In this week's magazine, Andrew Solomon tackles some troublesome assumptions made about child prodigies and the unacknowledged challenges in raising young people with extra-normal abilities. The article is an adaptation from Solomon's forthcoming book, "Far From the Tree," and marks his return to the magazine after an absence of more than a decade. In the '90s and early '00s, Solomon regularly contributed stories on a variety of topics (like poverty and Russian decadence) and people (like the artist Bill Viola and the late writer Gore Vidal, whom he compared, in repose at his villa in Italy, to "Xerxes, heaped on pillows, his head silhouetted against the window so that the sparkling sea seems a nimbus around his noble head").
Child prodigies are just one group that Solomon considers in "Far From the Tree." The book is a lengthy meditation on families, community and identity. In it, Solomon describes the connections that are established in various subcultures — people with dwarfism or Down syndrome, survivors of rape or violent crime, those who are transgender or have autism — and the ways that these social groups challenge common notions of normalcy.
The project began with a 1993 assignment by the magazine to write about deaf culture. "My assumption about deafness was that it was a deficit and nothing more," he writes in his book. But as he spent time with the deaf community, he saw how mainstream culture forced upon it an identity that did not fit. Watching young deaf students speak of deafness as a source of pride reminded him of his experience as a gay teenager; the students discovered an identity that was their own, relieving them of the constant pressure to become something they were not. Solomon would go on to find this common ground with many others he met in the course of his research, and it would lead him to the central notion of his book. "Difference is what unites us," he writes.
A single sentence from Solomon's book has been rattling around in my head since I read it, because it rings so true: "The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state."
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