Nonetheless, despite its thoughtful and well-evidenced base, this is no clinical academic text. Ten years of effort, and over 40,000 pages of interview transcripts, lie behind his 900-page analysis, and there is no doubt that this lends weight to his conclusions. To say that Solomon did his research thoroughly for this book would be an understatement.

But when children have a compelling point of different from their parents, Solomon argues, this skew between the child’s horizontal identity and the family vertical identity is profoundly challenging for parents, often from the very beginning of the child’s life. What Solomon is trying to get at is what he describes as the difference between “vertical identities” – which we derive from our families and social context, and which parents often assume they will share in a profound way with their children – and “horizontal identities”, which, in his words, are “recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors.” All people develop horizontal identities as they live, of course – no one (or very few) goes through life entirely aligned with the values, tastes, habits and norms of their parents. (If it strikes you that the last-listed is not quite like the others – or, indeed, that the various identities named have radical dissimilarities – you’d be right, and that is one of the weaker aspects of the book, as I’ll unpick later). To this end, he looks at parents who have deaf children dwarf children autistic children children with Downs Syndrome children with multiple severe disabilities child prodigies schizophrenic children transgender children criminal children or children conceived through rape. Solomon’s core project in this book is to look at what happens when parents have children who differ, in some fundamental way, from themselves. Put simply, this is a thorough, challenging, imperfect but compelling study in the depth and reach of parental love, when heavily challenged by circumstances. I missed it at the time, being otherwise engaged, but now, having read this sizeable work, I understand why it caused such a buzz. A couple of years ago, when it first came out, Andrew Solomon’s 10-years-in-the-making magnum opus, Far from the Tree, was the book du jour in Australian book-reading parenting circles.

Far from the tree by andrew solomon