Books On "The Notion of Parenting"
This segment originally aired live on December 2, 2014. An edited version was included in a best-of episode of The Brian Lehrer Show on January 2, 2015. The unedited audio can be found here.
As patrons nominate their libraries for the NYC Neighborhood Library Awards, The Brian Lehrer Show talks to writers about "Books That Changed My Mind." Today: Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2013), and Cris Beam, professor of creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and the author of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (Mariner Books, 2014), talk about the exceptional families they've written about.
Andrew Solomon says the word “reproduction” confuses people about parenting: “My book deals with how families respond to all these kinds of different children – deaf children, autistic children, children who commit crimes, kids who are transgender – and I wanted to establish how our notion of parental love which tends to be that your child is somehow an extension of yourself is really misguided and that often the experience of having children whose birth or whose diagnosis appears to be a trauma leads to an intimacy than you would have ever imagined and establishes an extraordinary closeness."
Cris Beam says, for her part, “I didn’t set out to write To the End of June with the intention of changing minds, I really set out with the intention of investigating a system that from my perspective was really broken...Once I came to the end…I did hope that it changes minds. I have a foster daughter… I never adopted her because for her that would be giving up hope on her family and yet she is very much my daughter and I am very much her mother. I came to this book with a unique perspective. I understood there is a system that is set up to bring kids from fosterhood into adoption…and yet there are a lot of us that work around that path and I wanted to report on the families that do and do it successfully.”
In studio now: @Andrew_Solomon and @cbnewyork on their great books on patenting, and so much more. pic.twitter.com/iuy6STxXnS
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) December 2, 2014
There is no parent, says @Andrew_Solomon, who hasn't at least once wondered where their kid came from. "Reproduction" is a misleading term.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) December 2, 2014
'Love is there from the start, acceptance takes work.' Heavy brain food on @BrianLehrer #parenting
— Matt Roberson (@lospapamatt) December 2, 2014
JAMES BALDWIN gets a shout-out AGAIN, this week from @cbnewyork. @Andrew_Solomon recs Virginia Woolf's 'Jacob's Room' as a parenting book.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) December 2, 2014
@Andrew_Solomon on @BrianLehrer talking about family: "love does not make a family ... it's a good jumping off point."
— Rebecca Carroll (@rebel19) December 2, 2014
