Far From the Tree

From the outside looking in, Maya’s family is picture-perfect. They live in a beautiful house and put on a good show when people visit. Her father wears a suit to dinner with Grace’s family, and her mom is the very image of a courteous host. However, behind closed doors, alcoholism is ripping Maya’s family apart. The wine bottles that Maya and Lauren find hidden around the house represent the dark family secrets lurking around every corner of the house and the intense cycle of addiction affecting the whole family.

Maya credits her parents’ frequent fighting to her mother’s drinking problem. Although they have been fighting for years, Maya believes that “a lot of those angry words [have] to do with the wine: a glass before dinner, two or three during dinner, and a fifth sloshed into the glass when Maya’s dad was away on business” (17). Maya’s mom drinks more when her dad isn’t around, and when Maya and Lauren start to find their mom’s wine bottles stashed around the house, Maya wonders “who her mom was hiding the evidence from: her daughters, her husband, or herself” (18).

Maya bears the burden of this family secret more than anyone else. She doesn’t tell her dad and tries to protect Lauren from the truth of what is happening to her mom, but soon the situation is outside anyone’s control. Maya worries not only about keeping her mom and sister safe but also about hiding the family secret. Maya becomes angry when Lauren tells Claire about their mom going to rehab. After all,

she had spent so long operating under the idea that secrets never left their house that she didn’t know how to handle it when any of them escaped, except to make her walls closer, tighter, hugging her in so that no one else would ever be able to enter (275).

The dysfunction of Maya’s family shows that adoption is not the end of someone’s troubles. Plenty of families, including adoptive families, are broken and imperfect, plagued with arguments, addiction, and abuse. The wine bottles symbolize the throes of addiction, and even when they are removed from the house, the impact of their time in the house lingers for a long time and will take years of rehab and therapy to undo.

Families and photographs go hand-in-hand, and in Far from the Tree, photos are used to represent familial bonds and belonging (or lack thereof). Having a photograph of a person can symbolize a close relationship, or a deep sense of respect and admiration for the person. While photographs are meant to memorialize happy times or momentous occasions, both Maya and Joaquin express anxiety over the topic of family photos.

Maya’s house is lined with photos of her, Lauren, and their parents throughout the years. However, Maya is “the only one who [stands] out, the only one who [isn’t] pale with freckles and amber-colored red hair, the only dark brunette stain in every single family photo that line[s] the stairs” (21). This glaring difference isn’t merely a product of Maya’s imagination: Both Grace and Joaquin notice the horrible effect when they visit Maya’s house. Grace looks at the photos and sees that “Maya [stands] out in every single photo, the one brunette in a family of redheads, her smile getting less and less full over the years” (47). Joaquin is disturbed by the family photos that show “the short brunette in a sea of tall redheads” (209) because Maya sticks out so obviously. Maya hates the pictures and even fantasizes about burning them. In her bedroom, however, Maya proudly displays photos of her and Claire, but Grace notices that Maya has no photos of her family in her bedroom. Maya doesn’t need any more reminders that she “doesn’t belong,” especially not in her safe space, and the presence of Claire’s photos reinforces the idea that Maya sees Claire as her family and her home. With Claire, Maya doesn’t feel like an outsider, so these photos are a comfort instead of an ugly reminder of her “otherness.”

On the opposite side, Joaquin is self-conscious about his lack of family photos. When he and Birdie are dating, Joaquin watches as Birdie’s parents take out photo albums and show him “every baby photo, every first day of school, every Christmas morning, every Halloween” (83) throughout Birdie’s life. He realizes that, unlike Birdie, “There [is] no one to tell her about him, no one to share embarrassing stories about him that Birdie would love, or show her baby pictures of him” (83). Joaquin believes that photos represent the map of a person’s life, and without photos, he has no past and, ultimately, no future. However, everything changes when Joaquin meets his aunt Jessica. Jessica tells him that his mother’s parents were so angry when she got pregnant with Joaquin that they “burned all of the pictures of her” (342) in an attempt to erase their daughter from their lives. Joaquin then discovers that his mother left him an entire box full of photos of him, and for the first time, Joaquin sees pictures of himself as a child. One photo shows “a newborn in the hospital, red and wrinkled like a raisin” (352), and there is “another of him sitting in a playpen, grinning up at the camera” (352). Most importantly, Joaquin sees a photo of his mother holding him and realizes he has more of a past than he ever thought. Joaquin treasures the photos because they prove that his mother cared about him enough to hold on to pictures of him.