Girls and Their Monsters

March 6, 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.

May 1, 2023
Farley (The Unfit Heiress, 2021) 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. Born in 1930, Edna, Wilma, Sarah, and Helen Genain had parents who were not only woefully unprepared to handle them but who were also engaged in appalling and abusive behaviors that resulted in various degrees of trauma for their daughters, including being abused by others, as well. Eventually, all four girls were diagnosed with schizophrenia, which led to years of sometimes troubling psychiatric treatment. Farley spoke to the last surviving sibling as well as other family members and the children of the man who led their treatment and wrote about it and has put together the most complete work on what the Genains' lives reveal about the nature versus nurture debate. 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.

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Starred review from April 15, 2023
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.

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