HEARTBREAKING SAGA IS A TALE OF HOPE
Robert Kolker puts a human face on mental illness
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
Robert Kolker
Random House Canada
ERIC VOLMERS
Robert Kolker never anticipated he would one day be discussing his writerly challenges with Oprah Winfrey.
But just more than a month ago, the journalist and author received a surprise phone call from the media mogul and talk-show host at his New York home.
Unbeknownst to Kolker, his publisher and Winfrey had been in talks about choosing his second book, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, for the much-ballyhooed relaunch of Oprah’s Book Club.
Kolker’s book fit nicely into Winfrey’s interest in mental-health issues, featuring the heartbreaking plight of the Galvin family and its battles with schizophrenia and stigmatization. Winfrey and Kolker discussed the formidable challenges facing the writer. The Galvin family included 12 siblings, six of whom suffered from schizophrenia. How do you distil all of these points-of-view into a coherent narrative?
“That was the first thing I said to Oprah Winfrey when she got on the phone to tell me about the book-club selection,” says Kolker. “I said this was really the challenge of a career to tell a story that came to view 12 children and two parents, and got everybody’s rationale in there and tell the story right. It was extremely tricky and I hoped I had done the family justice. Of course, the biggest challenge within that challenge is to write about the mentally ill siblings and give them as much dimension as everybody else. I didn’t want them to be cookie-cutter mentally ill people. I wanted them to be people.”
It’s among the many miracles of Hidden Valley Road, a complex, multi-layered tale that involves issues of sexual abuse, a murder-suicide, multi-generational trauma, the mysteries of genetics and the suffocating stigma parents of the mentally ill once encountered. Kolker also traces the evolution of the science that informed the medical establishment’s understanding of the disease.
An investigative journalist, Kolker’s 2013 debut, Lost Girls, was a grim true-crime account of online escorts being murdered by a serial killer on Long Island.
As a reporter, an empathetic Kolker is interested in telling “narratives about people facing challenges.” But the science research was a new, and surprisingly enjoyable, experience for the author, who said it was “fun to read old books about schizophrenia published in the ’60s, or ’50s or even the ’40s, just to see how wrong they were.”
“I really hit the books. There are so many conflicting theories and so much we don’t know and so many people who argue they have the answer as other people completely disagree with them. It was hard to wrestle down. I found the best way to do it was make it into a narrative itself — the story of the evolving science, the running debate of whether it was your environment that caused mental illness or whether it was genetics. This was a real debate that happened all through the 20th century and took form in many different ways. It became another exercise in storytelling for me.”
Science has evolved to a point where genetics are understood to play a major role in mental illness, which is part of the reason the Galvins’ now 90-something matriarch Mimi wanted the story to be told. For years, she had been blamed for causing the mental illness in her children, a common belief held by the psychiatric community in the baby boom years.
Still, the writer had his doubts the project would come to fruition given the number of family members involved. While family patriarch Don Galvin, a career military man, and three of the brothers have passed away, it was still a large family with varying views on how their story unfolded.
“I thought there might be at least one family member who would stand up and say ‘No, I don’t want this to happen,’” Kolker says. “It’s such a sensitive book. But, lo and behold, everyone was ready to talk. Especially Mimi, the mother, who had really been so guarded for so long and was ready to talk to an author. She was in her 90s and finally was ready, so it was excellent timing.”
While the Galvins’ tale is heartbreaking and tragic, Kolker says Hidden Valley Road is actually a hopeful story, particularly in showing the scientific and social progress made concerning mental illness.
“You see it with the next generation that I write about toward the end of the book,” Kolker says. “There is someone young in the book who gets early intervention and perhaps doesn’t develop acute mental illness that other people a few generations ago might otherwise have been left to wallow. Things aren’t perfect now and it’s deeply troubling what we still have to face, but there are little shards of hope in the book.”
I thought there might be at least one family member who would stand up and say ‘No, I don’t want this to happen.’