When Andrew Solomon started his family with his husband, John Habich, he says, people were surprised that he wasn’t afraid to have children, given the topic of the book he was writing. That book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, explores what it’s like for parents of children who are profoundly different or likely to be stigmatized — children with Down syndrome, deafness, autism, dwarfism, or who are prodigies, become criminals, or are conceived in rape.
Though these experiences can be difficult and isolating for families, Solomon writes about parents who have accepted their children in spite of conditions others might consider tragic. “We all love flawed children and the general assumption that these more extreme flaws make their children somehow unlovable — it wasn’t true of most of my experience,” Solomon tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.
Solomon found that while many children experience their difference at first as illness, over time, they understand it as part of their identity.
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