These are the first lines of the novel I just turned in to my publisher.

The third sentence could easily apply to me.

Like me, my narrator has a brother with developmental disabilities. Writing this novel has been a journey into a relationship unlike any other in my life.

My brother Sean was born on New Year’s Day. A few hours late for the tax deduction, was the joke. He’s an adult now and lives in a beautiful and caring community in northern Vermont. He slops pigs, walks the forest paths, and celebrates solstices. He also struggles with a seizure disorder and tempers.

Sean changed the course of my family and my life. Though I am considered the more “functional” brother, I feel more inadequate in my relationship with him than I do in any other relationship in my life.

It is perhaps worth noting that writing that sentence, like many sentences in my manuscript, brought tears to my eyes.

It is also worth saying that, in writing a book, the ratio of tears to progress is not linear.

It's not a book, though. Not yet.

Don't tell a prospective agent, as I did, that you "wrote a book." As people in publishing are quick to point out, a book is a printed thing. Authors make manuscripts. Publishers make books.

I have just passed the quiet and massive moment of submitting a full manuscript.

In dance, my first and dear art form, finishing a work and sharing it with the public are very close in time, sometimes disturbingly close, as we tack up costumes and go over cues while the audience find their seats. With novels, finishing and sharing are separated by huge stretches of time. Enough time for a pregnancy or two.

Publication date for this novel is Spring 2021. A year and a half till it’s a book.

Here's a book that lurks in my novel.

Far From the Tree is a revolutionary book about children who are different from their parents, “horizontal identities,” as Solomon calls them. He writes about people with schizophrenia, dwarfism, and autism. He also writes about prodigies, transgender children, and children who commit crimes. His writing is staggeringly compassionate and clear-eyed.

Solomon begins with his own journey as a gay man. In his lifetime, homosexuality went from a crime to an illness to an identity. He zooms in on a root question of our age:

“What do we cure? And what do we celebrate?”

Last year, a Far From the Tree documentary was made.

I avoided it.

You couldn’t possibly make a 90-minute film of this genius 700-page book (plus 200 pages of notes!). But the film turns out to be as nuanced and insightful as Solomon’s writing. Watch it. (It's free if you have Hulu.)

And read Far From the Tree. It offers (and I don't say this lightly) real wisdom.