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

by Andrew Solomon

At nine, I’d have given anything not to be gay and would have gone through a procedure like this had there been one for my condition; now that I’m forty-eight, I’m glad that I didn’t compromise my body. The trick is knowing which prejudices of a nine-year-old are nine-year-old prejudices that will change with time, and which ones are true readings of the heart that will last into adulthood. The attitude of parents frequently shapes the mind-set of children,

“I used to run marathons, and someone told me once that if you smile the whole way, you won’t feel the pain. It worked. So that’s what I do with this, too.”

Unfortunately, modern life has too many environmental variables to catalog: cell phones, air travel, televisions, vitamin pills, food additives. Many people believe that environmental heavy metals have afflicted their children. Others blame a broad range of other substances, especially bisphenol-A, a man-made, estrogen-based polymer used in plastics, which has an annual production of more than three million tons. Most geneticists acknowledge that these questions have not been fully resolved, and that they may not be resolved for many years.

“I began to understand. A conversation is performance, merely a series of juxtapositions. I say something to you. A phrase in what I said, a topic, a point of view, or nothing at all connects with something that you contain. Then you say something. And like this, we proceed.” Such insights solve some challenges associated with autism, but they do not eliminate it.

John Elder Robison writes, “Being a savant is a mixed blessing, because that laser-like focus often comes at a cost: very limited abilities in nonsavant areas. Some of my designs were true masterpieces of economy and functionality. Many people told me they were expressions of a creative genius. And today I can’t understand them at all. My story isn’t sad, though, because my mind didn’t fade or die. It just rewired itself. I’m sure my mind has the same power it always did, but in a more broadly focused configuration.” I have heard Temple Grandin say the same thing, and my friend who played the Philip Glass CD told me that as his social abilities improved, his pure mathematical thinking weakened. The cure can be its own disease: when you take away what’s perceived as wrong, you may also take away the person’s gift.

For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and having an experience are not particularly different.

Mental illness cannot be treated separately from the person; they are inextricably linked. I’ve answered the question ‘Where does mental illness end and where do I begin?’ In my case, we are one. I’ve made friends with the enemy. My treatment is successful precisely because it takes both me and my disorder into account and doesn’t delineate between the two of us.”

Language is as vital to the physician’s art as the stethoscope or the scalpel. Of all the words the doctor uses, the name he gives the illness has the greatest weight. The name of the illness becomes part of the identity of the sufferer.” The sadness of a poor prognosis is vastly easier than the chaos of no prognosis. Once the course is clear, most people can accept it. Since knowledge is power, syndromes associated with dire prospects are borne more nobly than those of which little can be understood. Identity is a function of certitude.

The dystonia proved what he had learned from Schnabel: that musicianship requires modesty. “Schnabel likened the performer to the Alpine mountain guide,” Leon said. “His aim is to lead you to the top of the mountain so that you can enjoy the view. He isn’t the goal. The view is.”

The neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen has proposed “that the creative process is similar in artists and scientists, that it is highly intuitive, and that it may arise from unconscious or dreamlike mental states during which new links are created in the association cortices of the brain.”

Failed prodigies must forever carry the poisonous memory of themselves as promising. The narrative of prodigies is constantly pushed toward triumph or tragedy, when most must find contentment somewhere in between.

Some who love applause confuse that fervor with a passion for music. “Unfortunately,” Veda Kaplinsky said, “they’re going to be miserable. Because most of the time, it’s you and your music, not you and your audience.”

I’m not an asshole. I want to give people pleasure. Music is a food. You have to consume it. I love the phrase preferable to silence. Is this piece of music preferable to silence? We’re in the business of art, but we’re also in the business of entertainment, and spiritual and emotional nourishment. You have to carry that with you.”

“If you invest your whole life in a family business, you want your children to carry on investing in it,” Nic said. “You want them to be artists who know everything you know and can benefit from everything that you’ve experienced. All parents want that, and it never works.”

More than half of all American children will spend some time as a member of a single-parent family. While 18 percent of American families fall below the poverty level, 43 percent of single-mother households do.

The social imperative is to suppress criminal behavior, but that should not preclude noticing the identity. I deplore violence, but I recognize the military intimacy it allows men who have no other occasion to bond. Indeed, I recognize that the conquests by which the map of the world is drawn derive from the loyalty and aggression of young men.

An event of such enormity completely disrupts one’s sense of reality. “I used to think I could understand people, relate, and read them pretty well,” Sue said. “After this, I realized I don’t have a clue what another human being is thinking. We read our children fairy tales and teach them that there are good guys and bad guys. I would never do that now. I would say that every one of us has the capacity to be good and the capacity to make poor choices. If you love someone, you have to love both the good and the bad in them.”

After Columbine, Sue had a client who was blind, had only one hand, had just lost her job, and was facing trouble at home. “She said, ‘I may have my problems, but I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything in the world.’ I laughed. All those years I have worked with people with disabilities and thought, ‘Thank God I can see; thank God I can walk; thank God I can scratch my head and feed myself.’ And I’m thinking how funny it is how we all use one another to feel better.”

Western culture likes binaries: life feels less frightening when we can separate good and evil into tidy heaps, when we split off the mind from the body, when men are masculine and women are feminine.

Genesis describes a world born in categories: God made grasses and trees, then whales and fish, then fowl and birds, then cattle and creeping things and beasts, then human beings to have dominion over all the rest. “Male and female he created them,” says the verse. In the great creation story, humans and animals occupy categories that can never cross, as do men and women. In the twenty-first century, new arguments are afloat that some human beings are not persons, that some persons are not human beings, that some men are women, that some women are men, that some human beings are persons but are neither women nor men. Globalization has blurred national identity, and intermarriage has compromised racial identity. We like categories and clubs as much as we ever have; it’s only that the ones we thought were inviolable turn out not to be, and others that we never imagined are taking their place.

Whether to consign someone else to struggle with the extraordinary burdens you have carried is a personal moral issue. Yet all parents make that decision on some scale.

But the vital piece of this inclination toward the light is the unshakable belief that catastrophes properly end in resolution, that tragedies are frequently a phase rather than an endgame.