A Horizontal Identity

The author of The Noonday Demon, a landmark work on depression, returns with an even more profound inquiry: What does it mean to be born different?

Philip Friedman/Studio D

Andrew Solomon spent 10 years interviewing more than 250 families, from which he generated 40,000 pages of transcripts and fashioned the 700-page tome Far From the Tree (Scribner). But even those numbers don’t do justice to his wild ambition. The book’s ­massive middle chapters—“Deaf,” “Dwarfs,” “Down Syndrome,” “Autism,” “Schizophrenia,” “Disability,” “Prodigies,” “Rape,” “Crime,” and “Transgender”—seek to stretch our empathy where it might shrink; they are preceded by one ­titled “Son,” in which Solomon recounts his torment as a gay kid in the ’70s, including outlandish therapies through which he sought to alter his sexual orientation. And the book ends with “Father,” which recounts how Solomon and his husband began raising their own son. The book’s overarching theme is what Solomon calls horizontal identity—a minority or ­Other status that ­people do not share with their parents. Far From the Tree is fundamentally about ­the bonds and burdens of family, and it’s a huge valentine to those who embrace the challenge of raising ­children who are in some way not what they had hoped for.

How did your own experiences inform this book?
If someone had been able to tell me at 10 or 12, “Someday, you’ll be married to a guy, you’ll have kids, you’ll go everywhere together,” I could have been saved so much agony.

I’m going to take a lot of flak for saying being gay is like being disabled. In a way, it’s the anti­thesis of what gay people have been fighting for. But in another way, no—it’s the essence of what we’ve been fighting for. If we want to achieve a just ­society, we have to look at commonalities and not all fight for our little bit of territory.

How did you pick the 10 groups you studied?
Where you come from, who you are socially, what body you’re born with, what’s going on in your mind—I ­wanted to pull all these polarities together, and these 10 represented a constellation of conditions. If I was writing about dwarfs, I didn’t need to write about gigantism.

You distill a lot of science and technology in the book, yet it’s a very heartfelt work. What was it like combining these characteristics?
With a lot of these conditions, people feel that they have to choose between the ­politics of liberation and self-actualization movements, on the one hand, and the medical model, on the other. The tension ­between these is so interesting, and you can’t make reasonable decisions without both. I wanted to translate between the two.

Sure. Experiencing your difference as an identity is very empowering, but I don’t believe it’s always accurate or honest. If you’re deaf and don’t want a cochlear implant and want to be part of a ­signing ­culture, terrific. But if someone else is deaf and wants a ­cochlear implant and to engage with the hearing world, don’t try to pressure them not to. Identity politics can be really aggressive.

People opened up their lives to me with no gain for themselves, so if I could do something kind for them, I wanted to. One transgender family had their child taken away from them, and I helped them get a lawyer. A dwarf told me she was lonely, and I’d just talked to another dwarf who told me he was looking for someone. I don’t buy that disengagement is the best way to study a subject. Boundaries are not my big strength. Of everyone I interviewed for this book, there are a handful of people I think of as real friends, and there are many others I have affection for. I have this fantasy of a party where I invite everyone, and we’d say, “Here we all are.”

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