A couple of years ago, when it first came out, Andrew Solomon’s 10-years-in-the-making magnum opus, Far from the Tree, was the book du jour in Australian book-reading parenting circles. I missed it at the time, being otherwise engaged, but now, having read this sizeable work, I understand why it caused such a buzz. Put simply, this is a thorough, challenging, imperfect but compelling study in the depth and reach of parental love, when heavily challenged by circumstances.
Solomon’s core project in this book is to look at what happens when parents have children who differ, in some fundamental way, from themselves. To this end, he looks at parents who have deaf children; dwarf children; autistic children; children with Downs Syndrome; children with multiple severe disabilities; child prodigies; schizophrenic children; transgender children; criminal children; or children conceived through rape. (If it strikes you that the last-listed is not quite like the others – or, indeed, that the various identities named have radical dissimilarities – you’d be right, and that is one of the weaker aspects of the book, as I’ll unpick later).
What Solomon is trying to get at is what he describes as the difference between “vertical identities” – which we derive from our families and social context, and which parents often assume they will share in a profound way with their children – and “horizontal identities”, which, in his words, are “recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors.” All people develop horizontal identities as they live, of course – no one (or very few) goes through life entirely aligned with the values, tastes, habits and norms of their parents. But when children have a compelling point of different from their parents, Solomon argues, this skew between the child’s horizontal identity and the family vertical identity is profoundly challenging for parents, often from the very beginning of the child’s life.
To say that Solomon did his research thoroughly for this book would be an understatement. Ten years of effort, and over 40,000 pages of interview transcripts, lie behind his 900-page analysis, and there is no doubt that this lends weight to his conclusions. Nonetheless, despite its thoughtful and well-evidenced base, this is no clinical academic text. It’s impossible to read this book without feeling Solomon’s genuine engagement with the people he speaks to, and of; one of the book’s more endearing qualities is this warmth, and Solomon’s knack of stepping back and letting parents – and their children – speak for themselves, without overriding their insights with authorial interpretation.
Although this is, ostensibly, a book about apples that fall far from the parental tree, it’s just as much a book about the startlingly heroic lengths that many people will go to in order to nurture, protect and achieve the best outcomes for their children. In some ways, though, this is one of the book’s blind spots – although he’s far too nuanced to do so overtly, there is a subtext in the book, or at least a bias, that urges the idea that a heroic response to children who fall “far from the tree” is the typical, widespread response that parents manifest.
It works a little like a card trick, although I think it’s unintentional – Solomon forces the “hero parent” card literally because those are the cards his deck is stacked with. He doesn’t have the stories of the parents whose response is different – who give babies into institutional care, give them up for adoption, choose termination after prenatal diagnoses or rape, fail to cope at any level with the challenges of parenting their children and abuse the children and / or themselves, or reject their older / adult children utterly once their divergence from their parents becomes apparent. (This is particularly an issue in the chapters on schizophrenic children, transgender children, and criminal children, where Solomon mostly deals with parents whose awareness of their child’s difference comes later than for parents of children with divergences apparent at or close to birth).
Solomon, in his keenness to make a meta point about the ability of parental love to transcend difference, may also push the envelope a little in his drawing of parallels between the children and families he examines. He never glosses over or romanticises any of the experiences he describes – indeed, that’s one of the true strengths of the book. But he also doesn’t make much specific acknowledgment that while none of these children are exactly like their parents, they are all as radically different from each other (perhaps more so) as they are from their own family. The experiential stories themselves reveal this tale, but Solomon seems perhaps less aware of it than would be warranted, given the sensitivity of his touch in other areas.
In particular, Solomon fails to explicitly deal with the very real and profound difference between parents who are raising or have raised children who may be different, but are capable of living fully independent adult lives, and children whose dependence on their parents is, to a greater or lesser degree, lifelong. Certainly raising a deaf child, as a hearing person, has multiple challenges (Solomon’s discussion of the politics of deaf culture is truly fascinating), but almost all deaf children become deaf adults who are capable of functioning independently in the world.
Even as children, the brute physical labour needed is quantitatively different with a child prodigy, a deaf or dwarf child, or a gender-fluid or transgender child than it is with a child who has multiple severe disabilities or severe autism. As the sibling of a child with multiple severe disabilities myself, I can attest to the absolutely all-consuming demands of physical care that a person who cannot (and will never be able to) perform basic physical functions unaided imposes on their caregivers.
This is not intended to suggest that Solomon should have created rifts and dichotomies where none need exist, or, worse yet, that it is appropriate to start playing “Difficulty Olympics” in these matters. Rather, it’s that I think that by eliding the ways in which these challenges differ, I think he loses something quite important in the overall discussion.
One thing Solomon does do very well, though, is addressing the whole question of what part of difference is disability, and what is just difference. The social model of disability has been a theory around for a while, particularly in deaf and autistic activist communities, and Solomon digs into the debate in a complex, persuasive way. I came to this book with a gut feeling that many kinds of difference are only disabling because of society rather than because of the individual body / mind itself, and if anything, reading the autism and deafness chapters here has reinforced this view.
Where it’s maybe less persuasive is when Solomon is looking at the children who are not disabled in any model (social or physical) – prodigies, transgender people, children born of rape, and (arguably) criminal children. To the extent that the first three are different, this difference only acquires challenging connotations because of the social construct, parental and societal attitudes, and psychological baggage that is draped around it. Are children born from rape really far from the tree, or is what’s different in that case in fact the maternal psychological situation vis her child? Are transgender children really different from their cis siblings, or is the difference more about society’s bigotry, often reflected in parental attitudes? These are questions I would’ve enjoyed seeing Solomon tease out a little more, given the richness of his material and his undoubted aptitude with it.
Overall, though, this is an absorbing, well-informed, persuasive and valuable text. It’s my sense that the work Solomon has done here will be integral to the ongoing discussion around parental love in the face of difference well into the future, and deservedly so.