“Hidden Valley Road” traces the devastation of a family by schizophrenia

If it were a normal author profile written in an ordinary period, I would probably give some details on how Robert Kolker look, what he’s wearing, if he ordered avocado toast at the Brooklyn cafe where Wed arranged to meet. I put my phone on the table to record our conversation, a notebook at hand to write down anything that is particularly personal, funny or revealing.

But the coronavirus changed this plan. Instead, we talked on the phone from our respective homes amidst the cramped neighborhoods, background noise and potential interruptions caused by teenage children. Sharing the workspace with one of them, Kolker quips, my daughter and I are sort of colleagues now. It is an unpretentious configuration to speak to a writer whose superpower is relativity.

I called to speak to Kolker, journalist and author, about Hidden valley road. Kolkers’ second book tells the true story of the Galvins, a huge brood of 12 children, six of whom have been diagnosed with schizophrenia; his multi-generational family saga, his medical mystery, written with an extraordinary blend of rigor and empathy. The Kolker reporter seeks accuracy first, but there is a notable lack of judgment in the book that feels remarkable in light of the long-standing stigma felt by those with the condition in their families.

Kolker first heard about the Galvin family from his youngest member and his second daughter, Lindsay (the first 10 children were boys). Lindsay and her sister, Margaret, had decided to ask a freelance reporter to help them tell the story of their family. A mutual friend recommended Kolker, a former colleague of New York Magazine, whose 2013 book Lost girls chronicled the families of five victims, prostitutes who were found murdered by an as yet unknown killer.

He knew I had a history of writing about ordinary people in extraordinary situations, that’s really what I ended up do a lot of at New York magazine, said Kolker. Instead of interviewing mayors, movie stars and fashion designers, I wrote people who never imagined they would get media coverage.

Speaking to Lindsay and Margaret, he was amazed at the enormity of the trauma. I couldn’t believe it could all happen to one family, he said. It’s not just schizophrenia, there’s also child abuse, and there is so much murder-suicide.

He doubted the book was possible, he said, because if only one family member opposed it, it would be very difficult to proceed. Kolker therefore offered to speak on the phone for an hour with each surviving family member, starting with their mother, Mimi, and then in the 1990s. (Father, Don, and three of the brothers were already dead.) , he said, everyone was on board.

After a year of talking, he got to know the family but not the disease. Where I was really at zero was to understand schizophrenia, he said. And it was the exciting part, as a journalist, of learning something from scratch, which was really breathtaking.

He spoke with researchers, some of whom had studied the Galvins, then it became time to delve into the history of science. I ended up reading very old psychiatric texts on schizophrenia just to understand what people were talking about at the time. It turned out that these books were very easy to find for a dollar fifty or two dollars, because the science they contain is false.

Hidden Valley Road, which will certainly be one of the years greatest non-fiction books, braid together the chronologies, one describing the growing horror of the Galvin family while his son succumbs to mental illness, the other tracing scientific controversies on the origins of the illness itself. It has really become a story of debates, all focused on nature versus education, said Kolker. Is it genetics or is it trauma or in another era, is it brain chemistry or is it bad parenting? It’s always the same debate, but it changes a little with each generation.

Mimi Galvin raised her children during the baby boom, a time when psychiatrists were talking schizophrenogenic mothers who caused mental illness because of poor parenting You can certainly say that she made some very big mistakes along the way, but it’s also true that she was wrongfully vilified, said Kolker. After all, he added, she kept the family together. One of the reasons why there are no other families like the Galvins in the study is that any other family like this would not be a family. They should live on the street, or half of them would have died at a young age.

For Kolker, reporting on a traumatized family was nothing new. After studying history in college, he took a different approach to journalism than some of his peers. People of my generation have thought of Woodward and Bernstein, he said. It was never anything that attracted me personally. Instead, he found himself drawn to non-famous people. I was not just roaring crime leads; I was looking at problems that were bubbling beneath the surface of these crimes, he said. I was the person you would send to interview the grieving family.

It is a skill that he developed, perhaps influenced by his mother’s work as a psychiatric counselor. There must be something in his listening training and as I understood it. I come in as an auditor. Part of it came naturally and part of it came through practice.

Part of the difficulty in writing about the Galvins was the sheer size of the family. I wanted to make sure that everyone in the book was a person not only the good but also the sick, he said. The challenge and pleasure of writing non-fiction about a family is that you get everyone’s perspective and try to get a larger truth. It was a chance to write something like a family saga, like East of Eden or something like that.

In writing the scientific half of the saga, the story of our attempts to understand Kolker’s schizophrenia found reason to be optimistic. I think there is hope. I think in general, when it comes to this disease, each so-called breakthrough brings people a little closer to the nature of the disease. After years of debate over nature versus education, researchers tend to view both as crucial. Early intervention has become the watchword now. If the Galvins were born decades later, there would be less stigma and more monitoring for early warning signs that would have limited the number of psychotic breaks. Whereas before, it was, let sweep it under the carpet, let them institutionalize, let them shock.

The book also ends with a moment of hope, not only for future generations of the Galvin family, but for the larger project of understanding and treating schizophrenia. After Lost Girls, which is a very sad book, it was delicious to find little pieces of hope at different times, said Kolker. I was hoping the book would help a lot of people and make the people who still feel the stigma feel a little less lonely.

And it’s true despite the lonely battles fought by patients and researchers, Kolkers Hidden Valley Road is at the heart of a book on how progress, personal or scientific, can never be achieved by ourselves.

Tuttle is a freelance writer and acting editor of the Boston Globe.