The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR PEOPLE'S #1 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, Slate, Smithsonian, The New York Post, and Amazon The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Thanks for being here and being with us on the podcast again. Be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, relatives. Get everybody involved in the show so they can take and subscribe, listen to all the wonderful things. You can see us in all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and Clubhouse app. We're always talking about stuff over there nightly on the Clubhouse app. You can also see the video version of this. You go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss, hit the bell notification, and you can find out everything you might need to know about what's going on in this author and his incredible book.

This book is pretty darn amazing. Oprah talked about it. It's received numerous awards and plugs and everything else. The book is called Hidden Valley Road, and it's written by the author Robert Kolker, who joins us today. It's a non-fiction, instant, number one New York Times bestseller and selection of Oprah's Book Club. It was named the top 10 book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate. One of the year's best by NPR, The Boston Globe, and New York Post and Amazon. The number one book of the year by People and one of President Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com.

And their Micro-iDSD Signature is a top- a top of the range desktop transportable dac and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones it has two brown burr dac chips in it and will decode high-res audio and mqa files we're using in the studio right now i've loved my experience with it so far just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level ifi audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times bestseller,

and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate's best-known fiction books of the quarter century. He is National Magazine Awards finalist, whose journalism has appeared in New York Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, oh, the Oprah Magazine, and Marshall Project. Welcome to the show, Bob. How are thou? Hi, Chris. It's great to be here. Thanks for picking me out of the pack. Thank you for coming and spending some time with us. We're honored to have you. There's a lot of Oprahs in there, in that bio. Yeah, years ago, just as a journeyman freelancer, I wrote a little bit for Oprah magazine just when it was starting and had a blast. Actually, it was fun, but then it was like a whole other lifetime.

And then I wrote this book and as Oprah usually picks fiction, this is a nonfiction book. So I didn't even dream it would be selected for Oprah's book club. And then one day she actually called me directly to tell me I was amazed. Just amazed. And then Barack Obama, president Barack Obama. Yes, he has,

he has this list. He puts on Instagram every December of here, the books I liked. And then he does another one with the TV shows. The TV shows this year were interesting. He liked the boys, the superhero show, which I thought was interesting.

Yeah. He's so cool. He's always so cool and got his finger on the pulse of what's going on. And the thing I love about Brock was a lot of things I love about Brock LeBron, but he actually reads. Yes. I hear Biden does too. This is an extraordinary book. It's inside the mind of an American family. Let's start out first with your plugs. Let's move some books here. Give us your plugs of where people can find out more about you on the interwebs and where they can order the book up. I have a website, robertkolker.com, K-O-L-K-E-R, and that links to websites for the two books I have. I have Hidden Valley Road and Lost Girls, which came out a few years back and now is

a Netflix movie. But these books are on sale everywhere. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any place you go and hunt for them. I have some old magazine stories on the website too. Some nice pictures. You know, the usual. There you go. You can check him out and find out more about him.

And maybe there's a link to his Tinder profile. I'm just kidding. I don't know. There's probably not. But anyway, in all seriousness. So you can check it out. Order up the book from your local booksellers and everything else. It's got just, you read the award page on Amazon. It's just, oh my gosh, this is an amazing book. So what motivated you to want

to write this book? How did you find out about this family? What went on? And why did it really pique your interest? I've had a career in magazine writing and with one book before this one where I really did what people call narrative journalism. So I'm not like the investigative reporter who's going to uncover the fourth quarter earnings report irregularity that blows the lid off of the corrupt corporation. And I'm not the guy who's going to go after a politician. I'm going to be writing involving compelling stories about everyday people who are caught up in emotional situations. And hopefully, in learning

their story, I can lift the veil on a part of America or a part of society that people otherwise wouldn't see. And I successfully did that with Lost Girls, which is not just a true crime book, and not just an unsolved murder case, but really a look at a whole class of people who are suddenly finding escort work in the age of the internet and of declining options for the middle class finding escort work somehow a practical option. And then they wind up in danger because of it and really neglected by the police. So it was part social commentary and part gripping story that hopefully would be as good as any novel.

