What is Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity about?

Andrew Solomon's book is a ten-year investigation into families raising children who are profoundly different from their parents — deaf children of hearing parents, children with Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, severe physical disabilities, and other conditions that create what Solomon calls "horizontal identity": an identity shared with peers rather than inherited from family. The book also covers children who are prodigies, who were conceived in rape, and who become criminals. In each case Solomon asks the same question: how do parents and children find meaning in a profound mismatch of identity, and what does that process tell us about love?

Solomon distinguishes vertical identity, which is transmitted within a family — language, religion, ethnicity, values — from horizontal identity, which arrives in the child without parental precedent. Deaf parents of deaf children transmit an identity; hearing parents of deaf children must negotiate a gap that neither party chose. The book's central tension is between the medical model, which frames these conditions as deficits to be corrected, and the identity model, which sees them as valid ways of being human that deserve acknowledgment and accommodation. Solomon takes the identity model seriously without dismissing the medical one.

The chapters are long and deeply reported. Solomon interviewed more than three hundred families and synthesized their stories with neuroscience, disability studies, cultural history, and his own experience as a gay man whose identity was initially rejected by his family. The result is a book that functions simultaneously as journalism, scholarship, and memoir. The interviews are extraordinary — Solomon has a gift for drawing out the complexity of feelings that parents and children are often not given language to express. The grief, guilt, love, and unexpected meaning in each chapter are specific and earned.

The book's scope is also its challenge: at over nine hundred pages, it requires sustained commitment. Some chapters are more fully realized than others. But the core argument — that human difference is not a problem to be solved but a condition that calls for a particular kind of love and social accommodation — accumulates force with each case study. Far from the Tree is a book that makes it harder to see disability, difference, or difficult children as simple tragedies.