
Andrew Solomon's masterpiece explores families raising exceptional children, challenging our understanding of identity and difference. This 10-year, 300-family study won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was praised by Pulitzer winner Siddhartha Mukherjee as "astonishingly humane" - expanding humanity through stories of extraordinary love.
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What happens when a child is born fundamentally different from their parents? Andrew Solomon spent ten years exploring this question, interviewing over 300 families where children possess traits foreign to their parents. These "horizontal identities" - from deafness to autism to transgender identity - require children to form their sense of self not from family but from peers who share their difference. Solomon's journey began with his own experience as a gay man born to straight parents. He noticed striking parallels between his journey and that of deaf people born to hearing parents - both groups often grow up with parents wishing to "fix" them before discovering affirming communities later in life. This insight revealed a profound truth: the line between "illness" and "identity" is rarely clear. Many conditions are simultaneously both, though we typically see only one aspect at a time. What makes this exploration so powerful is how it challenges our fundamental assumptions about family. We assume children will resemble their parents, that parenting means shaping children in our image. Yet these families demonstrate that reproduction is not replication. When a child falls far from the tree, parents face a choice that reveals the true nature of love: Do they try to change the child to match their expectations, or do they change themselves to embrace the child as they are?