susan cohen

The feedback we've gotten about "Normal at Any Cost" has been fascinating, and often personal.

There was the woman who remembers her parents arguing over whether to stunt her growth. Her father won the argument, by begging her mother to please tell him she wasn't doing this so their daughter would end up cute and cuddly for some football player. Throughout her childhood, this woman remembers her father saying things such as: good things come in small packages, but better things come in taller packages. She is a 6'2" attorney, married, and there was a picture in the Chronicle of her pole dancing -- upside down with her long, long legs fully exposed. She is grateful she wasn't treated.

There was the 90-year-old woman who wrote the paper that she had always liked herself, and she was also over six feet.

There were women who had been treated, and said they were grateful. Though one wrote that she'd had two bouts of breast cancer and would never know whether or not the estrogen pills had been to blame. She still prefered to go through life at 5'11" than taller.

We also got a letter from a man who belongs to a group called the National Association of Short Statured Adults, who said this was a book he'd been waiting to read for quite a while. He wrote: "Part of what we do at NOSSA is try to educate people about issues of heightism and of course one of our platforms is the use of HGH in children. Genentech, Pfizer and Eli Lilly promote the idea that being a short male isn't a very good thing, while we say otherwise. It's not being short that is bad, it is how us short people are treated that is the real atrocity. Maybe these phamaceutical companies can come up with a drug to treat the part of the brain that contributes to the thought that someone is superior to another based on a physical trait.
Now, wouldn't that be a money maker? LOL"