dr. Elise Marquette has spent years burying the past—until the past refuses to stay buried.
Hired to join Earth’s first interstellar contact team, she hopes the vastness of space will finally offer distance from the ghosts of war and the wounds left by a mother who never let her be…
