“Easy Beauty” Named the Common Read

Sweet Briar College is pleased to announce that the 2023-24 Common Read is Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones.

Cooper Jones, a philosophy professor and feature writer whose work has been published in leading newspapers and journals and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital condition that affects her mobility.

Her 2022 memoir, Easy Beauty, is a powerful, candid, moving account of the author’s journey through life in a body that is different, taking her from memories of childhood to discussions of the aesthetics of beauty, sexuality, body image, motherhood, meditations on how she is seen (or not seen), and on travels ranging from art galleries in Rome, to a Beyoncé concert in Milan, to sites of genocide in Cambodia, and more.

Easy Beauty has received laudatory reviews: The New York Times named it a Notable Book of 2022; Vulture called it the “#1 Memoir of 2022;” and it made the Best Books of 2022 lists of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Time, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, BookList, and the New York Public Library.

The annual Common Read provides the students, faculty, and staff of Sweet Briar with a shared experience, fosters discussion on a wide range of issues, and introduces us all to new perspectives through literature. Recent Common Read selections include Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey by Homer, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Sixth Extinction.

Copies of Easy Beauty are available to members of the Sweet Briar community. Cooper Jones will give a presentation on campus on March 27, 2024.