“Lindsay told me she would watch Oprah as a kid and joke, ‘These guests are OK, but if only you could meet my family.’” “I’m happy for the family,” Kolker says with a smile. When Kolker and I spoke, it was about a week after he had to be persuaded to answer a call from an unknown number: Oprah, trying to reach him. By the end of the book, there is a glimmer of hope, both on the research front and with the two sisters, who have carried on with their lives, even as they have chosen different paths for coping. Kolker not only unpacks the horror of life on Hidden Valley Road he pairs it with a medical mystery, as researchers try to figure out the causes of schizophrenia, an illness that, early on, the medical community blamed on domineering mothers and treated mostly by heavily sedating sufferers. The subject matter could be ripe for exploitation in the wrong hands, which is why Kolker’s New York editor, Jon Gluck, steered Lindsay Galvin, a high school friend, to Kolker when she and her older sister Margaret expressed interest in telling her family’s story. The girls were sexually assaulted by one brother, and another brother killed himself and his wife in a murder-suicide.
The young men fought - cracking each other’s skulls and throttling their mother - while the parents hid it all from the outside world. Six of the Galvin boys would descend into schizophrenia. The Galvins lived on the outskirts of the city, on Hidden Valley Road, and were the envy of other families throughout Colorado Springs.īut inside the house - where Mimi tried to bake a pie or a cake every day - life was a nightmare. Two beautiful daughters, Lindsay and Margaret, followed them. The first 10 Galvin kids, born beginning in 1945, were handsome boys who became high school football and hockey stars in their growing boomtown. Don was a World War II veteran helping to jump-start the just-opened Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs alongside his witty and selfless wife.
On the surface, the Galvins were a postwar American dream. Those skills served Kolker well during the reporting of Hidden Valley Road, a Gothic tale of the Galvin family - Mimi, Don, and their 12 children. When I’m listening to people, I think I’m doing what she does.” She was very good at active listening, both professionally and with our family. “She spent 25 years as a psychiatric counselor at our local hospital. “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. A former colleague of mine at New York, he can listen to you drone on and on about your problems, and then unobtrusively offer an observation or question that makes you look at the situation in a different light. The essence of Kolker’s success: He possesses multitudes of the empathy gene. His latest book, Hidden Valley Road, the story of a family ravaged by mental illness, was an immediate bestseller upon its release earlier this month, and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. A story he wrote for New York magazine about a dashing but embezzling school superintendent on Long Island has been made into the HBO film Bad Education, starring Hugh Jackman and premiering on April 25th.
#Hidden valley road serial#
Kolker’s first book, Lost Girls, the story of a still-at-large serial killer targeting call girls on Long Island, was acclaimed for its compassionate take on the disappearance of America’s discarded women. Not Robert Kolker - though a bit of ego would be justified. A quick skim of writers’ Twitter feeds (including, uh, my own) reveals they can be a self-aggrandizing lot.
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