Far from the Tree: Young Adult Edition--How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another . . . Our Differences Unite Us - Hardcover

Solomon, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 148144090X ISBN 13: 9781481440905

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2017

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author Andrew Solomon comes a stunning, poignant, and affecting young adult edition of his award-winning masterpiece, Far From the Tree, which explores the impact of extreme differences between parents and children.

The old adage says that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, meaning that children usually resemble their parents. But what happens when the apples fall somewhere else—sometimes a couple of orchards away, sometimes on the other side of the world?

In this young adult edition, Andrew Solomon profiles how families accommodate children who have a variety of differences: families of people who are deaf, who are dwarfs, who have Down syndrome, who have autism, who have schizophrenia, who have multiple severe disabilities, who are prodigies, who commit crimes, and more.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far From the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life. The New York Times calls the adult edition a “wise and beautiful” volume, that “will shake up your preconceptions and leave you in a better place.”

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Solomon is a professor of psychology at Columbia University, president of PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, NPR, and The New York Times Magazine. A lecturer and activist, he is the author of Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years; the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which has won thirty additional national awards; and The Noonday Demon; An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. He has also written a novel, A Stone Boat, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost. His TED talks have been viewed over ten million times. He lives in New York and London and is a dual national. For more information, visit the author’s website at AndrewSolomon.com.

Laurie Calkhoven is the author of many books, including George Washington: An American Life and Harriet Tubman: Leading the Way to Freedom. She lives in New York City. Visit her at LaurieCalkhoven.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Far from the Tree Son

I HAD DYSLEXIA AS A child; indeed, I have it now. I still cannot write by hand without focusing on each letter as I form it, and even then, some letters are out of order, or left out entirely. My mother saw this early on and began to work on reading with me when I was two. I spent long afternoons on her lap, learning to sound out words. We practiced letters as though no shapes could ever be lovelier than theirs. To keep my attention, she gave me a notebook with a yellow felt cover on which Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger were sewn. We made flash cards and played games with them. I loved the attention, and my mother brought a sense of fun to her teaching.

When I was six, my parents applied to eleven schools in New York City, and all eleven turned me down. Despite my advanced reading skills, my test scores said I would never learn to read and write. Only a year later did the principal of one school overrule the exam results so that I could be enrolled.

That early victory over dyslexia taught my family that with patience, love, intelligence, and will, we could defeat a neurological abnormality. Unfortunately, it also set the stage for our later struggle. It made it hard to believe that we couldn’t correct something else that was perceived as abnormal—my being gay.

·  ·  ·

People ask when I knew I was gay, and I wonder what that means. Recent studies have shown that as early as age two, many boys who will grow up to be gay avoid some rough-and-tumble play. By age six, a good number behave in some ways that aren’t typical “boy.” I knew that many things I liked were unmasculine: I never traded a baseball card, but instead shared the plots of operas on the school bus, which did not make me popular.

I was popular at home, but I was also corrected. Once, when I was about seven, I was leaving a shoe store with my mother and brother, and the salesman asked us what color balloons we’d like to take home. My brother wanted a red balloon. I wanted a pink one. My mother said that I did not want a pink balloon. She announced, over my protests, that my favorite color was blue, so I ended up taking a blue balloon. The fact that in adulthood my favorite color is blue stands as evidence of my mother’s influence; the fact that I am still gay is evidence of its limits.

Though it was supposed to be integrated, my grade-school class actually included only a few black and Latino kids, and they mostly socialized with one another. My first year at school was second grade, and when Debbie Camacho had a birthday party in Spanish Harlem, my mother made me go. I was one of only two white kids who went, out of a class of forty; none of my friends was there and I was terrified. Debbie’s cousins tried to get me to dance. Everyone spoke Spanish, the food was unfamiliar, and I had a kind of panic attack and went home in tears.

I didn’t see the parallels between everyone else’s avoidance of Debbie’s party and my own unpopularity. It never occurred to me that she and I had anything in common. It was only years later that I understood why my mother had made me go, and recognized that it was a moral issue. Then I was glad to have been there: It was the right thing to do. Debbie’s party was the beginning of my tolerance toward people who were different from me, and that attitude ultimately helped me understand that I was okay even though I was different.

