This book sounds interesting, especially the idea about vertical vs. horizontal identities . . . the interview is also quite good. The book is
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, by Andrew Solomon, who also authored the National Book Award winning
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.
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."
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.
On the difference between disability and identity
"I
think it's important for us to recognize that the idea of disability,
and really the idea of illness, is an idea that's really very much in
flux. When I was born, the wisdom was that homosexuality was an illness,
that it was caused largely by somebody's mother and a distorted
relationship with the mother, and that people who had it should be
treated for it. And now, as I live my life — married to a husband with
kids — it's an identity, for me at least. I know there are some people
who are still experiencing it as an illness. Having had that experience,
I recognize the fluidity of these categories. So do I think that
deafness is an identity in which I would be comfortable? No, I'm very
fond of my hearing. Here I am on [the] radio. But do I think there are
people for whom it is primarily an identity? Yes, absolutely."
On the story of Solomon's own post-nuclear family, which begins and bookends Far From the Tree
"When
I met John, who is now my husband, he told me that he had had some
friends, Tammy and Laura, for whom he had been a sperm donor, and that
they had a son named Oliver, of whom he was the biological father. A few
years later, they asked him to be a sperm donor again, and they
produced a daughter, Lucy. A good friend of mine from college had gone
through a divorce and said that she really longed to be a mother, and I
said how much I would love to be the father of her child. And so we
decided to produce a child through an IVF process. John and I then
wanted to have a child who would live with us all the time, and we
decided to use an egg donor, and Laura, the lesbian who had carried
Oliver and Lucy, offered to be our surrogate as a way of thanking John
for providing her with a family. So the shorthand is: five parents of
four children in three states. ...
"I'll tell
you that we recently had a friend to dinner who said to me after
dinner, 'I'm sure there should be a name for this relationship, but I
just wanted to say how much I enjoyed talking to the daughter of the
partner of the mother of your daughter.' And I said, 'We've had a lot of
relationships for which there are no words.' "
On whether he believes his own children will fall far from the tree when it comes to their sexual orientation
"My
assumption is that they will be heterosexual. I've certainly seen no
evidence to the contrary, and there's no evidence that children of gay
parents are more likely to be gay. And I don't particularly want them to
be gay, though I certainly wouldn't mind if they turned out to be gay. A
lot of people said to me, 'Gosh, you decided to have children in the
middle of writing this book about all of these terrible situations?' And
I really felt that I was looking at these terrible situations and
thinking, here are all of these parents, they're dealing with so many
challenges and so much difficulty, and yet they love their children, and
almost none of them regret having had children — very few of them
anyway do. And I thought if all of these people could love all of these
children, then I think I'll be able to love mine whoever they are."
Here is an excerpt from Chapter One of the book.
Chapter One: Son
There
is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a
baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the
word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that
two people are but braiding themselves together, is at best a euphemism
to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads. In
the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is
often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with
a personality of his own. Having anticipated the onward march of our
selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present
unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent
relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the
stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our
children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality
annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must
love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them,
and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an
exercise for the imagination.
Yet
blood, in modern as in ancient societies, is thicker than water. Little
is more gratifying than successful and devoted children, and few
situations are worse than filial failure or rejection. Our children are
not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject
right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And
yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves
those who have braved the metamorphosis. The psychoanalyst D. W.
Winnicott once said, "There is no such thing as a baby — meaning that if
you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.
A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship."
Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious
admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement
detractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and
long for what may be life's most profound compliment: their choosing to
live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride
in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how
different our children are from us.
Because
of the transmission of identity from one generation to the next, most
children share at least some traits with their parents. These are vertical identities.
Attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the
generations not only through strands of DNA, but also through shared
cultural norms. Ethnicity, for example, is a vertical identity. Children
of color are in general born to parents of color; the genetic fact of
skin pigmentation is transmitted across generations along with a
self-image as a person of color, even though that self-image may be
subject to generational flux. Language is usually vertical, since most
people who speak Greek raise their children to speak Greek, too, even if
they inflect it differently or speak another language much of the time.
