Far From the Tree

Far From the Tree is, finally, a sustained argument that the children who appear to fall furthest from the trees that produced them — children whose deafness, dwarfism, autism, gender identity, prodigious gift, traumatic conception, mental illness, or violence places them in territory their parents never planned to enter — turn out, when their families do the long, unfamiliar, often unsupported work of meeting them where they actually are, to expand the moral imagination of the people closest to them and, through those people, of the surrounding society itself; the book's claim is not that every horizontal identity is a blessing, and not that suffering should be sentimentalized, but that the human practice of receiving difference inside the family is the practice on which any larger ethic of human inclusion ultimately depends, and that the families Solomon has spent a decade listening to know this in a way the rest of us are only beginning to learn.

Andrew Solomon is an American writer, psychologist, and activist whose work has placed him among the most influential public voices on mental health, family, identity, and the politics of difference. Born in New York City in 1963 and educated at Yale University, Jesus College, Cambridge, where he received first-class honors in English literature, and later at the University of Cambridge where he completed a Ph.D. in psychology, he has spent his career moving fluidly between literary journalism, academic research, and advocacy. His first major nonfiction book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, was published in 2001, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been translated into more than thirty languages; it remains widely regarded as one of the foundational contemporary accounts of clinical depression. Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, published in 2012 after more than a decade of reporting and over three hundred family interviews, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Wellcome Book Prize, the Books for a Better Life Award, the Median Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, where he has reported extensively on topics including Soviet artists, Afghan cultural life, Libyan politics, and questions of identity and mental health. He is Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, a lecturer at Yale, the president of PEN American Center, and a board member of numerous organizations devoted to LGBTQ rights, mental health advocacy, and the arts. He lives in New York and London with his husband, the writer John Habich Solomon, and their children.