And that's my goal. So one day, five years ago, I got connected with a family, the most extraordinary family I ever heard of, the Galvin family of Colorado Springs, Colorado. They had 12 children and six of those children were diagnosed with schizophrenia. My first phone call was with the two youngest members of the family, the only girls of the 12 children, Lindsay and Margaret. And they were in their 50s and their older brothers were all as old as their early 70s. And they told me the story of their family in that first call. And I was devastated listening to it. I couldn't believe that all of this could happen to just one family. And I couldn't believe that the family would stay together after all of this. It wasn't just that six of the 12 had severe mental illness.

There was a murder-suicide. There was sexual abuse. There was clergy abuse. Lots of drugs. The police being called to the house. And at one point, one of the children being airlifted out by a generous, wealthy family who knew them. And almost this kind of weird Charles Dickens plot twist. It sounds like Friday's at my house. I couldn't believe it listening to all of it, but listening to them talk,

they were ready to talk about it. They were excited to talk about it because they also believed that their family was significant scientifically. They'd been studied by two different research teams over the years. Both of those teams were sure that a family with this much schizophrenia in it would have a genetic petri dish, essentially, that people could go and look in and examine and try and find that genetic smoking gun that everyone's been looking for that shows people the origins of severe mental illness. And they wanted to know the results of that work. They wanted a reporter to help track down that information, to dig up the medical records from

their brothers, to learn more about them, to really uncover the secrets of the family. And I guess buried in that request was a chance for them to give them almost a happy ending that they needed because the parents were so caught up in what was going on and had so few options at the time that they did their best to bury all of the information, to keep it all secret. So this was really, at the end of the day, an investigative job of a different sort, an investigation into people, into a family, into the dynamics of a family, and into the science of mental illness. It was really the challenge of a career. And slowly but surely, I got up the courage to do it. And three and a half years later, here I am. Did you do a lot of work with the family?

Did they open things for you, information, files, things of that data? Or did you have to go from outside sources? The sisters were ready. One of them had diaries from when she was a kid. The other one was very involved in the lives of the surviving mentally ill brothers and could offer access to talk to them and talk to their doctors. And also, most importantly, between the two of us, we could try and dig up old medical files to tell the stories of what happened back in the day when they first were becoming sick. And yet they were ready. But it was an open question in the beginning about whether the rest of the family was really on board with this. And I actually was,

I really put the brakes on it early on, because I pumped the brakes, I should say. I said, let's slow down here, because I don't want to start a war inside this family. I don't want to knock on a brother's door and have the brother say, what book? Are you kidding me? I don't want a book about this. This is sensitive information. And there's a huge stigma about mental illness. And I hoped and prayed that the family was ready to do battle with that stigma and to go public. But of course, people are have lives to lead in our and it's a difficult thing to ask them to do. It really took almost a year of me talking to everybody in the family, them getting to know me, me getting to know them. And then we were really off to the races. I was working full time and I went to Colorado eight times and hung out with everybody, learned

everybody's individual stories. And then of course, pieced together episodes that the family remembered from decades ago so that it actually reads like it's happening right now, which is a huge challenge for a narrative journalist. There's a huge moment at one of the Thanksgivings that this family went through, but nobody could figure out what year Thanksgiving it was. And if you think about it, that's pretty typical. Thanksgiving happens every year. How could I remember if something happened in 1992 or 1997? And so it took a lot of detective work just to figure out dates and things like that. And it was really extraordinary. Six of the 12 children are diagnosed with schizophrenia, which seems to me like that would be a bit of an anomaly. Is that correct?

