Excerpt from: Media dis&dat (click for full article)
Andrew Solomon’s enormous new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents,
Children, and the Search for Identity,” is about children who are born
or who grow up in ways their parents never expected. It’s a subject Mr.
Solomon knows from experience. He was dyslexic as a child and struggled
to learn to read. As he described in “The Noonday Demon,”
which won a National Book Award in 2001, he once suffered from
crippling, suicidal depressions. And Mr. Solomon is gay, which made his
parents so uncomfortable that as a teenager he visited sexual surrogates
in the hopes of “curing” himself.
Mr. Solomon, 49, is also different — different from most writers, anyway
— in that he is independently wealthy and lives in baronial splendor in
a West Village town house that once belonged to Emma Lazarus, who,
though she wrote about those poor, huddled masses, was not herself among
them. The book party for “Far From the Tree” was held not in some
editor’s cramped Upper West Side apartment but at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Mr. Solomon has recently been named a trustee.
His other great discovery, he added, was joy. He had been prepared to
encounter sadness in the families he visited; what surprised him was how
much love there was. “This book’s conundrum,” he writes, “is that most
of the families described here ended up grateful for experiences they
would have done anything to avoid.”
Reviewing “Far From the Tree” in The Times, Dwight Garner said,
“This is a book that shoots arrow after arrow into your heart.” But
it’s also a frightening and disturbing book. Its chapters are a vivid
catalog of all the things that can go wrong in giving birth to and then
bring up a child, and also raise difficult ethical questions: whether
it’s proper to give cochlear implants to deaf children or to subject
dwarfs to painful limb-lengthening surgery, for example.
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