Far From The Tree by Andrew Solomon

This is the first of the five New York Times Best Non-Fiction Books of 2012 that I have been able to read.  The subtitle is "Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity", but that is only a slight sliver of what he covers in this book, which he has been writing for over a decade.

I think the impetus to write the book was his relationship with his parents and his search for identity.  In the first chapter he divulges that he has a personal history of depression, and that he is gay.  His parents were very unhappy to learn that their son was gay.  So unhappy that it made him wonder if there was a genetic test for gayness and they had gotten that information that he might have been aborted in utero.  He was getting in touch with what it might be like to be an unlikable child.  On top of that, he considered the challenges of raising a child that was different from yourself in a significant way.  Every couple has one member who is a different gender from their child--in my case all of my children are a different gender.  But that wasn't the sort of difference that interested him--he was looking at more unusual differences, things that wouldn't appear frequently that parents had to cope with.  He did extensive interviews with families of children with 6 different medical conditions--deafness, dwarfism, Down's syndrome children, autism, schizophrenia, and then children with multiple and severe disabilities rendering them unable to care for themselves in a serious way.  These chapters deal with issues about love, connectedness, making decisions about child rearing and transitioning children into independent lives.  He asks them questions like what have you learned, what have you gained and what have you lost, and would you do it over again if you had a choice. Very disturbingly, there were parents of autistic children who had murdered their children, feeling like it was their only option--the desperation is palpable in some stories, and the wells of resiliency are equally compelling in other stories.

The next four chapters deal with issues that are different--one of them is transgendered children, which the author has an intense interest in.  One is based on raising a child prodigy, which comes across as being just as challenging as raising a child with a disability and in some ways less rewarding, because so many of the children end up being estranged from their parents.  The other two chapters are on children born of rape, and children who become criminals.  There is a lot of emotion in this book, but the stories are compelling, well told, thought provoking, and you do not walk away from this book unscathed.  You look at yourself, your parenting, and the results of that parenting in a different light as a result.