From The Guardian:
Solomon, a magazine journalist based in New York, begins again inside his own head, with the impulses that made him become a writer – the sense of difference and dislocation wrought by severe dyslexia as a child, and by the understanding that he was gay in his teens; alienations that were mitigated by the indefatigable efforts of his parents to have him live comfortably from infancy in a world of words, and by his own troubled efforts to have his mother and father and others understand his sexuality. This imprisoning solipsism is quickly willed into something entirely different, however, when Solomon sets out on his search for those who make his own psychological anxieties and challenges, his difficulties of acceptance and filial frustration, seem something not only manageable but trivial. This journey takes him to what he begins by imagining might be the outer edges of parental attachment. “The children I describe have conditions that are alien to their parents,” he says of this stubborn and compendious inquiry, “they are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people who are conceived in rape or commit crimes; they are transgender.”
Each of these groups is given a chapter to itself. And each chapter – like a series of discrete books – involves up to a dozen tales of how particular children have challenged their parents and the author with what they know of life and love. If that makes the book sound mawkish or exploitative, or a misery memoir on a grand scale, it never feels at all like that. Solomon never tries to draw explicit lessons from the families he talks to, and in defiance of his surname he continually stops short of judgment. Instead he details the often painful, occasionally triumphant, sometimes unbearable, always deeply human narratives with care and empathy, and from time to time illuminates them with the urgent politics and telling historical contexts in which they exist. Solomon interviewed, compulsively, more than 300 families for the book, and ended up, he says, with 40,000 pages of notes. It is odd to read something of this length that feels like a distillation, a piece of concentrated intelligence, but that is, nonetheless, its effect.
More here.