Yes. In one theory, it's that you're hammering the same nail over and over again, that the parents continue to mix their genetic material. And so there's an equal chance if they had just had four kids, maybe only two would have had schizophrenia. Wow. equal chance if they had just had four kids, maybe only two would have had schizophrenia. But then there's another way of looking at it, which is that whatever is happening genetically is so powerful that we ought to be able to notice it with today's scientific tools. We ought to be able to see where the genetic mutation or variant, as they call it, is taking place and perhaps even find a way to medicate it. And that's like the great white whale in scientific research to find something big enough to zap with a drug so you can make a difference in people's lives. So were the parents alive still? The mother was alive. And I think that's one reason why the whole family was on board,

because she was 91 years old and very sharp mentally, but physically in decline. So they felt like time was of the essence. And they also, after I made a couple of calls, they realized there was some good news on the scientific front. And so that buoyed everybody's sails a little bit, made them feel a little bit better about things. There you go. So how does it begin? They become a family and they start having children. Or where do you want to begin in telling us the story or sharing at least the parts? The thing that really hit me as I got to know the family was that this family had 12 children over 20 years, and those 20 years were the precise years of the baby boom. Their first child was born in 1945 while dad was still overseas fighting World War II. He was conceived during a trip home. And then the last

child, the 12th child was born in 1965. So the exact baby boom. So this was the American century. This was a generation filled with optimism and hope. And so to have 12 children at a time like that in the late 40s and throughout the 1950s was, in a way, almost a triumphant thing for them to do. And this was a very ambitious family. They were New Yorkers who were dragged out west to Colorado, because that's where the Air Force set up the Air Force Academy. And Don, the father, ended up an instructor at the academy. And so his career brought them there. And when they got there, they could have taken up golf or just relaxed. But instead, they took up the most strenuous demanding

dangerous thing you could possibly do out there which is falconry they learned to tame and domesticate and fly falcons and they became known for it until don the father ended up being the guy who flew the falcons during halftime shows at at air force games and they they actually it was more than that. This family is the family responsible for having the Air Force adopt falcons as their mascot. So the Air Force was born in the mid 1950s. And that's when Don was there as well. And he wrote them a letter saying, you know, the falcons are here in Colorado, the prairie falcon and the native to that area. And what a great idea to make them the mascot and they agree. So they have a little bit of history to that area. And what a great idea to make them the mascot. And they agreed.

So they have a little bit of history to be made. They were, as the family, as the boys got older, the family became more notorious. And before the boys were sick, they were a model family. And you can see from the cover of the book, all of them wearing their little suits, standing on the staircase in the grand ballroom of the Air Force Academy. It was an American success story. And Mimi, the mother, even toward the end of her life, was still saying to people like me, we were a model family. Other families used us as an example. And they were heavily invested in this. So it's not like they were leading a quiet life and then suddenly got hit by a bus. They really had a lot of hope and optimism, and then the worst possible thing could happen to them by the mid-1960s.

And that's when America starts losing its innocence, too. The writer in me was excited to tell a story about what happens when that vision of triumph, that optimistic life, becomes threatened by things you can't control how do you react and they react every different which way over the years it's really quite something to see and then the children grow up and they have to unpack those experiences and process the traumas of their childhood and find a way to move on and that's really the second thing i would want to get across to you chris and everybody else that's that this is a I would want to get across to you, Chris, and everybody else.

That's that this is a multigenerational saga. You meet the parents, you see their hopes and dreams, you get to know them rather well. And then the children grow up and become adults and have families of their own. And they start to see their parents with new eyes and go through their own things. And by the time you watch the kids grown up to the family so well that everything takes on a deeper meaning. I wanted it to be like East of Eden or the corrections or these family stories that you read in fiction. This book seemed, from the start, it seemed like it would be rich enough to be able to tell a story that powerful. And so that's what

I tried to do. It does evoke that, especially just looking at the cover. And I don't know if this is a good analogy, but this atomic age leading into Baby Boomer and then almost this Icarus experience of flying too close to the sun and the fall of that. I don't know if that's the Icarus thing is a good analogy. But yeah, there's that romanticism of that atomic age and Baby Boomers. And then, yeah, as you mentioned, the decline of the American nuclear family, if you will. But yeah, these guys seem really extraordinary. They seem really driven. They seem to be doing a lot of things. So where do things start going off the rails?