A few months after Debbie’s party, Bobby Finkel had a birthday and invited everyone in the class but me. My mother called his mother, sure that there had been a mistake. Mrs. Finkel said that Bobby didn’t like me and didn’t want me there. My mother picked me up after school on the day of the party and took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae. Now I can see how hurt my mother must have been for me—more hurt than I was, or let myself notice I was. She knew that being different had sad consequences, and she wanted to protect me.

Making me choose the blue balloon had been partly an effort to shelter me and partly an act of aggression. In many ways, my mother encouraged me to be myself, and she made me believe I could be loved for who I was rather than for who the larger world suggested I should be. But at the same time, she wanted to change me in ways that I couldn’t be changed. That made me angry; it still does. The hardest thing to make sense of was the fact that the love was real even though it coincided with the rejection of a central part of me.

I floundered in the tricky waters of elementary school, but at home, away from the cruelty, my quirks were mostly humored. When I was ten, I became fascinated by the tiny European country of Liechtenstein. A year later my father took us along on a business trip to Switzerland, and one morning my mother announced that she’d arranged for us all to drive to Liechtenstein. The same mother who forbade the pink balloon took us to lunch in a charming café, on a tour of the art museum, and to visit the printing office where they made the country’s gorgeous postage stamps, just to indulge my weird fascination.

Still, there were limits, and pink balloons fell on the wrong side of them. My parents’ rule was to be interested in others from within a pact of sameness. I wanted to do more than just be interested in the whole world: I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to dive for pearls, memorize Shakespeare, break the sound barrier. Maybe I wanted to transform myself because I wanted to break away from my family’s way of being. Maybe I was already trying to get closer to who I wanted to become.

·  ·  ·

In 1993, I was assigned to investigate Deaf culture for the New York Times. I thought of deafness as a defect. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents—parents who often think deafness is a tragedy, and throw themselves into making sure their deaf children learn to speak and read lips. Teaching those skills usually takes so much time and energy that parents neglect other areas of their children’s education. Some deaf people become very good at speech and lip-reading over time, but at the expense of learning history and math, and they end up fairly uneducated.

Some kids stumble upon Deaf identity as teenagers, and it makes them feel free and powerful. They move into a world that uses Sign as a language and they become proud of the same things about themselves that used to embarrass their parents. Some hearing parents accept this confident new identity, but others struggle against it.

I understood this complex process of self-discovery because I am gay. Gay people usually grow up with straight parents, who often believe that their children would be better off straight. Frequently, they pressure their kids to be or act straight. These kids discover gay identity as teenagers or later, and it comes as a huge relief. So the line between illness (the negative way of looking at a condition) and identity (the positive way of looking at it) is never clear. Something you start out considering as an illness can become a cornerstone of your identity. Also, what some people think of as an illness, others think of as an identity. And the same attribute can be defined as an illness at one time, then in a different historical time it can change to an identity. Sometimes, it can be an identity and an illness at the same time, even for the person who has the condition.

When I started writing about the deaf, the surgical insertion of a device called a cochlear implant, which can offer something similar to hearing, was a recent innovation. Its supporters said it was a miracle cure for a terrible defect. The Deaf community saw it as an attack on their culture. The issue is complicated by the fact that cochlear implants are most successful when they are introduced in infants, meaning that the decision is made by parents before the child can possibly weigh in with an opinion.

My parents would have said yes to a childhood operation that would have made me straight. If such a process is ever invented, I think most of gay culture would be wiped out within a generation. That thought makes me terribly sad.

But it has taken time for me to value my own life. I, too, once wished to be straight. While I have come to understand the richness of Deaf culture, I know that before I did this research, I would have assumed that the only thing to do for a deaf child would be to fix the abnormality.

A few years after I began spending time in the Deaf community, a friend gave birth to a daughter who was a dwarf, and she had a lot of questions. Should she raise her daughter to believe that she was just like everyone else, only shorter? Or should she make sure that her daughter had dwarf role models and developed a dwarf identity? Or should she consider surgery to lengthen her daughter’s limbs? I saw a pattern that was becoming familiar.

First I had found common ground with the Deaf, and now I felt the same way about a dwarf. Who else was out there waiting to join us kids who were different, and whose parents had a hard time figuring out what to do about it?

