This week on The One You Feed we have Andrew Solomon.

Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture and psychology.

Solomon’s recent book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, published on November 13, 2012, won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction among many other awards. The New York Times hailed the book, writing, “It’s a book everyone should read… there’s no one who wouldn’t be a more imaginative and understanding parent — or human being — for having done so… a wise and beautiful book.”  People described it as “a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity.”

Solomon’s previous book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Scribner, 2001), won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in The Times of London‘s list of one hundred best books of the decade. A New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback editions, The Noonday Demon has also been a bestseller in seven foreign countries, and has been published in twenty-four languages. The New York Times described it as “All-encompassing, brave, deeply humane… a book of remarkable depth, breadth and vitality… open-minded, critically informed and poetic all at the same time… fearless, and full of compassion.”

 In This Interview Andrew and I Discuss…

• The One You Feed parable.
• Using work to make the world a better place.
• The urgent business of living a moral life.
• How to decide what we should change and what we should accept.
• How hope can become the cornerstone of misery.
• The challenges and joys of parenting disabled children.
• The perfectionism of privilege.
• The importance of the choice to celebrate what is versus wishing it to be different.
• How we can grow through difficult circumstances.
• The poison of comparison.
• The idea of the “psychological supermodel”.
• Layering feelings of failure onto depression and how damaging that is.
• Learning to celebrate our difficulties and differences.
• A beautiful and hopeful reading on depression.
• How critical humor is in dealing with depression
• New approaches to treating depression.
• His ongoing challenges with depression and anxiety.
• The shame of mental illness.
• If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes.
• A life that is only luxury and pleasure tends to feel rather hollow and empty.
• How sparing our children from all adversity is a bad idea.
• The choices we face.
• How encounters with darkness give us the energy to feed our good wolf.

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