I'm hitting that American dream bit a little hard because the other way to go was not tempting to me. I didn't want this to end up being like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or some monster movie where one by one the children get sick and the house becomes a house of horrors i i feel like enough bad stuff happens to the family that theme is obvious and there's no reason to really hit the gas on that and i didn't want to be exploitative i didn't want this to be the book to be like looking at a car crash yeah instead i just wanted to show how it all unfolds and the mystery of that at the time and the frustrations and the struggles of the family at the time. The oldest son, Donald,

is the first to demonstrate real symptoms. And it happens when he's at college. And this is typical because with schizophrenia, the real onset happens at the end of adolescence. And he gets sent to health services because he's doing erratic things like torturing a cat or jumping into a bonfire and burning his arm during a pep rally. And even he can't explain why he's doing these things. And that becomes a hallmark of the illness in all six. They do things they can't explain. They become a stranger to their own thoughts and feelings and emotions. Other symptoms they don't share, but that's the thing they all share. And so Donald, the son, he needs help, but the parents aren't in a position to help him. And there are a lot

of reasons for that. The first is that the stigma of mental illness is so terrible that it would affect all the other 11 children and it would affect the father's career at the time he had a career where he had political connections. And so to say that he had a severely mentally ill son was going to be a problem in the mid 1960s. And that's one problem. The second problem is that even if they wanted to get him help, their options were terrible. They could go to psychotherapists who all at the time were blaming mom and dad for schizophrenia. So that would just triple the stigma on the family. Or they could send him to the state mental hospital, which had just come through this

horrible scandal. That was a house of horrors, the state mental hospital. Basically, it was warehousing your kid, and they didn't want to do that either. And they didn't have the money, they were a middle-class family. They didn't have the money to go to some posh sanitarium, a place like the Menninger Clinic or whatever. So they were really stuck. And so what they decided to do is something that I think if you're a parent, sometimes you see yourself doing with your kids, which is you decide to hope for the best. You decide that the most practical choice is to try to be optimistic and think maybe they'll grow out of it. Maybe they'll move their way through it. And of course, there's this bootstrap American ethos that the family has, too. That doesn't, that only contributes to it. They think Donald's just going to have to learn

to stand on his own two feet. And we really need to make sure that he learns to fend for himself, a lot of that language. And so they kind of paper over the worst of it make sure that he learns to fend for himself, a lot of that language. And so they kind of paper over the worst of it and hope that he moves through it. And of course, he gets worse and worse. Meanwhile, the second son, Jim, who is Donald's chief rival in the family, he's married. He has a child. He feels like he's the biggest success in the world. But suddenly, he has bouts of paranoia and delusions. He thinks not just that everybody's out to get him, but that strange things are happening. He spends

all night turning the burner on the stove on and off and on and off. He has compulsive behavior. He also is a stranger to his own thoughts and feelings and emotions. And he, again, he doesn't live at home. And so when his wife comes to the parents and says that he's acting this way, the parents are faced with another decision. What do they do? And shockingly, they don't tell the two of you are having marital problems. Maybe you should see a priest. These are the early years where denial is really huge. But things do change. As more kids get sick and the family sinks more and more into crisis, they can't deny it anymore. And so they stop playing little games like that and they start acknowledging the problems. But by then, so much has happened that it's a whole other scene at the house. The house almost becomes like its own mental hospital.

