It was around the eighth year of working on his book about childhood and parental love, still wading through the 40,000 pages of interviews he'd conducted with over 300 parents and children, some of which were so painful he could hardly bear to read them, that Andrew Solomon began to worry that his book was simply unwriteable. And in those moments, he felt something close to despair.
What kept him going were the two things that underpin Far From the Tree: first, his deep connection with the families who shared the most intimate and painful moments of their lives with him. Second, his belief in the message of his book, which is that differences unite people in the way that sameness is assumed to.
"I felt as though one seldom has anything to say and I thought I had something to say about this. If I gave it up what was I going to do?" And so, he continued to work at it for another three years.
The result of this decade-and-then-some of emotionally exhausting work has already won Solomon the National Book award in the US and, this week, the Wellcome book prize in London (I was one of the judges). Far From the Tree details in 12 sections what it is like to be a parent of an exceptional child, whether they are deaf, schizophrenic or transgender. If this sounds depressing, Solomon would sympathise with that assumption as he, too, expected when he set out with his research to find "unconditional tragedies". But one of the most surprising things about the book – and there are so many surprising things; every other sentence seems to contain a subtle revelation – is how joyful it is, and no one was more surprised than Solomon himself, "by the joy I found [in the families], and that's because the families were surprised by the joy. It's not that it's fun having Down's syndrome, but you can figure out ways of constructing joy out of that, and that takes work and discipline. So I was surprised by the joy and also admiring of it," he says.
But he has not written a "Lemons? Make lemonade!" book: there are also stories of terrible pain, and some of the interviews were so sad that they triggered depressive episodes in Solomon, who has suffered from depression in the past. The chapter on transgender children, which is written with real tenderness, includes one particularly awful story in which the transgender daughter of a lesbian couple in Kansas is taken away by social services because they disapproved of the mothers encouraging their daughter's female identity.
"Part of what was so sad about that experience was I felt they wouldn't have been in this situation if they were richer and better educated. I recognise that we live in an unequal society, but the ability to keep the child you love should not be contingent on being adept at working the system and knowledgeable about how to deal with intrusive social service operators," he says, his jaw setting a little.
Although Solomon does not include this in the book, he later introduced the couple to people who he thought might help them, and the girl is now back with her mothers. "I am not a great believer in the idea that journalistic neutrality means you have to abandon the people you talk to," he says firmly.
Far From the Tree is Solomon's fourth book, and all have elements of autobiography. His first, The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, was about artistic communities in 1980s Russia who Solomon met while on a journalistic assignment. His novel, A Stone Boat, tells the story of a young man coping with his mother's impending death and her difficulty in accepting his homosexuality. The Noonday Demon, which also won the National Book award and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer prize, is an evocative account of Solomon's battle with depression after his mother's death. He spent five years writing it, interviewing hundreds of experts and devastated sufferers, and comes down very much on the side of the pharmaceutical industry, praising it for making the drugs "that have saved so many lives". But in classic Solomon style, he, in the interest of fairness, gives new‑age treatments a go too, such as going to a ranch in Arizona where he is covered in crystals and peppered with interpretive Sanskrit chants. The experience, he concludes, probably did not "inscribe antidepressant virtues into my meridians". On the other hand, he adds dryly, "four days of being handled by beautiful women in an opulent resort did a great deal for me".
Far From the Tree emerged from similarly autobiographical roots, but grew into something more varied. In 1994, Solomon was asked to write an article on deaf culture for the New York Times. He learned from deaf children what it was to be like to be raised by hearing parents who think that the way to make their child happy is to "fix" them, and the children's sense of relief on discovering a deaf identity, and the conflicts their parents felt about this. To Solomon's surprise, he found the situations of families with deaf children "arrestingly familiar" because they echoed his experience of growing up as the gay child of straight parents. This led him to think about what he called vertical identity – which is the identity you share with your parents, such as race, class and religion – versus horizontal identity, which is the identity that separates you from your parents and makes you instead part of an outside community, such as, in Solomon's case, sexuality.
Far From the Tree looks at whether a child's especially strong horizontal identity – such as a physical or mental disability – can be integrated within the family's vertical identity, so that the child still has a strong bond with its parents. It is, in short, a debate about how parents can best make their children happy: by encouraging their individuality but risking their alienation, or by incorporating them into the world familiar to their parents, but risking their self-loathing.
