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

by Andrew Solomon

In an age when women can work in construction and men can marry other men, the notion of a medically enshrined, “Batman vs. Snow White” typology of gender identity seems reductive, yet it still has considerable currency in the medical literature.

As long as GID is classed as a mental illness, professionals will try to cure it, and parents will refuse to accept it. It is time to focus on the child rather than on the label.

A double life is exhausting and ultimately tragic, because you can’t ever be loved if you can never be known.”

People often question a trans person’s authenticity in his or her affirmed gender. “I call myself a gender immigrant,” Jenny said. “I’m a citizen of this land of women. But it is true that I was born somewhere else. I came here, and I got naturalized.”

It’s impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.”

“We are who we are as a result of who we love,”

But struggling to become who you’ve always been and be loved anyway is a continuous process, usually marked with ambivalence.

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we’d received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.

Worldwide, a transgender person is murdered every three days.

It’s not nature versus nurture. It’s nurturing your nature.”

“If you’re uncomfortable with your body, you want to control that body, and sports are a really good way to do it.”

“Our hardest conversations aren’t with other people; they’re with ourselves.

the pain that life sometimes brings, and the soothing love that welcomes it with open arms, after its exhausting journey into a distant country.”

I know that choice can be burdensome and exhausting and frightening—especially unaccustomed choice. My first book was about a

I likewise believe that choice is the only true luxury, that the striving inherent in decision-making gives decisions value. In modern America, choice is the aspirational currency, and even knowing the weariness selection entails, I like to imagine a future in which we would be able to choose everything. I’d quite possibly choose what I have now—and would love it even more for having done so.

with enough emotional discipline and affective will, one could love anyone.

difficult love is no less a thing than easy love.

Those who are prepared to love children with horizontal qualities give dignity to them,

With access to reproductive technologies, we are conjecturing what kind of children will make us happy, and what kind we will make happy. It may be irresponsible to avoid this guesswork, but it is naïve to think it is anything more.

Hypothetical love has little in comm...

the assumption that betterment is a project undertaken by individuals on their own, in which the rest of us need not implicate ourselves.

We live in an increasingly diverse society, and the lessons in tolerance that come with that diversity have extended even to populations too disenfranchised to make their own claims—a change larger in scope than any that the suffragettes or the civil rights activists envisioned. Disabled people are on television; transgender people hold public office; members of the helping professions are working with criminals, prodigies, and people conceived in rape. Jobs programs exist for people with schizophrenia or autism.

We are closer than ever to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Fewer and fewer people are mortified by who they truly are.

This mutual counterfeiting reflects a larger ambivalence, which is that we long for and resist difference; we aspire to and fear individuality.

“People want to get better, but they don’t want to change.”

What I do know is that it would be a mistake to turn us all into elms. It can look pretty, the long alleys of matching trees, their noble trunks aligning in symmetrical resemblance, but it is an irresponsible way to plan.

John gave me more courage to be extraordinary, and more confidence about being ordinary,

When you have longed for the moon and are suddenly offered all its silver light, it’s hard to remember what you intended to do with it.

two things in life look incredibly daunting until you realize that almost everyone does them—driving and having children.

I avoided children because of how much they made me feel.

Implicating others in your reality strengthens it,

You never know anyone as admiringly as you do when she is carrying your child,

I taught John a great deal about doing things instead of simply imagining them, and he taught me a great deal about experiencing those things once they were done.

for the first time something wild and heroic in her, an acreage of heart and valor beyond anything male experience had taught me.

I would do everything right, which would postpone anguish.

valor cannot be achieved on a schedule.

I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight.

The tree doesn’t grow far from the apple.

Our love for our children is almost entirely situational, yet it is nearly the strongest emotion we know. This book’s stories were to my love for my children much as parables are to faith, the concrete narratives that make the greatest abstractions true. I am the parent I am in the wake of this book’s epic narratives of resilience.

our existence is evidence that we had to be;

Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have; we could have had no others. They will never seem to us to be happenstance; we love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die—even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure our own lives. Indeed, they are the rightness by which we measure life itself, and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them.

My journeys toward a family and this book have taught me that love is a magnifying phenomenon—that every increase in love strengthens all the other love in the world, that much as loving one’s family can be a means of loving God, so the love that exists within any family can fortify the love of all families.

My family is radical for a different reason from most of the others I have chronicled, but all of us are exponents of revolutionary love against the odds.

Pain is the threshold of intimacy, and catastrophe burnishes devotion.

One may be infuriated and depressed by vulnerability and still be drawn to its seductions. While I mostly fell for the friends I adore because they are wise, kind, generous, and fun, I have loved them most acutely when they or I have been most sad, because there is a psychic proximity in desolate times that happiness does not match. My depression hatched an intimacy with my father that I’d never have known if he hadn’t helped me through that struggle. As a parent, for all that I relish glee, I know that attachment happens when things turn dark. Parenting is an exercise in safety, and the perpetual menace of danger is what exalts parental love above affection; without the night terrors, the spiking fevers...

I want more than anything for my children to be happy, and I love them because they are sad, and the erratic project of kneading that sad...

Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow’s richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.

As the jagged Alps are to the romantic sublime, so this curious joy is to the character of these families—nearly impossible, terrible, and terribly beautiful.