Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

#1109
Title: Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Author: Andrew Solomon
Year: 2012
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 976

Interesting premise, and many opportunities to several times in every chapter. Often overgeneralized, and sometimes simply incorrect. It doesn't help that he narrates the audiobook himself and keeps sounding like he's about to cry.

Everyone, whether parent or child, regardless of which horizontal condition the child has, is pretty miserable and isolated. Even in the prodigy/gifted chapter, everybody's depressed, damaged, and lonely.

I'm not a prodigy, but I do have a number of horizontal identities (that is, those unshared with all or most of my family of origin). I'm just not, and haven't ever been, that miserable*. While acknowledging that Solomon is on to something some of the time, the overgeneralizations are wearying. Where is resilience? Where is curiosity? Where is community? Although I'm privileged in many ways, my lived and observing experience can't be that off.

In addition to the content/focus problem, the book is structurally wobbly, ranging around but often not actually addressing the titular "search for identity," for example, or the parent-child identity/identification issues that are promised but not delivered. It ultimately leaves the impression of a plea for understanding because we are like you but we're not like you, and non-normal (in the statistical sense) characteristics are a deficit with some benefits. This seems to fit the phenomenology of the author's coming out process, but not my own.

*(Except in middle school, where it's virtually required no matter what one's identities and characteristics.)