Andrew Solomon: A memoir of coming out becomes a completely different story
Andrew Solomon, already the author of an acclaimed memoir about his journey through depression (“The Noonday Demon”), says he began his subsequent book as a way to understand his struggle to gain his family’s acceptance after coming out. But when Solomon started to interview other families who had struggled to accept children profoundly unlike them — children with schizophrenia, deafness and other conditions that challenge the boundaries of unconditional love — he decided to write a very different book, “Far From the Tree.”
That 2012 bestseller is now a documentary by the Emmy Award-winning director Rachel Dretzin. In addition to featuring Solomon’s personal story and some other material from the book, the film introduces several new subjects: Leah Smith and Joe Stamondo, a married couple with dwarfism; the family of an autistic child; a man with Down syndrome and his parents; and the Reeses, whose son Trevor slit the throat of an 8-year-old boy, when he was 16. Solomon, who also produced the new film, sat down with Dretzin to talk about its provocative message.
Q: Let’s address the elephant in the room. There’s a line in the movie’s press materials that talks about how the film invites us to see aberrance not as a threat, “but a shimmering, new beauty.” But that sentiment is clouded by the fact that one of the film’s subjects committed a horrific crime. Surely we are not meant to see the beauty in that. What is the film really about?
Solomon: The film is about the resilience of parental affection. It’s about the way that parents who have children who they would not have wanted end up getting very attached to those children, and finding meaning in the experience of being with them. It’s also about blame: selfblame, blame of the larger society. If you go back not that long ago — 30 or 40 years — people were thought to be gay because they had overbearing mothers and passive fathers. People were autistic because they had “refrigerator mothers.” While there are some people whose tendency toward crime is exacerbated by abusive childhoods, there are plenty of people who are born into perfectly nice families who just go off and do appalling things. If you have children, you have to be prepared for the fact that things can go terribly wrong. They could go wrong biologically, or they could go wrong behaviorally.
Q: Unlike the film’s other subjects, Trevor never appears on camera. Is this meant to reinforce the notion that the film is less about the children than the parents?
Dretzin: To some extent. You could argue that Joe and Leah’s story, which is told from their perspective, isn’t about parents at all. The film doesn’t fall into the neat equation that everybody seems to be putting it in: “It’s about parents accepting children.” It’s really about the many permutations of difference. What Trevor did is not something that society needs to accept. But it is something that his parents need to come to terms with.
Q: Did you approach Trevor about being in the film?
Dretzin: We did, and Trevor was open to it. Ultimately, we made a decision, with the family, not to pursue it. There were two reasons: one practical and one editorial. The editorial reason is that we did not want all of the oxygen in the film to be swallowed up by the question of why he did this unimaginable thing. Q: And the practical reason? Dretzin: Trevor is in Angola prison, in Louisiana. For Trevor to be a child killer in solitary — politically speaking, to approach a warden and to ask permission to film, the family was hesitant, for Trevor’s protection.
Q: How did you meet the Reese family?
Dretzin: The father wrote to Andrew after reading the book. We were having a hard time finding the right kind of family for this chapter. It was the most difficult family to find.
Solomon: It was a very beautiful letter. My book has a section that talks about criminals and their parents and that ends with the discussion of the family of Columbine perpetrator Dylan Klebold. Trevor’s father wrote, “Thank you for writing about this in a non-accusatory and kind way.” I wrote back and said: “So glad the book was helpful. Thank you for your lovely letter, and would you like to be in a movie?”
Q: It strikes me as a bold decision to include a criminal. There’s a risk of creating an association in some viewers’ minds between, say, homosexuality and criminality. In the film, Leah is asked what she thinks about scientists who are searching for a cure for achondroplasia, her form of dwarfism. She says, “I don’t think I need to be fixed.” But isn’t Trevor, arguably, broken?
Dretzin: Her statement is not meant to apply to everyone.
Solomon: In writing about crime, I wanted to show that, while we think of crime as aberrant and different, the narrative of those families is in many ways like the narratives of the families coping with, say, disabilities. It was best summed up when I talked to Sue Klebold, and she said: “I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children. If I had never gone to Ohio State, I would never have crossed paths with my husband, Tom, this child wouldn’t had existed. But over time, I’ve come to feel that I loved the children I had so much that I wouldn’t want to imagine a life without them, even at the price of this pain. And when I say ‘pain,’ I’m speaking of my own pain, and not the pain of other people. While I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I’ve decided that it would not have been better for me.”