Earlier this year, Arianne Cohen, a combination of personal recollection and journalistic investigation into the culture of (and the science behind) tall people. She got a lot of media attention—including the cover of the magazine section of the London newspaper The Observer—but then Cohen’s been subject to attention all her life, given her above-average height (6’3″). We asked her about the process of taking something that made her feel self-conscious throughout her childhood and adolescence and turning into the cornerstore of a literary career.
“As a writer, I’ve always found that the pieces that are the most meaningful to readers are on subjects that really pricked my emotional nerves: the stories that are hard to talk about, the ones I don’t jump to tell,” she told us. “I do a writing exercise sometimes where I ask myself what are the stories that I don’t tell anyone. If you’ve never told anyone a story, and it’s not boring, then it’s probably worth exploring on the page. Not because navel-gazing is fulfilling (it’s not—quite the contrary, it dredges up happily buried issues), but because it likely approaches some sort of essential truth.”
Because of her height, less-than diligent (and sometimes less-than-sober) observers have sometimes told Cohen she looks like a man, and she confesses that the (fortunately rare) experience can still upset her. “Yet in researching the book,” she explained, “I discovered that tall women are really just caught up in our culture’s larger confusion about what ‘feminine’ is. We tend to automatically associate femininity and gender with size, which is certainly not accurate, and extremely unpleasant for tall women and short men alike. So what was gnawing at me all those years connects to a much larger societal truth.”
But, Cohen emphasizes, The Tall Book isn’t a confessional memoir. “Only 20 percent of the book is my personal experience,” she explains, “and the vast majority of the ‘ah-ha!’ moments in the book come through research findings, or my own discoveries made based on all that research… [It’s] really a book about being different, masquerading around tall clothing.” And with a fan-mail-to-books-bought ratio of about 10 percent, Cohen is increasingly confident that she’s hit that mark.