Far From the Tree (2012) by Andrew Solomon

 New York Times 

100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Far From the Tree (2012)

by Andrew Solomon

#67

  This is a 41 hour Audiobook.  I have been trying to get through it since November 20th of last year.  I finally finished a couple days.  Four separate check-outs.  Truly a beast of an Audiobook and depressing as hell, but I totally get while it was included.  Solomon, known for his journalism and his memoir about depression tackles this project charting societal attitudes towards "children who are different than their parents" with characteristic ambition.  Each chapter was an average of eight hours.  He covers deafness, dwarfs. down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, rape, criminals and transgenders with book-ending chapters about his own experience growing up gay and later experience as a gay dad of a very modern family.

  As Solomon repeatedly acknowledges, his sample is limited by parents of these different sorts of children and the children themselves who want to sit down to extensive interviews with a nosy journalist asking all sorts of extremely private questions.  Solomon is right on top of his major theme: Which is that even allowing for the need of humans to find meaning in cruel fate, parents of these children are by in large grateful for their experience.   One group that was noticeably, noticeably absent from every single chapter of this book was any input from the "normal" siblings of the subjects of this book.  As one of those siblings, and a reader of this book, I was astonished how every chapter featured the parents DESCRIBING how the normal siblings felt or what they thought they felt, but that almost none of them actually were asked anything.

   One of the justifications, traditionally, for warehousing children in these various categories was that it would have a negative impact on the "normal" siblings, which means that in each chapter that viewpoint is explicitly ruled out and ignored.  In some chapters it makes sense- I would hope and expect the hearing and normal sized siblings of the deaf and dwarves would be able to make a go of it.  The next four chapters: down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia and disability- which means basically vegetables, could have used some perspectives from the children in these families who have to watch their parent's lives irrevocably altered and generally ruined.  Of course, the parents can and do need to come to terms with it, but I would have liked to hear how out that ceaseless attention impacted the later lives of the siblings.

   The chapter on Prodigies is a clear outlier in that Prodigies carries a positive connotation, but paradoxically this is the one chapter where the parents often come off as manipulative and selfish. The last three chapters- rape, criminals and transgender were almost impossibly cruel in their details.  I think actually the transgender chapter was the hardest of all- hearing from parents who'd had their whole world destroyed because they lived in a small town and had a child who decided He wanted to be a She at a young age.  Published in 2012, I was still frequently shocked by the treatment experienced by the transgender families with young kids.  I certainly won't forget Far From the Tree.