Religion is moderately vertical: Catholic parents will tend to bring up
Catholic children, though the children may turn irreligious or convert
to another faith. Nationality is vertical, except for immigrants.
Blondness and myopia are often transmitted from parent to child, but in
most cases do not form a significant basis for identity — blondness
because it is fairly insignificant, and myopia because it is easily
corrected.
Often, however, someone has
an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and
must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a horizontal identity.
Such horizontal identities may reflect recessive genes, random
mutations, prenatal influences, or values and preferences that a child
does not share with his progenitors. Being gay is a horizontal identity;
most gay kids are born to straight parents, and while their sexuality
is not determined by their peers, they learn gay identity by observing
and participating in a subculture outside the family. Physical
disability tends to be horizontal, as does genius. Psychopathy, too, is
often horizontal; most criminals are not raised by mobsters and must
invent their own treachery. So are conditions such as autism and
intellectual disability. A child conceived in rape is born into
emotional challenges that his own mother cannot know, even though they
spring from her trauma.
***
In 1993, I was assigned to investigate Deaf culture for the New YorkTimes.
My assumption about deafness was that it was a deficit and nothing
more. Over the months that followed, I found myself drawn into the Deaf
world. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, and those parents
frequently prioritize functioning in the hearing world, expending
enormous energy on oral speech and lipreading. Doing so, they can
neglect other areas of their children's education. While some deaf
people are good at lipreading and produce comprehensible speech, many do
not have that skill, and years go by as they sit endlessly with
audiologists and speech pathologists instead of learning history and
mathematics and philosophy. Many stumble upon Deaf identity in
adolescence, and it comes as a great liberation. They move into a world
that validates Sign as a language and discover themselves. Some hearing
parents accept this powerful new development; others struggle against
it.
The whole situation felt
arrestingly familiar to me because I am gay. Gay people usually grow up
under the purview of straight parents who feel that their children would
be better off straight and sometimes torment them by pressing them to
conform. Those gay people often discover gay identity in adolescence or
afterward, finding great relief there. When I started writing about the
deaf, the cochlear implant, which can provide some facsimile of hearing,
was a recent innovation. It had been hailed by its progenitors as a
miraculous cure for a terrible defect and was deplored by the Deaf
community as a genocidal attack on a vibrant community. Both sides have
since moderated their rhetoric, but the issue is complicated by the fact
that cochlear implants are most effective when they are surgically
implanted early — in infants, ideally — so the decision is often made by
parents before the child can possibly have or express an informed
opinion. Watching the debate, I knew that my own parents would gamely
have consented to a parallel early procedure to ensure that I would be
straight, had one existed. I do not doubt that the advent of such a
thing even now could wipe out most of gay culture. I am saddened by the
idea of such a threat, and yet as my understanding of Deaf culture
deepened, I realized that the attitudes I had found benighted in my
parents resembled my own likely response to producing a deaf child. My
first impulse would have been to do whatever I could to fix the
abnormality.
Then a friend had a
daughter who was a dwarf. She wondered whether she should bring up her
daughter to consider herself just like everyone else, only shorter;
whether she should make sure her daughter had dwarf role models; or
whether she should investigate surgical limb-lengthening. As she
narrated her bafflement, I saw a familiar pattern. I had been startled
to note my common ground with the Deaf, and now I was identifying with a
dwarf; I wondered who else was out there waiting to join our gladsome
throng. I thought that if gayness, an identity, could grow out of
homosexuality, an illness, and Deafness, an identity, could grow out of
deafness, an illness, and if dwarfism as an identity could emerge from
an apparent disability, then there must be many other categories in this
awkward interstitial territory. It was a radicalizing insight. Having
always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I
was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these
experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an
aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The
exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely
state.
Excerpted from Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
by Andrew Solomon. Copyright 2012 by Andrew Solomon. Excerpted with
permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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