Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family is a nonfiction work by Robert Kolker, author of the 2013 work Lost Girls. In Hidden Valley Road, Kolker, whose writing career began in investigative and longform journalism, blends scientific findings, history, and firsthand testimonials to produce a narrative biography of the Galvin family and their experiences of schizophrenia. All page numbers in this guide refer to the work’s first edition, published by Doubleday in 2020 and named a best book of the year by publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post.  

Hidden Valley Road tells the story of Don Galvin, his wife Mimi, and their 12 children. The couple met in high school and married in 1944, just prior to Don—a newly recruited naval officer—receiving his first posting. Mimi gave birth to their first son (also named Donald) before WWII ended, and when Don returned home, the couple seemed to have a bright future ahead of them; Mimi came from a wealthy and cultured Texas family, and Don began a new career in the Air Force. Don’s work took the growing family to Colorado Springs, where he would complete his PhD in political science and eventually leave the military entirely to become the director of the Federation of Rocky Mountain States, “help[ing] the region attract industry, banking, the arts, and major transportation projects” (56).

As the years passed, Don and Mimi’s family continued to expand; their final child, Mary, was born 20 years after their first. By this point, however, there were indications that something was amiss. The Galvins’ 10 boys fought constantly, and the eldest, Donald, had a series of breakdowns after leaving for college, often behaving in ways that were reclusive, paranoid, or even violent. Towards the end of a short-lived marriage, Donald attempted to kill himself and his wife, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Meanwhile, the Galvins’ second son, Jim, had also married. Although he too had begun to experience psychotic symptoms, Jim was more functional on a day-to-day basis than Donald, so Mimi and Don continued to let their younger children spend weekends at his home. This proved to be a mistake, as Jim went on to sexually abuse at least three of his siblings (Peter, Margaret, and Mary).

All told, six of the Galvins’ sons—Donald, Jim, Brian, Matt, Joe, and Peter—would eventually experience psychotic breaks of some form, with Brian killing both himself and his girlfriend during one such episode. Some (most notably Matt and Joe) responded well enough to treatment that they were able to live more or less independently, but others, like Donald, only seemed to grow further detached from reality as time went on. Mimi’s insistence on caring for these sons herself likely helped some of them avoid homelessness or long-term institutionalization, but the experience of growing up around so much mental illness proved traumatic for the Galvins’ healthy children—particularly Margaret and Mary (who later adopted the name Lindsay). As a result, Margaret and Lindsay spent much of their young adulthood trying to come to terms with their past and their family.

Hidden Valley Road ends shortly after Mimi’s death in 2017; her husband predeceased her, having died of cancer in 2003, and her sons Jim and Joe died of heart failure associated with antipsychotic drugs in 2001 and 2009. By the time of Mimi’s death, researchers studying the Galvins determined that the schizophrenia in the family was likely the result of a mutation in a gene called SHANK2; the mutation came from Mimi’s side of the family, but her children’s sickness was not—as many doctors had claimed—the result of bad parenting on her part. Meanwhile, the family’s experiences had inspired one of Lindsay’s children, Kate, to study the origins of mental illness. In 2017, Kate began an internship with schizophrenia researcher Robert Freedman—one of the scientists who studied the Galvin family over the years.