A story of mental illness, progress and hope
Author Robert Kolker explores one family’s devastating battle with schizophrenia
CALGARY — Robert Kolker never anticipated he would one day be discussing his writerly challenges with Oprah Winfrey.
But just over 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. It wasn’t really impromptu, of course. 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.
Entry into this particular club has been a reliable goldmine for authors and publishers ever since Winfrey introduced it in 1996. While the club has traditionally leaned toward fiction, Kolker’s book fit nicely into Winfrey’s interest in mental health issues.
The heartbreaking plight of the Galvin family and its battles with schizophrenia and stigma on mental illness, in fact, could have easily been the focus of an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show back in the day.
FORMIDABLE CHALLENGES
But the conversation with Winfrey quickly turned from the details of the story to one of many formidable challenges Kolker faced as a writer. The Galvin family included 12 siblings, six of whom suffered from schizophrenia. How does a writer go about distilling all of these pointsof-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, who will be a guest of Calgary’s Wordfest Online Happy Hour on April 30. “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”. Beyond the stranger-than-fiction tragedy about six siblings caught in the throes of schizophrenia is a complex, multi-layered backdrop 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 faced in America during the baby boom years. Throughout the devastating story of a family in crisis and denial, Kolker also traces the evolution of the science that informed the medical establishment’s understanding of the disease. An investigative journalist who has worked for Bloomberg and New York Magazine, Kolker’s 2013 debut, “Lost Girls”, was a grim true-crime account of online escorts being murdered by a stillat-large serial killer on Long Island. As a reporter, Kolker has a history of empathy and unravelling family tragedies and an interest in telling “narratives about people facing challenges.” But the science research involved in the Galvins’ story 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,” he says. “There are so many conflicting theories and so much we don’t know and so many people who argue that have they 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.”
THE SCIENCE
Science has evolved to a point where genetics are now understood to play a major role in mental illness, which is part of the reason that 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, which was, unfortunately, a common belief
held by the psychiatric community in the baby-boom years. Kolker was introduced to the family through Jon Gluck, his former editor at New York Magazine who had gone to school with one of the Galvin sisters, who had contacted Gluck about wanting an independent journalist to write a book. He immediately thought of Kolker.
Still, the writer had his doubts that 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.”
Wordfest’s Online Happy Hour with Robert Kolker will take place April 30. Visit wordfest.com for details.