[originaltext]Moderator: Hello, everyone. I’m so happy to say that Andrew S

Moderator:
    Hello, everyone. I’m so happy to say that Andrew Solomon will be our keynote speaker today.
    Andrew Solomon is a writer on politics, culture and psychology. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, and President of PEN American Center. Now let’s welcome Mr. Solomon.
Andrew Solomon:
    Thank you for that introduction. Today I want to talk about how the worst moments in our lives make us who we are. As a student of adversity, I’ve been struck over the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strength from them, and I’ve heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some great truth waiting to be found.
    But over time, I’ve come to feel that the truth is irrelevant. We call it finding meaning, but we might better call it forging meaning.
    My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring, and one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities, said to me,’’People always give us these little sayings like,’God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle,爷but children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They’re a gift because that’s what we have chosen. ’’We make those choices all our lives. When I was in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and she called Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn’t like me and didn’t want me at his party. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae.
    I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn’t know then, and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you’ve forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you’ve come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
16. What does the introduction say about Andrew Solomon?
17. What was Mr. Solomon’s last book about?
18. What did Bobby Finkel do to him when he was in second grade?
19. How did Andrew Solomon survive his childhood?