There are sons cycling in and out all the time. And the sisters are sitting ducks there at home. They sometimes get sent over to a brother's house and the brother sexually assaults them. There just aren't enough eyes on people in the family to really take care of everyone. And so even with the best of intentions, the worst happens. I'm piling on all the difficulties, but I think what folks paying attention here might want to know is that the book is really about how people move through traumas. It's not about victims. It's about survivors. And it's about survivors, and it's about

making it through. And so even if you don't have severe mental illness in your family, this is where I break in and say, cold timeout. Even if you aren't interested in schizophrenia, this is a human story about a family that finds a way through when the absolute worst possible things happen. And there's a way to read the book almost for tips on how you might process your own traumas in your life. I think, not to get too deep here, but like we as a culture, we don't like to talk about sick people. We don't like to talk about trauma. We don't like to talk about our own difficulties. Somebody asks how you are, you say, oh, I'm fine. You're not going to talk about what's bothering you. It's through storytelling, fiction and nonfiction, that we can process these

fears we have and the experiences we have, we can find ways to move through them by looking at other examples. And so I'm hoping this book is helpful in that way. There you go. Really amazing. Six of the 10 Galvin boys get schizophrenia. The other six children are sitting there, the poor girls. And then like you say, there's, I mean, it just gets worse. But I love how you approach the story where you just didn't turn it into a car crash strategy. Look how bad this got and made it a story of medicine, of triumph, of like you said, survivor, repair, and all that sort of good stuff. And you mentioned that they become one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental

Health. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? If you feel we're at that part, we want to cover that. Yeah, sure. One of the other exciting challenges of this book is to show how their story is almost like a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia. And the more I looked into it, the more I saw how little we really know about schizophrenia. There's so much that, not only that, but things we think we know aren't actually true. In our society, we use the word schizophrenia or schizoid to think about multiple personalities. And that just isn't what schizophrenia is. There may be something called multiple personality disorder, but that's different from schizophrenia.

That's what Bob and Lucy say. That's right. I was just next to me. What we're all trying to tell you, Chris, is that it's not about multiple personality. That's just a canard. And that's a problem. It started when they came up with the name schizophrenia because the root stands for split and so people thought it meant split personality but really what it is it's a split between what a person perceives and what reality is so it's about being separated from reality and the other big thing that was eye-opening to me was that we all came of age at a time where the age of brain chemistry where where new drugs seem to be coming online,

like Prozac, like every year, there was something new that had a new possible amazing effect on treating any number of mental illnesses or difficult emotional conditions that with the help of a therapist and with trial and error, there were things that seemed hopeless that now are hopeful. And I felt, I thought before I started this book that if you had something intense like schizophrenia, there were drugs for you too. And that all you needed was to stay in those drugs and that you would be okay.

But it turns out that's just not true, that we've done it with bipolar disorder and with anxiety and depression. But with schizophrenia, the people today who have schizophrenia are basically taking the same exact drugs that the Galvin family was prescribed back in the late 60s and early 70s. And that was amazing to me that you said you could put a man on the moon or whatever it is you could do, but we haven't been able to innovate in this area. And that was a real eye opener to me.

So all the while, science is struggling. And we see science struggle in the book. I duck over and tell a separate story about the evolving science. I hopefully do it in a way that makes it clear that I'm not trying to put you to sleep. I'm not trying to make you eat your vegetables. The idea is to raise the stakes of what the Galvin family might mean. And we get to know a couple of key researchers, including a woman named Lynn DeLisi. Dr. DeLisi became a doctor in the 1970s, back when they were still blaming mom and dad for a lot of these illnesses. And she was more than sure that schizophrenia was a genetic illness and that we just had to prove it and we just needed the technology to prove it. And we just needed the technology to prove it. And she decided long before she met the Galvin family that the key to understanding the genetics of schizophrenia would be to look at families with as much schizophrenia in it as possible and to analyze their genes and to see how their genes

were different from everyone else's. It just seemed like more than obvious to her. But everyone else in her field in the 70s, first of all, half the people were saying, you're a woman and you shouldn't be a psychiatric researcher anyway. You should be doing pathology or maybe even thinking about becoming a nurse. And then the other half of the people were saying, you want to research psychiatry. You don't want to think about genetics. You want to be a therapist. You want to go be a therapistize people. And then anybody else who wasn't didn't take those positions, they'd say to her, why do you on earth do you want to devote your career to something as hopeless as schizophrenia? Why don't you look into depression or anxiety, or even bipolar disorder, because we're making strides there and you're actually going to be successful, you're going to fail if you do this.

