As the old saying goes, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. In other words, the child takes after the parent; the son is a chip off the old block.
Of course, that's often not the case. Straight parents have gay children and vice versa; autistic children are born to parents who don't have autism; and transgender kids are born to parents who are perfectly comfortable with their gender.
That's the kind of family Andrew Solomon has written about in his new book, Far From the Tree. In it, Solomon chronicles the lives of families in which the kids are, in one way or another, different from their parents. He explores how some of those differences come to be viewed as disabilities, while others are seen as part of that child's identity.
He joins NPR's Robert Siegel to discuss how differences can sometimes serve to unite families, rather than isolate them.
Interview Highlights
On vertical and horizontal identities
"I've divided identities into two categories. There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally — so, ethnicity is hugely a vertical identity, nationality usually is, language is, often religion is. These are things a child has in common with his parents. But there are many other ways of being that tend to occur for parents who don't anticipate them. ... You have parents who perceive themselves to be 'normal,' whatever that means, and they have a child who has a condition which they often perceive to be 'abnormal.' And those children often grow up with the sense that the way they are is really a tragedy, and it would be great if they could change and fix that. And then in adolescence, frequently — sometimes earlier, sometimes later — they discover other people who are like them in their peer group. And so I've called [that] a horizontal identity because of the way it reaches out across, sort of sideways."
On whether it's fair to compare the experiences of families whose kids are deaf with families whose kids are, say, dwarfs or prodigies
"I found as I did the research that each of these individual differences felt very isolating to the people who were experiencing [them]. But then, in fact, there was an enormous amount that the parents dealing with these things all had in common. And ultimately it seemed to me as though difference was not something that isolates people, but rather something that unites people. And I thought, if the people who were dealing with autism could understand how similar this situation is to the parents of people with remarkable gifts who are prodigies — or to gay people, or to transgender people, or to dwarfs — if they could understand how much they all have in common, a lot of the isolation of those conditions would be mitigated."
Enlarge Annie Leibovitz/Courtesy of Scribner
Andrew Solomon's 2001 book, The Noonday Demon, won the National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.