Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In my two most recent books, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, I included reports from far-flung locations: I wanted to understand how narrative changed when context changed. I tailored what I wrote to the books I was working on; here, I’ve included versions of those sojourns that are of a slightly different shape. When I went on tour to promote my book about depression, I was struck by the variety of attitudes I encountered. In Spain, almost every journalist who came to interview me began the conversation by saying, “I have never been depressed myself, but . . . ,” and off we went, as I quietly wondered why these allegedly cheerful people had chosen to interview me in so much detail about mental illness. In Japan, every interviewer commented on his or her own depression but asked me not to mention it to anyone else. On the leading morning TV program in Finland, a gorgeous blonde woman leaned forward and asked in a mildly offended tone, “So, Mr. Solomon. What can you, an American, have to tell Finnish people about depression?” I felt as though I had written a book about hot peppers and gone to promote it in Sichuan.

This book is contiguous with my work on psychology and family dynamics. I have written two recent books about the inner determinants of difference and identity, but I am equally interested in the outer ones. I grew up in a household in which there was a preferable approach to everything—and I quested after the strength to choose among my childhood principles rather than be obligated to them. Travel taught me how to relate to disparate people with incongruent values, and, thereby, how to be contradictory myself. If I came subsequently to report on mental illness, disability, and the formation of character, that was an extension of my mission to break loose from the presumption that there is a single best way to be. I continue to move between the internal abroad and the external abroad. Each enhances my relationship to the other.

The collective result of my anthologizing is a bit of a bildungsroman, a book of my adventures as much as of the planet where I had them. I could never have written it if I were not infatuated with the notion of elsewhere, an ingenuous exuberance that goes all the way back to that long-ago Kleenex box. I’ve made it to 83 of the 196 recognized countries in the world. I plan a future book of profiles of people to supplement this book of places. But in some profound sense, people are places and vice versa. I have never written about one without the other.

In the quarter century or so covered in this book, the status of gay people has changed dramatically in a surprising variety of countries. Twenty have approved gay marriage as of this writing. Additional countries have passed legislation that provides other protections to gay men and women. In many societies, homosexuality remains a pulsating subculture; like art, it is a window through which to interpret a place.

I used to travel with my sexual orientation incognito, but have been increasingly open about being gay, a mark not just of my own maturation but also of the world’s. In some instances, my identity has been more obvious than I realized; in Ulaanbaatar in 1999, I saw a young Mongolian shepherd coming down the street where my hotel was located, leading a flock of fat-tailed, carpet-wool sheep. I stared inquisitively at this spectacle and was astonished when he crossed over and said in serviceable English, “You are gayboy? I am gayboy, too.” Then he added in an insinuating voice, “Maybe I leave sheep in hotel parking lot and come inside with you?” In Ilulissat, my guide sighed that it was not easy being the only gay dogsled-driver in western Greenland (a reflection I remember whenever existential loneliness strikes). At a formal dinner in Delhi, when I asked whether the city had a gay culture, given how many Indians disparaged homosexuality as a “Western import,” my host looked at me as though I had dropped in from outer space and said, “What do you think this party is?” And in Cartagena de Indias in Colombia in the question session that followed a lecture I gave, an elegantly dressed woman said she’d heard that children of gay parents were better adjusted than children of straight parents and suggested, “I suppose it is because men and women argue so much.” I revel in the notion that gay couples are above contentiousness. Sexual identity is at the forefront in a wide range of societies; it has become an unavoidable conversation.