Harare Review of Books

288 pages.

Expected publication date: 5 April 2022.

Finished reading on Mar 8, 2022.

Genre: Non-fiction/Memoir.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Simon & Schuster for this eARC.

First of all, this will not be to everyone’s taste (partly because no book ever is). To locate it: it sits at the intersection of living with a disability and Western philosophy, expressed as a study of beauty. Not everyone cares about (Western) philosophy, or wants to read pages and pages of it. I don’t. However, I connected with the author’s struggles because I’ve lived a lot of them, too; I found this book triggering, and so read it very slowly. I can’t imagine what those who don’t connect with the living with a disability might make of it: will it mean anything? Will it be educational? Will it get tiresome?

The strongest parts for me were when she related her own story — and, correspondingly, the weakest were the philosophical bits, which I understood as Ms Cooper making logical sense of her lived experience (as is her right, of course, but I didn’t connect with that).

In short, this is a difficult book to review, recommend, or rate, as it will either be deeply meaningful to you (as it was to me), or not. It is, however, an excellent addition to memoirs, to memoirs by women, and to memoirs about living with a disability.