Family differences

Andrew Solomon’s simple and powerful guiding idea in this book is that there are two sorts of identity that affect your place in the world. Your ‘vertical identity’ is what you share with your parents — and it usually, but not always, includes such things as race, religion, language and social class. Children are born with ‘horizontal identities’ too — which is to say, things that they don’t share with their parents but that they have in common with others elsewhere: being the deaf child of hearing parents, the schizophrenic child of mentally well parents, or the gay child of straight parents.

Some of these horizontal identities are things that are, or were, regarded as impairments; some of them are understood as mere difference. With many, that question is precisely the one that’s up for grabs. Do we choose the ‘illness model’ or the ‘identity model’: seek to fix the condition, or seek to accept it? Early on, Solomon quotes Jim Sinclair, an intersex autistic person, putting a forceful case for the latter:

When parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.

The project of Far from the Tree is to find out about how a whole range of horizontal identities actually work in families and the wider world: how parents cope with them, how children feel about them, and how they negotiate the institutional, social and sometimes medical worlds in which they participate.