And she didn't listen to any of them. So part of this book is her story. And another researcher, Bob Friedman, the two of them are heroes in the book who do battle against the trends and the groupthink of the scientific community and continue to pursue their line of thinking, which is that these families hold the key. And when they meet the Galvin family in the mid-1980s, that's the moment that hope first appears for this family in a real way. And that becomes like part two of the book. One way I thought about it while writing the book is that you have a murder mystery where there's a long prelude of everything that happens right up to the murder. And then in part two, the detective shows up. That's the first time you meet the detective. These guys are the

detectives, Dr. DeLisi and Dr. Friedman. And we follow them on a very crooked path as they find a way to use the genetic material of the Galvins and other families like them to pursue various lines of inquiry. And sometimes they hit dead ends. And sometimes they get ignored by the establishment. And they have to wait until they're back in fashion again. But both roads from both researchers lead them to breakthroughs just in the past few years, in 2015 and 2016. And amazingly, just as I was starting work on the book. And that's why the, another reason why the family was so interested in the book in the first place, because they really feel like research into their family and others like them really shined a light that led to progress.

And the progress is outlined toward the end of the book. It involves finding actual genes that might play a role in schizophrenia, but more to the point, those genes point to particular issues in the way the brain operates that we should be looking at. And then finally, they point to a new strategy that could mean preventing mental illness before you even get it, making brains more resilient when you're an infant, or even when you're gestating in the uterus, in utero. You could be taking vitamin supplements that make your brain more resilient so that if you have a genetic vulnerability, it doesn't matter because your brain is developing beyond it because it's stronger. These are hopeful things that couldn't

have happened without the sacrifice of families like the Galvins. And in the end, I think this book is a little bit about those sacrifices, about how there's a way to look at suffering as in the service of something else. And that's a way to hopefully move through it. That's perfectly said, look at suffering in the service of something else. And that's a way to hopefully move through it. That's perfectly said. Look at suffering in the service of something else. And of course, learning and growing from it. It is extraordinary. I've had some employees that they had one member in their family who was schizophrenia, and I would see the fallout from that. Hey, Chris, I've got to take time off to go get them out of jail. I've got to go to court with them. This is back in the age when, what was it, Rose Kennedy, I think, or whomever, they just gave them a lobotomy sometimes to deal with some people.

And what's interesting to me is the fault that I've seen from just people I've known who have one member having schizophrenia is massive. It's extraordinary. It's just, I've often just said, I don't know that I would, if I was the father of a schizophrenic child, if I, if we wouldn't go on a, on a boat in, uh, in Lake Tahoe and sing Hail Marys, but these people had six, I'm half joking there, but they'd have six. And you're just like, just the fallout from what I've seen with one is extraordinary. But I think that's, I think that's what makes it a beautiful story is like I said, you didn't focus on the tragedy of it so much other than just telling the story. But you focused on how this could be something that could improve everyone's life, could make the world a better place. And somehow, maybe through the arc of it, you tell me if I'm wrong, but maybe through the arc of it, this atomic family can find redemption in serving society or serving schizophrenia in the future through the research and everything that's come from it? I do feel like we're older and wiser now. A lot of people talk about the

late 60s and the 70s as America's loss of innocence. And if that's the case, a generation or two later, we're wiser to some of the pitfalls, some of the hubris that we have. And that when we have difficulties now, we're able to talk about them a little bit more. There's still a huge stigma with mental illness, but there are things that have changed in our lifetime. So when you and I were growing up, I don't think people really talked about bipolar disorder or anxiety or depression for that matter. And when they did, they certainly didn't talk about them as brain diseases. They talked about them as character flaws. Oh, she's got manic depression. And when she's that way, we just tell her she needs to shape up as opposed to that she has a brain condition and there's a

