The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America
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Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2023
304 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an "intimate and compassionate portrait" (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences, from the author of The Unfit Heiress.
In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution.
The case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets, they soon found, was hardly so straightforward. Contrary to fawning media portrayals of a picture-perfect Christian family, the sisters had endured the stuff of nightmares. Behind closed doors, their parents had taken shocking measures to preserve their innocence while sowing fears of sex and the outside world. In public, the quadruplets were treated as communal property, as townsfolk and members of the press had long ago projected their own paranoid fantasies about the rapidly diversifying American landscape onto the fair-skinned, ribbon-wearing quartet who danced and sang about Christopher Columbus. Even as the sisters' erratic behaviors became impossible to ignore and the NIMH whisked the women off for study, their sterling image did not falter.
Girls and Their Monsters chronicles the extraordinary lives of the quadruplets and the lead psychologist who studied them, asking questions that speak directly to our times: How do delusions come to take root, both in individuals and in nations? Why does society profess to be "saving the children" when it readily exploits them? What are the authoritarian ends of innocence myths? And how do people, particularly those with serious mental illness, go on after enduring the unspeakable? Can the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood help the deeply wounded heal?
"[A] powerful but unsettling tale... Farley tightly interweaves the quadruplets' lives with the story of America's fraught relationship with mental illness. Haunting and impactful, this story does not leave the mind easily." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Farley's narrative is based in deep research and makes for her nuanced analysis of the country's shifting attitudes toward childhood and mental health. Readers will be riveted." ―Publishers Weekly
"As much a study of parenting as it is of what psychologists once thought of parents, Girls and Their Monsters follows Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road (2020) as another unsettling, behind-closed-doors look at families and mental illness." ―Booklist
"In Girls and Their Monsters, Audrey Clare Farley embraces the complexity of mental health and human relationships. In her hands, the story of the Genain quadruplets is at once disturbing and heartening. It's a tale of despair and resilience, about the ways we hurt each other and lift each other up." ―Josh Levin, award-winning author of The Queen
"Girls and Their Monsters is both an intimate and compassionate portrait of girls growing up under the constant gaze of media, doctors and government agencies, and a well-researched analysis of a nation in the grip of social illness.This book is brilliant and riveting." ―Grace M. Cho, author of National Book Award Finalist, Tastes Like War
This information about Girls and Their Monsters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Grace Farley
Audrey Clare Farley is a scholar of twentieth-century American culture with special interests in science and religion. She earned a PhD in English literature at University of Maryland, College Park. She now teaches U.S. history at Mount St. Mary's University and history writing for Catapult.
Her first book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, tells the story of a 1930s millionairess whose mother secretly sterilized her to deprive her of the family fortune, sparking a sensational case and forcing a debate of eugenics. Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America explores the lives of the four women behind NIMH's famous case study of schizophrenia. It was published by Grand Central in June 2023.
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