Author Robert Kolker discusses his latest book, which details the story of an all-American family decimated by schizophrenia — and ends on a surprisingly hopeful note
“I’m probably in some ways emulating my mother, who died in 2018,” says the baby-faced Kolker via FaceTime from his home in Brooklyn. “She spent 25 years as a psychiatric counselor at our local hospital. She was very good at active listening, both professionally and with our family. When I’m listening to people, I think I’m doing what she does.”, a Gothic tale of the Galvin family — Mimi, Don, and their 12 children. On the surface, the Galvins were a postwar American dream.
Four of five years ago, Lindsay came to New York, and told Jon that she and Margaret had been talking about wanting to have a book written about the family. They didn’t want it to be a memoir told just from their point of view. Jon thought of me, probably because he thought I was a good match based on the troubled families I wrote about inI got on the phone with the two of them from a conference room.
The old idea about schizophrenia was that it was, as you write, “a disease of nurture, not nature,” caused by a woman “who suffers from a perversion of the maternal instinct.” Would that have been applied to Mimi, just on the basis of having 12 kids? Still, strictly speaking, the theory of the dominating mother, if this book were a murder mystery, that would be the red herring in the first part. But it happens to be a red herring that makes life terrible for them. The last thing they would ever want to do is try to let the world know that this is happening, so they acted like everything was alright.
I love the fact that their reactions were so different. In the very beginning, I thought, this will be a book about two sisters who survive together under terrible conditions. And then the more I got to know them, the more I saw how different they were in dealing with this condition. I worried for a day or two, and then I thought: Wait a minute; that’s more real.
It turned out that Donald [Jr.] had attempted something similar to the brother who ended up murdering his wife and committing suicide. The story is, they had been told that Donald’s wife left him, and he was so dejected that he had a psychotic break and had to go to the hospital, because he was heartbroken. One day, we were in Pueblo, at the hospital where many of them were treated, and going through reams and reams of documents with Lindsay.
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