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A Memoir About Short Stature and Inner Growth
Pearlsong Press
September 2006
On Sale: September 15, 2006
264 pages
ISBN: 1597190055
EAN: 9781597190053
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Non-Fiction Memoir
A touching, tender and at times funny account of a woman's
struggle for stature in a 4 foot 8 1/2 inch tall body,
Beyond Measure speaks to the heart of soul-breaking attempts
to fit an arbitrary and elusive cultural ideal of physical
perfection. Being short isn't the problem, Ellen Frankel
insists. Instead, the real difficulties lie in the social
bias against short people. Ellen shares the difficulties of
living short in a world in which stereotypes are based on
gender and size. She moves beyond her own experience into
the political realm in revealing how pharmaceutical
companies--with government backing--are expanding the market
for human growth hormone treatment by reclassifying healthy
short children as patients in "need" of such injections in
hopes of making them taller. She shares the dilemma of being
subjected to simultaneous messages that her physical body
should be bigger--that is, taller, but not wider--while her
expansive spiritual body should be smaller. As a result of
too much attention on the external rather than the internal
workings of the soul, Ellen flirts with eating disorders and
unhealthy relationships with powerful males in an attempt to
compensate for her feelings of not "measuring up." In the
process, her real self slips farther away. The path out of
her dilemma lies in the shadow of the tallest mountain on
Earth. It is through a spiritual pilgrimage to Nepal that
Ellen discovers her own strength and spirit, and that we are
all dwarfed by Everest and beyond measure.
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