Let us first discuss size. At 962 pages -- including more than 200 pages of citations -- Andrew Solomon's "Far From the Tree" is a mammoth commitment. (Also, in this petite reviewer's experience, a handy booster seat for low chairs.)
"Far From the Tree," subtitled "Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity," is a lyrical ethnography based on this simple premise: It is a struggle to raise a child who is created not in your image but as something starkly different and strange.
Parents expect and take pride in their children's "vertical identities" -- traits such as eye color, language, ethnicity or religion that are inherited or cultivated. These tend to be seen as desirable; they're easy to accept.
But some children are who they are in spite of their parents. Dwarfs born to tall couples; deaf babies to hearing people; children with Down syndrome to Ph.Ds. These children belong to "horizontal identities" that their parents can neither understand nor share.
"Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger," Solomon writes. "The more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity."
Solomon divides the book into 10 "chapters" (Schizophrenia, Transgender, Disability, etc.) and bookends these with sections called "Son" and "Father." In a way, this is Solomon's memoir told through a global lens.
I'm the mother of an autistic son and so I began by reading Autism. This was a mistake. I was disappointed in Solomon's telling of what I saw as my story. It was both too familiar and gratingly off-key.
Betsy Burns? Jim Sinclair? Temple Grandin, again? After I swore I'd slap the next person who uttered her name? It seemed that Solomon had rehashed every bit of autism lore I'd read over two decades. I finished the section aggrieved and depressed.