·  ·  ·

Because genes and cultural habits get passed down from one generation to the next, most of us share at least some traits with our parents. These are vertical identities, like the trunk of the family tree. Ethnicity, for example, is a vertical identity. Children of color are born to parents of color. Language is usually vertical, since people who speak Greek as a first language usually raise their children to speak Greek too, even if those children also speak another language some of the time. Nationality is vertical, except for immigrants. Nearsightedness and blond hair are often passed from parent to child, but neither one is an important basis for identity—nearsightedness because it is easily corrected, and blond hair because what’s in style shifts all the time, and besides, you can change your hair color easily, many times over.

But what happens when something about you is so completely alien to your parents that you have to learn your identity outside of your family? This is a horizontal identity, one that does not show up on the intergenerational family tree. These identities can come from a recessive gene, a random genetic mutation, or values and preferences that you don’t share with your parents. Being gay is a horizontal identity because most gay kids are not born to gay parents. They need to learn about being gay by observing and taking part in a subculture. Physical disabilities and genius are both usually horizontal identities. Mental illness is also usually horizontal. So are conditions such as autism and intellectual disabilities. Even being a psychopath is a horizontal identity. Most criminals weren’t raised by gang members; they have to invent their own identity outside of their families.

In the twenty-first-century United States, it is sometimes still hard to be black or Asian or Jewish or female, but no one suggests that all people should try to turn themselves into white Christian men. Many vertical identities make people uncomfortable, and yet we don’t try to eliminate them. Instead, over time, we recognize the flaws in our society that have made these conditions difficult for the people who have them. We try to fix the society, not to change the Asians or Jews or women or African-Americans. Parents teach these children a sense of pride about who they are, even when the larger society is divided by prejudice.

The disadvantages of being gay are no greater than those of believing in a minority religion, but many parents have long tried to turn their gay children straight. Many parents also rush to make certain kinds of physical differences “normal.” Some children’s minds are labeled as diseased—with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—in part because those minds make their parents uncomfortable. Things get corrected that would be better left alone.

·  ·  ·

My parents misunderstood who I was, and I have come to believe that all parents sometimes misunderstand the core nature of their own children. Many parents see a child’s horizontal identity as an insult. Those same children are also different from most of their peers. They’re not accepted at home or in the world. Families tend to support and encourage vertical identities. Horizontal ones, however, are often treated as failings.

We use the word illness to criticize a way of being, and identity to validate a way of being. Many conditions can be viewed as both an illness and an identity. Just as in physics, where we’ve learned that energy is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle, we need to come up with a new vocabulary for conditions that can be both illness and identity.

I thought that if the identity of being gay could grow out of homosexuality, which used to be considered an illness; and if the identity of Deafness could grow out of deafness, which has been widely considered a disability; and if the identity of dwarfism could emerge from what was considered an apparent deformity, then there must be other categories in this awkward in-between territory. Instead of being in a marginal minority, I was suddenly in vast company. Each of these experiences—deafness, gayness, and dwarfism, among many others—can isolate those who are affected, but together our struggles and differences connect us. Everybody is different in one way or another. It’s the one thing we all have in common.

The children I describe in this book have horizontal conditions that their parents find strange and alien. They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people born out of rape, or people who commit crimes; they are transgender.

There’s an old saying that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, meaning children tend to be like their parents. The children in this book are apples that have fallen elsewhere—some a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world. Yet many of these children learn to embrace their horizontal identities, and help their families to tolerate, accept, and even celebrate them.

All children are startling to their parents. I have yet to meet any parent who doesn’t sometimes look at his or her child and think, “What planet did you come from?” I’ve yet to meet a child who hasn’t sometimes wondered the same thing about his or her parents. So these dramatic situations expand on a theme. By learning more about exceptional cases, we can start to understand the universal phenomenon of difference within families.

You need three levels of acceptance: self-acceptance, family acceptance, and acceptance by the larger society. It’s important to know how autistic people feel about autism, or dwarfs about dwarfism. Self-acceptance is critical. But compassion and empathy begin at home. Most of the parents and children I have written about love one another across the divide of their differences. When they look deep into their child’s eyes, parents can see both a reflection of themselves and someone entirely strange, and still love their child completely. Children can look back and feel the same combination of reassuring sameness, confusing differences, and overpowering love. The society at large will often take its cues from the family and the self. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.

·  ·  ·

Most kids want to be like other kids. That was...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 148144090X
• ISBN 13: 9781481440905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464