Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomonis a writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in...
ProfessionWriter
mean weather england
I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!
kids attachment parent
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
appreciation children understanding
In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.
depression trying balance
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
mother strong betrayal
Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.
christian sex gay
If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.
running heart people
Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.
knowing space race
I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then.
study much-love
I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.
believe sin homosexuality
There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.
people needs belief
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
motivation humility writing
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
loss despair anticipation
Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
right-time feels ifs
We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.