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A review by honnari_hannya
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
3.0
The biography of a family suffering from schizophrenia—both those individuals who have the disease, as well as the members whose lives are forever altered because of the messy family relationships at the heart of this story. The case study for how schizophrenia presented in the Galvin family is fascinating in and of itself. Amongst the 12 children, half were diagnosed with the disease, all of them boys, at various levels of severity.
Kolker traced the history of treatment (and sometimes the lack thereof) within the Galvin family very admirably. I appreciate that Kolker also provided a fairly wide scope of the Galvins' interactions with the medical institution, as patients and as subjects, giving readers a good understanding of the complexity of this disease and the barriers which prevent people not only from seeking treatment but also scientists and doctors from trying to find it.
I will say that I'm not sure how effective this book was, written as a biography. Kolker clearly spent a lot of time with the family, and I have to wonder why this wasn't approached as some sort of memoir, with Kolker acting as a ghostwriter—perhaps from one or both of the sisters, who lived through incredibly traumatic experiences in their household. This is a story that would have been incredibly powerful written by one of the members. As it is, I felt like there was a lot of distance between me as a reader and the experiences of the family. Alternatively, it could have skewed more towards the science of the disease and firmly established itself as a scientific history of the disease. I don't think it found its footing in any particular genre, and suffered for that.
Kolker traced the history of treatment (and sometimes the lack thereof) within the Galvin family very admirably. I appreciate that Kolker also provided a fairly wide scope of the Galvins' interactions with the medical institution, as patients and as subjects, giving readers a good understanding of the complexity of this disease and the barriers which prevent people not only from seeking treatment but also scientists and doctors from trying to find it.
I will say that I'm not sure how effective this book was, written as a biography. Kolker clearly spent a lot of time with the family, and I have to wonder why this wasn't approached as some sort of memoir, with Kolker acting as a ghostwriter—perhaps from one or both of the sisters, who lived through incredibly traumatic experiences in their household. This is a story that would have been incredibly powerful written by one of the members. As it is, I felt like there was a lot of distance between me as a reader and the experiences of the family. Alternatively, it could have skewed more towards the science of the disease and firmly established itself as a scientific history of the disease. I don't think it found its footing in any particular genre, and suffered for that.