“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Easy Beauty is a groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and a journey to far-flung places in search of a new way of seeing and being seen.

Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy NYC hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the US to secure the American dream for their children, she is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does sometimes wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.

Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, Meghan O’Rourke’s speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America—even greater with the advent of “Long Covid”—and where we go from here.