Andrew Solomon is the author of
The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost,
A Stone Boat,
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of fourteen
national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.
He named his five favorite books about family love for
The Daily Beast. One title on the list:
The Siege
by Clara Claiborne Park
This is the first of the great autism memoirs and the first to describe autism as not merely an illness, but also an identity. Park’s daughter was born in 1958, at a time when mothers were 
routinely blamed for their children’s autism, but somehow Park made it through with an intact sense of self—and with, moreover, an intact sense of her daughter, who ultimately seemed different rather than damaged. Park summed it up: “I write now what 15 years past I would still not have thought possible to write: that if today I were given the choice to accept the experience, with everything that it entails, or to refuse the bitter largesse, I would have to stretch out my hands—because out of it has come, for all of us, an unimagined life. And I will not change the last word of the story. It is still love.”
Read about
the other books on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.
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