THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #146: ANDREW SOLOMON

“How do we decide what to cure and what to celebrate?” asked Andrew Solomon, rhetorically, during the New Yorker Festival. The lecturer and author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity is referring to the transformation of the “illness” of homosexuality into the “identity” of gayness in a telling scene from Rachel Dretzin’s recent documentary adaptation.

Solomon, a once-closeted gay man who now happily lives with his husband, serves as both character in and producer on Dretzin’s film. His decade-long investigation into families with children born “far from the tree” — who are surviving and thriving with everything from autism to Down syndrome to dwarfism — is both a celebration of diversity under threat, and a call to society to reexamine our long-held assumptions of exactly who needs to be “fixed.”

I spoke with Solomon prior to the film’s theatrical release about serving as both a producer and a character, distinguishing what to cure from what to celebrate, and the difference between promoting books versus films.

To read my interview visit The Rumpus.