medicine that can help her with this. And that's where we're headed with schizophrenia. We're not entirely there yet. But the fact that we're able to do this and the fact that people who are fortunate enough to have good health care actually can get support from the medical establishment in a way that they couldn't before. A lot of people ask me, if the Galvin boys got sick today in 2021, would it be different from getting sick in 1967? And in that sense, the answer is yes. They might be getting a lot of the same medicines, but they'd be getting treated at the ages of 15 or 16 or 17, not at 23, 24 and 25. And that may not sound like much, but that actually is a tremendous difference because we know that every time you have a

psychotic break, you damage your brain. So if you can stave off 10 years of psychotic breaks that you otherwise would have had, then you have much more functionality than you otherwise would have. In the book, I have Donald Galvin, ahead. Sorry. No, you go ahead. In the book, I have Donald Galvin, the oldest one. His first trouble seems to be when he's a teenager, but he doesn't get to the hospital until he's 25. That's eight years of psychotic breaks that can be prevented. I didn't know it did damage to the brain.

That's really amazing. It's like a seizure almost, maybe. Yeah, exactly. There's like a loss of gray matter they've noticed now. Yeah. And the most exciting realization that people have about schizophrenia is the idea of how the genetic aspect of it really works. You aren't born with a genetic mutation that says that two weeks after your 22nd birthday, you're going to have your first breakdown. It's not destiny that way. The genes are more of a blueprint and less of a

an oracle. So instead, what you're born with is a vulnerability. And as your brain develops over time, it becomes harder and harder to mask that vulnerability. It starts to screw up more and more things until finally, as your brain is getting finished, which is at the end of adolescence, more or less, that's when it becomes harder and harder to really paper over the issues. And the great analogy would be a bowling ball. You're bowling and you throw the bowling ball and it hits the lane and it looks fantastic for about half the way down there. But what you don't realize is that something's been amiss from the very beginning. And so by the time it gets to the pins, it's so far off that it's basically in the gutter. And you ask yourself, how'd that happen? It was doing so well in the beginning. What happened

in the middle that sent it off the edge? Nothing happened in the middle that sent it off the edge. It was a problem from the beginning. It's just, we couldn't notice it because the ball was compensating for a little while. That's the best way I've been able to explain it. That's a good comparison. Yeah. It's astounding. What were some of the things that Oprah or Obama, like really, what were some of the things that you felt, or maybe they told you, drew them to the book, what they love most about it? I really was dumbfounded when Oprah called. I didn't pick up the phone, first of all, because it said no caller ID. And then i got an email from the publicity department

at double day and they said it's a guy he said bob there's a journalist he's trying to call you the next time you get a phone call that says no caller id could you please pick it up and i said okay and then i said to myself why is he being so cryptic why doesn't he just say entertainment weekly is calling you he didn't why wouldn't he say who it is and then i pick up the phone and i hear this is oprah winfrey and i start laughing hysterically because i feel i felt at that moment as if the book had been rescued because it was march of 2020 and the pandemic was raging and the city i'm in new york was shutting down and there was talk of amazon switching over and only shipping out essential items, and not even books, we all were in peril. And I wasn't sure what that meant for anything. And then to know that, at the very least,

the book would find a huge segment of readers who might connect with it. I was just amazed. And I was flattered, because I know that there are a lot of good books on Oprah's book club list. But then I thought there was a little question in my mind, which is why this book? Why is she interested in this book? And I realized in hindsight that I shouldn't have wondered so much because she is interested in mental health issues. And she always has been. It's a theme that would show up on her show a lot. And then Lindsay and Margaret, the Galvin sisters, they both told me independently that when they were kids watching the Oprah Winfrey show, they would turn to each other and say, these people have nothing on us.

We should be on this show. Our family should be on this show. And when I think about Hidden Valley Road, I think it really is a really good episode of the Oprah Winfrey show. If she was still doing her show, they would be on it. And they did it on her book club show. She did interview the family members.

