Hidden Valley Road

I just finished reading an engrossing book about a Colorado Springs family ravaged by mental illness. It's called Hidden Valley Road and it was both an Oprah's Book Club choice and a recent New York Times nonfiction bestseller.

The Galvins are a family with twelve children born over a 20 year span, from the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s. The first ten were boys, six of whom ended up with schizophrenia. The thought of having six schizophrenic siblings is almost unimaginable, and the book delves into the history of how everything unfolded, how the family dealt with emotional catastrophe after catastrophe over many years, and how the individual siblings have fared, especially the two daughters, who were last in the birth order. In addition, the author dissects how schizophrenia has been diagnosed and treated by the medical and psychiatric communities over the last century, as well as how researchers have chased its causes -- nature versus nurture, etc. It's fascinating!

I was curious whether I knew any of the Galvin family members, since the youngest ones are in my age group. The street where the family lived, Hidden Valley Road, is only a mile or two as the crow flies from Pat's childhood house. So I went to Facebook and searched for the youngest Galvin, Mary (who now goes by Lindsay), and sure enough, we have two friends in common, both of whom went to high school with Pat. As I got farther along in the book, it dawned on me that one of the middle Galvin sons, Michael, sounded awfully familiar. I finally realized that I knew him back in the early-to-mid 1990s, when I was entrenched in the local music scene and Michael was known as a talented classical guitarist. Meanwhile, Pat was taking guitar lessons from him during that same time frame! It's kind of cool that we both know someone that I happened to be reading about in a bestselling book, although I never knew that Michael and his family had been carrying such a heavy burden for so many decades.

Hidden Valley Road is an engrossing read if you're looking for a good book to dive into. If you've ever known anyone with schizophrenia, I think it offers doubly valuable insights.