Beyond Measure: Essays

by Rachel Z. Arndt

Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.

Rachel Z. Arndt’s writing has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Quartz, The Believer, and elsewhere. She received MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and nonfiction editor of The Iowa Review. After stints in Rhode Island and New York, she now lives in Chicago and works as a reporter at Modern Healthcare, covering healthcare technology.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

Published April 10, 2018

Reviews

[AL Kepple · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the insight into living with narcolepsy to be the most interesting.

It is always interesting to see the process of living our lives through the lens of someone who has taken different paths than you have.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was glad to have stumbled across this book at Powell’s; I found the longer essays (“Sleep,” “Match,” “Commute”) more successful than the shorter sketches, which often left me wanting more. I was especially interested in Arndt’s experience with narcolepsy, an illness whose experience isn’t well represented in memoir.

[Kaylie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rachel’s voice is precise, melancholic, addictive. Being inside the spinning out of someone else’s brain for once is a pleasant, curious relief, but it will leave you with the same strange heaviness she describes. A keen tongue paired with an unusual eye; strong prose.

[Mary Nee · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is precise,and addictive.It is curious being inside someone else's brain.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to Sir Thomas Browne, “We term sleep a death and yet it is waking that kills us.” Narcoleptic essayist Rachel Z. Arndt shows how too much sleep and uncontrollable sleep can lead the living to envy the dead. Let nature take its course and you’ll drift helplessly into dreamland at the height of the Nine Inch Nails encore. Overcorrect with too many stimulants and career through the venue into the night with “the manic enthusiasm of someone looking for a misplaced wallet in her own house, tearing through drawers and moving every object because movement feels like a solution.” To accompany Arndt on a voyage through sleep disorders, judo competitions, excessive sweating, running late, cycling across Iowa, online dating, swindling Bed, Bath & Beyond with illegitimate returns and other strange and familiar manifestations of the human condition, check out “Beyond Measure.” Count sheep as the words and paragraphs pile up around you, and raise new eyes amid the life sentence that is your own.

[Jody Keisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arndt's essays have a kind of kinetic energy running through them--even when she's writing about narcolepsy--that kept me turning pages, eager to see how else she would measurements and data as a unique "way in" to understand (and quantify?) the human condition.

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Time runs like colors, like tights. Time crawls and time passes -not away, in euphemistic death, but by, like passing by a storefront."

"Waiting" was just an excellent essay about returning to judo several years after competing in high school. "I like that mystical moment (the match), but it took so much waiting to get there."
"What am I waiting for now? And how long will I have to wait to find out? And what will I do to busy myself while I wait for an answer? And what if I decide the wait's not worth it? Then what?"

Other engrossing essays concerned her sleep disorder and diagnosis, and trying to calibrate the medication with daily events.

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