Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America

by Audrey Clare Farley

Overview

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.​

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? 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538724491
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	14,590
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress, a page-turning drama about reproductive rights and eugenics framed by the story of Ann Cooper Hewitt, as well as a writer, book reviewer, and historian of twentieth-century American literature and culture. Having earned a PhD in English from University of Maryland, College Park in 2017, she occasionally lectures in history and literature at local universities. Her essay on Cooper Hewitt, published in July 2019 in Narratively, was the publication's second most-read story of the year. Her writing on the eugenics movement and other topics has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Public Books, Lady Science, Longreads, and Marginalia Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

03/06/2023

Farley (The Unfit Heiress), a history professor at Mount St. Mary’s University, skillfully recounts the tragic tale of the Morlok quadruplets, four siblings born in 1930 who largely lived in the public spotlight and privately battled severe mental health issues. A media sensation since their birth, the sisters (later given the Genain surname pseudonym during research projects to protect their identities) were effectively raised by controlling and abusive parents to have a single identity. As the girls grew up, they did a stint touring the country as a dancing troupe, began to have hallucinations, and were all diagnosed as schizophrenic. In the 1950s, they became part of a National Institute of Mental Health study on the causes of schizophrenia, for which they underwent psychotherapy sessions and hours of doll-playing—and which, eventually, pointed to both genetic and environmental factors. Farley writes that the Morlok girls were “formed in a world gone mad” and sets their story against a backdrop of swirling cultural forces, from the sexualization of children in pop culture (most vividly illustrated by the emergence of “it-girl” Shirley Temple) to the mapping of the human genome. Though often grim, 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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Farley’s book is truly a case of reality being stranger than fiction, a highly researched yet readable account of a shocking piece of U.S. history that doesn’t show up in textbooks.”—The Associated Press

"In constructing an intimate portrait of the decades-long relationship between the Morlok family and the federally funded scientists who studied them, Farley examines the way American institutions and culture crucially shaped the construction of madness at mid-century. . . Girls and Their Monsters is a timely reminder of just how imperative this awakening is."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"The violence and dysfunction Farley describes is gothically sordid, painful to read about and entirely believable."—New York Times

“A powerful book that should provoke deeper reflection on how we come to grips with madness.”—Psychology Today

"[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 recounts the sad story of the Genain quadruplets in a narrative that amply draws on published documents and new interviews to illuminate elusive truths within family chaos. . . 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

“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

“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. Farley shows us the interplay between American eugenics, white supremacy, and the hidden and widespread abuse of children within their own homes and communities, and how these monstrosities created the conditions for a madness that was deemed a biological disease of the individual. This book is brilliant and riveting."—Grace M. Cho, author of National Book Award Finalist, Tastes Like War

PRAISE FOR THE UNFIT HEIRESS

"In Audrey Clare Farley's book, the fascinating and unsettling case—and the worldwide media sensation it caused—is carefully revisited to expose what it meant to be considered an unfit parent and how easily family can become foes."—Town and Country

“Expertly blending biography and history, and using the life of Ann Cooper Hewitt as a backdrop, Farley has created an absorbing biography effectively explaining how the legacy of eugenics still persists today. Hewitt’s story will engage anyone interested in women’s history.”—Library Journal

“The Unfit Heiress is a sensational story told with nuance and humanity with clear reverberations to the present. Historian Audrey Clare Farley's writing jumps off the page, as Ann Cooper Hewitt, once a one-dimensional tabloid fixation, is brought into full relief as a complicated victim of her time, standing in the crosshairs of the growing eugenics movement and the emergence of a "over-sexed" and "dangerous" New Woman. But most importantly, this book is a necessary call to remember the high stakes and terrible history of the longstanding fight for control over women's bodies.”—Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire

From the Publisher

★ 2023-03-21
A dark vault of pseudoscience, mental illness, and fame contained in a chronicle of four identical quadruplets in midcentury America.

In her latest book, following The Unfit Heiress, Farley chronicles the devastating lives of famous identical quadruplets born in 1930 to Carl and Sadie Morlok. The Morlok quadruplets performed on stage and off, maintaining the image of the perfect American family with matching outfits, dance routines, and plenty of publicity. Behind the doors of the Morlok home, however, the girls lived in a tumultuous, often brutal environment. By their mid-20s, all four were diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized. At the time, schizophrenia was one of psychology’s core puzzles, and the Morlok girls were the once-in-a-lifetime candidates for research. At the time, writes the author, “the estimated frequency of quadruplet births with at least one baby surviving is about one in a million….The chance of their all having schizophrenia is about one in one and a half billion. It’s hard to imagine they will ever again have such an opportunity for study.” Pulling no punches, Farley chronicles their story from birth to death, extracting the truth of their abuse by their father, the medical community, and the world. Not for the faint of heart, the book is a powerful but unsettling tale. Readers will be upset at the horrifying events of the girls’ lives as well as America’s dark obsession with them as children. Throughout, the author does well to maintain concise readability while investigating the murky waters of midcentury psychology, pop culture, and eugenics. The archival narrative approach feels deeply personal with respect to the Morlok women, but the segments expanding on psychiatric philosophy and procedures may take readers out of the otherwise novelistic flow of the text. Nonetheless, 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