Jessica reviewed Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed …
Review of 'Hidden Valley Road' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is a fascinating but rough read. The trials that this family goes through are not easy to stomach, but it is a fantastically empathetic window into the experience of growing up around mental illness, particularly at a time when it was even less understood than it is now. The story is largely woven together via anecdotes and documents from the members of the Galvin family that were never diagnosed with mental illness, so it doesn't provide as much of a window into the mind of those experiencing schizophrenia (or, in one case, bipolar disorder), which feels like a missed a opportunity, but an understandable one, given that many of the still living brothers had been institutionalized and heavily medicated for decades by the time this author found them, making parsing their experiences incredibly challenging.
Additionally, there are some really interesting insights into how institutional misogyny, ableism and a touch …
This is a fascinating but rough read. The trials that this family goes through are not easy to stomach, but it is a fantastically empathetic window into the experience of growing up around mental illness, particularly at a time when it was even less understood than it is now. The story is largely woven together via anecdotes and documents from the members of the Galvin family that were never diagnosed with mental illness, so it doesn't provide as much of a window into the mind of those experiencing schizophrenia (or, in one case, bipolar disorder), which feels like a missed a opportunity, but an understandable one, given that many of the still living brothers had been institutionalized and heavily medicated for decades by the time this author found them, making parsing their experiences incredibly challenging.
Additionally, there are some really interesting insights into how institutional misogyny, ableism and a touch of a classism contributed to the decades of hardship the family experienced.
