“Kolker’s previous book, Lost Girls, traced the lives of five murdered women on Long Island and told a story of sex work and law enforcement during a time of technological change. His new book is a comparable feat of empathy and narrative journalism…. Kolker recounts the Galvins’ home life with such vivid specificity that it can seem as if he’s working up to a suggestion that their upbringing determined the course of their mental health. But family turmoil is inherently more amenable to narrative drama than the slow, painstaking crawl of medical research, and Kolker — who skillfully corrals the disparate strands of his story and gives all of his many characters their due — knows better than to settle for pat truths.”
“The Suffering and Scientific Legacy of a Large Family Consumed by Schizophrenia,” March 30, 2020