Andrew Solomon Far From The Tree

After reading Far From the Tree I realized I wasn't alone. The treatment I had received from my nuclear and extended families made sense. Once my family knew that I was aware of being adopted the gloves came off. Frequently on holidays my larger cousins would hold me down while the others called me names and/or punched me. Comments like "Your mom likes me better than you because I'm blood" and "I…

It is not often that I find a book and realize as I read it that I have waited my whole life for such a book. That is my experience as I read “Far from the Tree.” I am the mother of 3 grown children and the concept of “vertical vs horizontal” identities is something I have never thought about. I grew up in New York City (Washington Heights) in the 50’s-60’s . I had an older brother who…

Matthew Shepard was murdered in October of 1998. This was done because he was gay. He died alone, tied to a fence on the Wyoming range. He was a thoughtful, kind person and he left us at 21. I wrote a mini-poem for him and am absolutely convinced that Matthew's memory endures:

Matthew Shepard wide the sky, long and blue before my eye, endless you are, yes you stand me up, never really…

I am writing in order to make a contribution to Andrew Solomon's project of enabling people with horizontal identities to share their stories. I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in a middle class family in the middle of the country, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a town epitomizing "middleness." My vaguely articulated discomfort with the confines of "middleness" was manifested in a yearning to go away to big…

I am writing at the invitation of Andrew Solomon to broaden awareness of a widespread network of rehabilitation communities for people with mental illness which aims at realigning identities. The communities are based on the premise that the illness is not all-consuming. It is not the whole of a person. The design of some 341 such communities in 32 nations is called the Clubhouse Model, and it was…

I was honored to meet Andrew, at a fundraiser that he and his partner John, hosted for my friend Spencer's film project related to Our Little Roses in Honduras. I felt so grateful to him and for his book and was blessed to be able to thank him face to face.

For about a year I was working on a memoir about my only sibling and our relationship. She has DS and we were born less than a year…

More important than my story, i wish to thank Mr Solomon for writing what I think is one of the mostly timely and significant books of this century. I think you should win the Pulitzer for it. You have succeeded in writing the most profound and compassionate yet unsentimental study of the problems of identity and illness I have had the privilege of reading. You eloquently illustrate and articulate…

I have entered many rooms in my 70-some years. Reading this book allowed me for the first time to enter a room in which I felt totally accepted. Thank you!

When I was a teenager, I came across a magazine article featuring a mom whose son had been born with a cleft lip and palate. In the article, the mom spoke of her son’s birth, and emphasized that it was not the joyous occasion she had expected it to be.

When I read this, I felt a strong emotional reaction well up within me. I found myself in tears, angry toward the mother in the article,…