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In 1998 Andrew Solomon published “Anatomy of Melancholy” in The New Yorker, an account of his own depression; three years later it had grown into The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2001 and was a Pulitzer finalist the following year. Solomon was born in Manhattan in 1963, studied at Yale and Cambridge, and had already written about Soviet artists in The Irony Tower (1991) and a son and his dying mother in the novel A Stone Boat (1994). His next big book, Far from the Tree (2012), took the same method to families whose children are deaf, autistic, schizophrenic, prodigies or otherwise unlike their parents, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia and was president of PEN America from 2015 to 2018. Readers come to him for two things at once: an honest account of his own life, and the patience to listen to hundreds of other people until a subject like depression or difference looks completely different. The writers below share one or both — illness or difference written from the inside, or long, humane reporting about minds and families.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Depression · Mental health · Family and difference · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
If you love Andrew Solomon, start with William Styron's Darkness Visible, the short depression memoir that came before The Noonday Demon, and Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist writing about her own bipolar illness. For Far from the Tree, read Robert Kolker on one family and schizophrenia and Steve Silberman on autism as a kind of difference. And for his mix of reporting and self, Rachel Aviv.
10 authors like Andrew Solomon
Where to start if you loved Andrew Solomon
If you want The Noonday Demon again, read William Styron.
Darkness Visible: one depression, told in an afternoon's reading.
If you want Far from the Tree again, read Robert Kolker.
Hidden Valley Road: twelve children, six diagnoses, one family.
If you want the science and the self together, read Kay Redfield Jamison.
An Unquiet Mind, from a psychiatrist who has the illness she studies.
If you want his reporting in a new generation, read Rachel Aviv.
Strangers to Ourselves: a few lives, followed past the diagnosis.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Andrew Solomon
Who should I read if I love Andrew Solomon?
William Styron's Darkness Visible and Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind are the classic first-person books about depression and bipolar illness. For the side of Solomon that listens to families, read Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road and Steve Silberman's NeuroTribes. Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves is the closest recent book in method.
What books are like The Noonday Demon?
William Styron's Darkness Visible (1990) is the short memoir of depression it follows. Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind (1995) combines a clinician's knowledge with her own illness, as Solomon does. Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves (2022) and Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) are recent books that mix personal experience with reporting on mental illness.
What books are like Far from the Tree?
Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road (2020) follows a single family in which six of twelve children were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Steve Silberman's NeuroTribes (2015) is a history of autism and neurodiversity. Oliver Sacks's Seeing Voices (1989) covers Deaf culture, the subject of the book's first chapter.
Is The Noonday Demon a memoir?
Partly. It began as Solomon's 1998 New Yorker article on his own depression, and his experience runs through the book, but most of it is reporting, history and science: interviews with patients, doctors, researchers and policymakers about how depression is defined and treated. A revised edition in 2015 added a chapter on newer treatments.
Which Andrew Solomon book should I read first?
The Noonday Demon (2001) if you come to him for depression or mental health; it won the National Book Award. Far from the Tree (2012) if you are interested in parenting, disability and identity; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Far and Away (2016) collects his reporting from abroad over twenty-five years.
What did Andrew Solomon write before The Noonday Demon?
The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (1991), about the Moscow art world at the end of the Soviet Union, and A Stone Boat (1994), a novel about a son and his mother's illness, which was a runner-up for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction prize.
Footnotes
More from the shelf
Author guide
Every Andrew Solomon Book
From The Irony Tower to Far and Away, in order.
Authors like
Authors Like Rachel Aviv
Who to read after Strangers to Ourselves.
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Authors Like Robert Kolker
Who to read after Hidden Valley Road.
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Books About Mental Health
Fiction and memoir, chosen with care.
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