In this moving, incisive memoir, Jones, a professor and writer born with sacral agenesis, a rare condition that affects her mobility and leaves her in chronic pain, charts the process of coming into her own and taking up space, after a lifetime of reminders — some shockingly overt, others implicit — that her disabled body makes her marginal. Leaving her young son and husband at home in New York, she travels to Italy and Cambodia, ostensibly for dissertation research but really as a way to sate her wanderlust and desire for something novel. She shifts between ruminations on ancient notions of beauty, from Socrates to Plato, and her own background, growing up as the only child of an idealistic white father and more practical Filipino American mother amid all of these assumptions about what her life should look like because she is disabled. Her doctors assume she can never get pregnant, fellow philosophy doctoral students argue over whether she should exist at all. Jones resists sentimentality and is as unsparing of herself as she is of other people, and yet she writes with such graciousness. A wonderful debut. —Tomi Obaro (from 25 Books From 2022 You’ll Love)
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