The story of a family ravaged by schizophrenia
by Robert Kolker (Doubleday, $30)
Robert Kolker’s new book is “destined to become a classic of narrative nonfiction,” said Hamilton Cain in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The story of one Colorado family’s wrenching battle with schizophrenia, it weaves a scientific detective story with “gripping” reportage to create a pageturner “reminiscent of Rebecca Skloot’s
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” From the 1950s into the ’60s, Don and Mimi Galvin created what seemed to be their ideal life, with 12 children, piano lessons, church on Sunday, and a passion for falconry. But then six of their 10 boys, one after another, began displaying signs of psychosis. One son killed himself in a murdersuicide, another raped his younger sisters repeatedly. Kolker reports every horror, but the author of 2013’s Lost Girls also makes readers care about what the Galvins’ nightmare eventually taught the world about mental illness.
Kolker’s recounting of the Galvins’ tribulations is “at once compassionate and chilling,” said Karen Iris Tucker in The Washington Post. “He gives as much voice to the schizophrenic siblings as to their relatives,” the siblings and others who suffered their abuses, and he makes Mimi a particularly complex figure. Both parents were too long accepting of troubling behavior like Don Jr.’s torturing of cats or the beatings he inflicted on his brothers. But when the family became desperate for help, the experts leaned on the prevailing theory about schizophrenia and blamed it on Mimi’s mothering. One researcher, though, “emerges as something of a hero,” said Sam Dolnick in The New York Times. Lynn DeLisi, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, suspected years before most others in her field that schizophrenia is largely a genetic disease, and her efforts to prove her theory brought the family some relief.
Still, the more researchers have learned,
“the more they have realized how complex the puzzle is,” said Richard McNally in
The Wall Street Journal. DeLisi eventually singled out a mutation in a gene that regulates synaptic activity, then discovered that the healthy brothers carry the same mutation. But evidence now suggests that certain genes confer a vulnerability to schizophrenia that a stressful environment can activate, and the Galvins, we learn, were a troubled family before most outsiders noticed. “With the skill of a great novelist,” Kolker “brings every member of the family to life,” leaving the reader shaken—but also impressed by the resilience of the survivors. Several of them “seem to have found peace and meaning in their lives, despite often having been haunted by the fear that psychosis might strike them next.”