"Parenting involves two separate activities. You have to change your child, in that you need to educate your child and instil moral values in them. But you also need to celebrate your child for who he or she is and make them feel really good. Then there's a vast fuzzy middle – is this something we should accommodate? Is this something we should be helping them not to do any more? I think the book is about what to do when you find yourself in that middle territory," he says. Although Solomon insists that he didn't set out to write Far From the Tree as a "therapeutic exercise", it was only through writing the book, he says, "that I ended up forgiving my parents".
Solomon was born in 1963 and grew up in Manhattan, on the moneyed Upper East Side. He has one brother and was always very close to his parents. As an adult, Solomon has a charmingly anachronistic manner – it is easy to imagine him in a velvet three piece suit, holding a monocle – so it is not surprising to learn he was an unusual little boy, one who would recount the plots of operas on the school bus (this, he writes, did not make him popular). His parents celebrated most of his differences, but not all: when he displayed signs of what was deemed effeminacy, such as choosing a pink balloon when he was six years old, he was hastily corrected by his mother ("Your favourite colour's blue!"). This was, Solomon now sees, "a protective gesture". After a somewhat lonely school life, Solomon was much happier at Yale, followed by an equally happy time at Cambridge University. But he felt deeply conflicted about being gay for years, even subjecting himself to "surrogate therapy" as a young man, and the descriptions of his encounters with female sexual surrogates in Far From the Tree are both amusing and sad. He finally came out to his parents in his
early 20s "and they professed to be surprised, which seemed most implausible to me", and is now happily married to journalist John Habich.
Solomon, by anyone's standards, lives a rarefied life: he has homes in the poshest neighbourhoods in Manhattan and London, and he and Habich celebrated their civil partnership at Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northampton. After coming out, Solomon decided he would never keep anything about himself a secret again, and in The Noonday Demon he is extremely self-exposing, detailing his occasional enjoyment of class-A drugs in the past and, during one suicidally depressed period, his attempts to catch HIV through unprotected sex. But the only real fallout from these revelations is that he was turned down for membership of a swanky private members' club in New York "which was kind of an unpleasant experience". One of Solomon's interviewees from Far From the Tree, William Davis, told the New York Times that he was somewhat surprised when Solomon turned up at his house in a chauffeured car. ("It was a car service! It's not like I arrived in a Rolls Royce!" Solomon protests.)
"He's living in a different world from the one I'm used to, but it's not a problem … You can tell he cares. You just want to hug him," said Davis.
To talk to Solomon is to understand why he elicits such trust from interviewees. He is a warm and deeply engaged listener, with large sympathetic eyes that make you want to tell him your own history. "I really felt the things I had in common with [the interviewees] were at least as significant as the things I didn't have in common. I think if I'd been straight I would not have been able to write this book," he says. He later adds: "The business of figuring out how to love someone who often seems to be unlovable is very familiar to me."
Soon after Far From the Tree was published in the US, Solomon was contacted by Peter Lanza, the father of Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old behind the terrible shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012. Lanza had read Solomon's interviews with the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the teenagers behind the Columbine shooting, in his chapter on children who commit crime, and trusted Solomon to tell his story, which he did in a long New Yorker piece. But where Klebold's mother says her son remains one of "the greatest joys of my life", Lanza says he wishes his son had never been born. Solomon does not look for easy conclusions in his book, and he wishes he could have included Lanza's story alongside that of the Klebolds, who have had more time to come to terms with their child's crime: "He loved his child, and he wished he'd never been born. It was the pain and ambivalence that spoke to me in that story," he says.
The biggest surprise of Far From the Tree, a book that involved Solomon immersing himself in the most painful family situations, is that it made Solomon want to have a family himself. "The work I did awakened me to the way that taking care of one's child is a way of building the intimacy one wants with them. It does not need to be only an onerous responsibility," he says.
Solomon's husband already had two children with a friend who was raising them with her partner, and Solomon followed suit. In 2007 he had a daughter with an old friend who lives in Texas, and in 2009 he had a son, who lives with Solomon and Habich in New York.
Solomon is already working on another book about the changing shape of parenthood. But aside from having to cross out "mother" on school application forms and replace it with "father number two", the most striking thing about his family life, he says, "is how much it is like other families. We deal with exactly the same issues as all families." Because sometimes what makes us different is also what connects us all.