But more than that, I think she's interested in inspiring stories about people overcoming adversity. And there is a way of reading this book to try to be inspired to see what happens when the worst happens. And how do you come out the other side? And I think that she responded to that. And that was a tremendous relief to me, because I really didn't want to make a mistake and have the book damage the family more they had been through enough. I'm an impartial journalist. I'm not an advocacy journalist.

I'm not working for the family. But I certainly didn't want to make this a takedown of the family or to make it exploitative at all. And so her endorsement was just wonderful that way. And then I learned that one reason why she learned the book existed at all was because she was working on a documentary series about mental health for Apple Plus for the streaming service. And so someone from Oprah Magazine, the book's editor, Lee Haber, said, oh, you might want to look at this new book that's coming out that's a big deal.

And she looked at it and she came back. Oprah came back and said, let's make this the book club book. So I was just bowled over when I heard about that. It's extraordinary. Yeah. Obama's list is a little more opaque, hard to know exactly what he likes and what he doesn't like, but he tends to put to for nonfiction. He tends to pick a nice sample of the heavyweight doorstop nonfiction books that are well reviewed over the year. So this became one of those. And that was really just wonderful to see. Hard to believe. I'm not in contact with him just to think that he actually read it. I was actually over my shoulder,

there's a couch. That's where I was for two hours after I heard that it made the Obama list. I just couldn't believe it.'s astounding and of course it's probably also shout out to the great writing and different literary stuff that you put in it to tell the story and everything else do you see it maybe becoming a movie or going to the screen in any way i'd like that i think it would be good as a miniseries because there's so many different plots this is um another reason why oprah might have connected with it is that it makes me think of east of eden where part one of the book is one generation and part two is the whole younger generation and you get to know everybody so well and i think something long

like that really lends itself well to a miniseries so i'm trying i'm thinking about it i think there's huge demand for this these days because as there are streaming wars going on and everybody wants their own original content. And then the other thing that's happened is that stuff based on true events has become really in demand. Lots and lots of movies based on true events that get made and miniseries, too. So there's a shot. There's definitely a shot. There's definitely a shot. And I think more now than ever after this pandemic week, I don't know about anybody else, but I like more stories that are trauma to triumph, rising from the ashes and learning about all of our different faults and failings and incompletions

and trying to fill in those blanks. And so I would watch it. I'd just be enthralled by it. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing book. And fleshing out the story and stuff, of course, nothing is ever as good as the book, the movies are. But I would obviously watch it just to be intrigued by the whole play out of it. But there's nothing like this. Was there anything close? Was there any other families maybe that you found that had this sort of DNA issue of this? Or was it just more extraordinary for them, especially because they had 12 kids and so they really hit the number lottery?

I think it's more the latter because they had so many kids. In the years since, there was word of a family in South America with something like 18 kids and an enormous number of them having severe mental illness. But I don't know who studied that family, but it came out later.

So at the time, they were this enormous anomaly. This is interesting because it's the American family with this whole atomic baby boomer arcing thing. And then America is kind of having those whole value changes. So I think that makes it compelling. This has been amazing, Robert, to take and talk to you about the book and the extraordinary nature of the story and everything else. Give us your plugs as we go out so people can know where to order the book up and find out more about you online. Thank you. I really hope people get something out of this true family story. It's called Hidden Valley Road, and you

can find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever books are sold at your favorite independent bookstore. My website is robertkolker.com. That's K-O-L-K-E-R. And there's information about all my work, including Hidden Valley Road there and speaking events and so forth. I really wish everyone the best. Hope they like it. There you guys go. Check it out. Hidden Valley Road, inside the mind of an American family. What an extraordinary story. Brilliant and best-selling book, so you definitely want to check it out. Thanks to Robert for being with us here today. Thanks for spending time with us, Robert. Thank you, Chris.

I appreciate it. I appreciate it as well. It's been an honor, sir. Thank you. So anyway, tomorrow night, let's go to YouTube.com, see us on all the different groups that are out there, and make sure you follow and refer the show. We'll see you guys next time.