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Are You My Child?
Life-shaping differences between children and their parents.
November/December 2012
Reviewed by Carlo Rotella ’94PhD
Carlo Rotella ’94PhD is director of American Studies at Boston College. His latest book, published this fall, is Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories.
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Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon ’85
Scribner, $37.50 |
In the opening pages of Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon recounts how, by the
time he was two years old, his mother had realized that he was dyslexic and set
out to teach him to read. Ignoring dire predictions that he was a hopeless
case, she sat him in her lap for whole afternoons at a stretch to pursue a
heroic regimen of phonetic drills and flash cards that helped him become a
proficient reader—and eventually, of course, a celebrated writer. (His previous
book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of
Depression, received the 2001
National Book Award for nonfiction, among other honors.) The anecdote’s just a paragraph
long. Here’s the next-to-last sentence: “The standards of perpetual triumph
were high in our house, and that early victory over dyslexia was formative;
with patience, love, intelligence, and will, we had trounced a neurological
abnormality.” Then comes the kicker: “Unfortunately, it set the stage for our
later struggles by making it hard to believe that we couldn’t reverse the creeping
evidence of another perceived abnormality—my being gay.”
It’s the first of the
book’s many capsule stories, each a highly crafted mini-novel a few sentences
or pages long, in which families reckon with life-shaping differences between
children and their parents. Solomon’s subject is horizontal identity, the kind
of selfhood that develops when a child “has an inherent or acquired trait that
is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a
peer group.” That’s as opposed to vertical identity: ethnicity, nationality,
language, and other such attributes that are typically “passed down from parent
to child across the generations not only through strands of DNA, but also
through shared cultural norms.” Bracketed by Solomon’s opening and closing
accounts of being a son and a father, the book’s chapter titles span a range of
horizontal possibilities: Deaf, Dwarfs, Down Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia,
Disability, Prodigies, Rape, Crime, Transgender. Horizontal identity is what
unites the community you discover, often online after Googling your condition,
when you realize that whatever vertical identity you got from your parents
isn’t going to be enough.
Solomon refers more than once to
“Welcome to Holland,” Emily Perl Kingsley’s much-reproduced therapeutic parable
about learning to accept the unexpected in your children. Kingsley describes
boarding a plane for a long-anticipated trip to Italy, but when the plane lands
you discover that for some reason it has gone to Holland, and you suddenly face
an entirely different experience: windmills, not the Colosseum; Rembrandts, not
Michelangelos. The change in destinations comes as a shock, but it’s just
different, not worse; you can adjust. In Solomon’s study of comparative
horizontalities, the parents of deaf children, dwarfs, or children with Down
syndrome or autism often find their way to a “Welcome to Holland” account of
their lives, but that’s not so true of parents of children who are diagnosed
with schizophrenia or become criminals. In his most fascinating chapter, the
parents of musical and intellectual prodigies are undone to a surprising degree
by their child’s extraordinary gift, often having a harder time than parents
whose children have what society regards as a significant disability.
Struggling mightily to come to terms with a child touched by a genius beyond
their powers of understanding and instruction, some parents of prodigies
respond by entirely effacing themselves, others by becoming supercontrolling
and forlornly larger than life.
Setting out to render the sweep of
horizontal identity, Solomon has undertaken a big book in every sense of the term.
Like Anne Fadiman’s The
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Rebecca Skloot’s The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Far from the Tree braids together science and medical
writing, family narrative, a first-person account of the author’s own journey,
mastery of research in multiple fields, exemplary legwork, and literary
storytelling chops. But where Fadiman and Skloot go deep on one specimen
family, Solomon extends his reach to embrace dozens, culled from among the more
than three hundred families he interviewed.
Solomon demonstrates command of a great
deal of knowledge, and he has a winning way of clarifying hotly contested
issues—cochlear implants for the deaf, for instance—that inspire others to
sling around words like “genocide.” But the essence of his craft can be found
in the family stories. These tales share familiar contours, from the moment
that parents first realize something’s different about their child (he stops
pointing at things, or she sits down at the piano and plays Rachmaninoff by
ear) to the denouement in which a family either stretches to accommodate an enormous
new fact or tears itself to pieces. It’s striking how many arrive at a workable
accommodation. Far from
the Tree, for the most part a
study of acceptance, takes the “anti-Tolstoyan view that the unhappy families
who reject their variant children have much in common, while the happy ones who
strive to accept them are happy in a multitude of ways.” Solomon shows us
families responding to difference by taking their best shot at being a family
over the long haul, an effort that constitutes much of what it means to be a
family at all. Subtract the unlikeness that distinguishes children from their
parents and you’ve got something less than a family.
“Difference is what unites us,” Solomon
argues. “The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and
lonely state.” The remarkable families in the book serve as extreme cases of a
universal struggle to bond across and along the lines of difference: “All
offspring are startling to their parents; these most dramatic situations are
merely variations on a common theme.” Solomon holds himself to a high standard
of restraint, kindness, and reason, but he doesn’t try to hide the passion that
animates him. He intends to move those who have felt themselves isolated by the
experience of difference to recognize that they form “a vast company”—a
majority, in fact. If his book is a call to arms, then deep in a paragraph on
page 18 can be found his battle cry: “Everyone is flawed and strange; most
people are valiant, too.”  |
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