Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker Summary

Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family -- A Comprehensive Summary

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family written by Robert Kolker is based upon real-life events of Galvin family members. They found themselves grappling with illness and trauma that haunted them for the better part of their lives. The Galvin’s were a large and happy family with parents and twelve children. However, half of the children, i.e., six, were diagnosed with the mental condition schizophrenia, which led to the downfall of a once-prosperous family.
The author starts the story by tracing it back to the family's history by starting with Mimi, who was the daughter of an aristocrat. Her husband, Don, was a military man who actively held diplomatic posts along with teaching political science. Margaret or Mimi and Donald or Don Galvin were born just after the Great Depression and married during World War II.
Mimi had longed for a refined and highbrow life in the heart of New York City, but her husband's vocation took them to Colorado Springs. So she redirected her dreams into carefully crafting a flawless family. The community where they lived was initially jealous of the Galvins' perfect family.
The children were born and raised during the Cold war, which was the baby boom era. Their eldest son Donald was born in 1945 while their youngest daughter Mary or Lindsay was born in 1965. Between the span of twenty years, the couple raised ten boys and two girls in their home situated on the unpaved Hidden Valley Road in Colorado.
On a festive evening of Thanksgiving in the year 1972, Mimi Galvin had toiled in the kitchen to craft a splendorous meal for the family who had arrived to celebrate the holiday. However, her eldest son Donald had created a mess by throwing the dining table at his brother Jim and scattering food, broken plates, and silverware everywhere. This was when Mimi's world came crashing down, her family, and all the things that she loved would end in pieces. Mimi is a complicated character of the story who was sympathetic towards her children and, at times, guilty for letting her children suffer. For a long time, she was adamant that her children were fine and tried her best to keep them away from medical help. She even would, at times, deny that her sons displayed erratic behavior. Meanwhile, the couple grew distant with her husband, Don, growing physically as well as emotionally remote with the arrival of each child in their life.
Mimi was termed the schizophrenic mother negatively by many during that era. However, the theory holds no ground that the dominancy of mothers led their children to be schizophrenic. The author's rendering of the multi-generational family saga is chilling yet deeply compassionate. The author painstakingly shares how one after the other six of the boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia in an era that was torn between calling it a mental illness and bad parenting.
The author has made sure that each of the family members has an individual voice in the book as they all try to navigate through the tragedy that befell them. Each of the six sons had varying responses to the disease; hence the topic of treatment was a national debate that grabbed headlines during the time. The sons were heavily medicated with powerful drugs. They were much of the experimental rats where doctors were trying to see what worked and what didn't. Along with the sons, the relatives and friends of the family also underwent psychological and sexual abuse from being in their orbit. The kids who didn't have the illness seemed to be continually worrying if they were next in the line to falling prey, wondering when their time would come.


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