How does it feel to be a mom of a teenage dwarf who's desperate to start dating? What if we love a daughter we recognised when we were raped yet can't bear to be overwhelmed by her? And, as a father of a happy, nonetheless profoundly deaf son who's forgotten how it feels to hear, how do we deal with your memories of a times we played music together?
Gina Triplett
FAR FROM THE TREE
Parents, Children, as well as a Search for Identity
By Andrew Solomon
962 pp. Scribner. $ 37.50.
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A Writer Who Embraces Difference (November 19, 2012)
M. Sharkey
Andrew Solomon, in light shirt, with members of his own family.
"Parenting is no competition for perfectionists," Andrew Solomon rather gloriously unde! rstates toward a finish of "Far From a Tree," a generous, benevolent as well as in formidable as well as unexpected ways compassionate book about what it means to be a parent. A techer in psychoanalysis during Cornell as well as a writer of "The Noonday Demon," a National Book Award-winning discourse about his journey by depression, Solomon outlayed 10 years interviewing some-more than 300 families with "exceptional" children. That is, young kids with "horizontal identities," a term he uses to encompass all a "recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values as well as preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors."
He developed what appear to be genuine relations (entailing mixed visits, generous information exchnage as well as poignant follow-up over a number of years) with families of individuals affected by a spectrum of cognitive, physical or mental differences: "They have been deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or mixed serious disabilities; they have been prodigies; they have been people recognised in rape or who dedicate crimes; they have been transgender." His interviews yielded nearly 40,000 twin pages as well as his "anti-Tolstoyan" conclusion that "the unhappy families who reject their variant young kids have much in common, whilst a happy ones who strive to accept them have been happy in a multitude of ways."
Bookending this measureless core of element have been insinuate accounts of Solomon's own experiences: first, as a son of relatives who lovingly helped him overcome his dyslexia, yet struggled (as he did) with a thought that he was gay, his own "horizontal identity"; as well as afterwards finally, as well as very movingly, as an awkward as well as awed brand new father himself.
This is a passionate as well as inspiring work that will shake up up your preconceptions as well as leave we in a better place. It's a book everybody should review and, although everybody won't (at a hefty 700 pages of text, with some-mo! re than 100 pages of notes, it's no slot guide), there's no a single who wouldn't be a some-more talented as well as bargain primogenitor or tellurian being for having done so.
As a psycho-sociological study, it's critical as well as unrivaled; no a single has ever collated this volume of evidence before. And even yet a book competence have benefited from occasional tightening, it still makes for breathtaking reading a vivid as well as retaining comment of who we have been right now, as well as what just happens when we try to make some-more of ourselves.
"There is no such thing as reproduction," Solomon points out upon a initial page, only acts of "production." And notwithstanding a actuality that we never know utterly what or whom we'll produce, it's a single of a slightest bitter truths of tellurian existence that, in any box of what pain as well as agonise they put us through, we never ever regret a children. "It is not pang that is precious," he notes when recalling a depths of his depression, "but a concentric pearlescence with that we contain it."
More than anything, "Far From a Tree" is a book about precisely that containment. Throughout, Solomon proves a calm as well as likable beam open, curious, nonjudgmental, not too politically scold as well as also possessed of a clarity of amusement as well as honesty, which, we imagine, endeared him to his subjects. If he has expectations as well as prejudices "My arrogance about deafness was that it was a deficit as well as nothing more" he is only too peaceful to have them demolished. After all, as he explains here with fresh frankness, he too knows about a humiliations concerned in a poke for (in his case, sexual) identity. He knows what it is to feel similar to a freak.
Julie Myerson is a writer of eight novels as well as three works of nonfiction, together with "The Lost Child."
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