Bob Kolker

the second syllable. Something kept me from saying Bobby, and I just switched to Bob immediately and that was it. Yeah. I was certainly Bobby growing up and occasionally in my family. Certainly by time I hit college, I was not Bobby either. But I have never been Robert. It's really kind of funny. Okay, So you wrote this book Kin in Valley Road. It's about a family, the Galvin family from Colorado Springs. There are twelve children and six of them get schizophrenia. How

did you come and become involved with this story? Well, my career really took shape at New York Magazine, where I wrote a lot of true crime stories and other dramatic and vivid nonfiction tales. And I just tended to specialize in writing about people who never imagined that they would get news coverage. So not politicians or movie stars, but everyday people caught up in something extremely uh, you know, of human interest. And my longtime editor there, John Gluck,

contacted me one day about four years ago. We both had left New York Magazine years earlier and had lunch every now and then. But he, uh, he contacted me saying that he went to school with a friend of his high school decades ago. Her name was Lindsay. They dated in high school. And it's just because I've read the book Is This Hot Kiss with referring to his

high school, the prep school that she ultimately went to. Yes, they both were, um, you know, outsiders at Hotchkiss, sort of not part of the preppy set, and they dated then, and of course Lindsay wasn't really talking much about her

home life or anything then. But as the decades went on and they stayed friendly, he learned the ins and outs of her family, and he got to know her older sister, Margaret also, and then one day in the sisters came to him and said, we've been thinking about for decades now, ways to try to tell the story of our family, ways to let the world know about our family. We believe scientists have been studying our family

for decades. The things that happened to us as children are so extreme and unbelievable, no one would believe it. And we've struggled, but we've decided that the time is right to talk to an independent journalist about telling the story and following the story wherever it goes, and talking to everybody, not just making it a a story of the two sisters. And so I got on the phone with them four years ago, and this was the first I heard about any of it. This is a family

with twelve children born during the baby boom. The oldest in nt the youngest in nineteen. And we're since we're being truthful, how old are you today? I am fifty one? Okay, So the children were born during the baby boom, yes, And a couple of years after the youngest was born, the oldest started to get sick, started to behave strangely, had psychotic breaks, was examined by psychiatrists. The parents were desperate to try to mainstream him and have him kind

of grow out of it. And then another one got sick, and another and another um six of the twelve, and then there was abuse, and there were among the brothers, and there was a murder suicide with one brother. As sisters were telling me about this in that first phone call four years ago, I was simply stunned and really brought low. I thought to myself, how could all this happen to just one family? And then I wondered how

they could even remain a family. You know, why would either of these sisters want to stay in a family like this given everything that happened to them. But they were not that way on the phone. They were ready to talk and to tell their story, and they believed that everybody else in their family would too. Um they felt like people could perhaps learn from their experiences. But also they had done a lot of work in the

inter intervening decades. They had um a lot of therapy and a lot of internal examination to try to move through the traumas of their childhood. So they felt like that could be a big part of the book as well. I was more skeptical. I it took me some doing, but I what I said, what to myself was there's no way I would work on this unless every living

family member was supportive of it. I didn't want to uh to suddenly being emotionally invested in writing this family story and then see that there was opposition within the family to even having it be out there. So I decided to go very slowly and talk to everybody very gradually. Let's let's let's go a little bit slower here. So at what point did you decide there's a book here and you wanted to do it? Um? It was about

three months after that first phone call. What I did in those three months was very strategic, I said, um, And I was very open with the sisters. I said, let's let's take this slowly. Books take time, anyway. UM, what if once a week I get on the phone for an hour with a different family member of yours, and then also with a few doctors who have talked to the family and might be able to give me some perspective on the medical side of things. And I'll

be very open ended in these phone calls. I'll just say, so the sisters are interested in a book, what do you think about that? And then just see what they have to say. And I said to the sisters, we'll all know at the end of three months or so

whether or not this is doable or not. And if it isn't, I'll give you the tapes of the conversations that that I've had with these folks, and you can write your memoir whether it'll be my good deed for the year, and and and they could go off and do what they needed to do in their own way.

But um, being opened this way and being kind of casual about it was helpful because I was able to really really hear what each individual family member had to say about their family, what had to say about the idea of the book, and everyone was comfortable enough with it so that a year later, when I got a book contract and started working on it full time, I really was up at full speed from the from the

get go. Then okay, let's go. So you do this three month period of research, then what goes off in your brain, and then how do you get the book deal? Um, Well, after the three months, I thought, well, this is this

is really doable. I should get to Colorado, where most of the family lives, and try to meet some people personally, and most importantly, I should meet face to face with Mimi Galvin, who was the matriarch of the family, who at that point was years old, I believe, and to start doing interviews with her to put together a book proposal. And um, and then I, you know, I reached out to my agents, who I had been my agents for more than ten years, and were they really believe that

this was something special? Um. The more I talked about it with them, the more I realized how unique this was. There are wonderful, wonderful books about mental illness out there, about the science and mental illness, and there are wonderful books that are memoirs about the experience of either having your own issue or um having a family member experienced

that issue. But nobody, to my knowledge, had been able to do a three sixty degree omniscent you know book that would read like a novel where you have every input from every family member and everybody's perspective of woven together so that it it really reads like some ambitious narrative nonfiction. And so I felt like I had a unicorn here, you know, something something that nobody else had, and I wanted to see how far I could take it.

It really was a mystery at the beginning, whether it would be a science book about an interesting case study or a story of sisters surviving trauma. But by the end of those three months I got invested in this being much more ambitious. This could be an epic, an intergenerational family saga that also is a medical mystery, a book about a family where you get to know the

parents nice and slowly. You you walk in their shoes, You live with them for years as they raise a family, as they have dreams, as they realize some of those dreams, and then as things start to fall apart, and then in the whole second half of the book, the children start to grow up and get new perspectives on everything their parents have done. And because you've read part one, you have all perspective on on the parents that you

wouldn't have otherwise had. And then interwoven you get a little bit of information about why this family mattered for medical research, which I think kind of raises the stakes a little bit. Okay, let's really good. Down to the nuts and bolts. You say this to your you tell this, give the picture your agents. They immediately say, we're in. They wanted me to do it before I wanted to do it. Um, they understood how how different this was and how potentially, um it could really connect with a

lot of people. And how do you sell it to a publisher? Um, you write what's called a book proposal when you're a novelist, and you do this often, that means you've written half the book already, written some chapters already.

Maybe you've if you've written the entire thing already. But with nonfiction, it's more of a perhaps you'd have some sample chapters, but really it's more of a a high speed version of what the book will be, like a flyover of I'm going to do this, and I'm gonna do that, and I already have done this, and I already have and that, and this is how I envisioned it, a little like a Hollywood pitch meeting. And I sent

that to How long did it take you right there? Oh? Um, over Christmas time, so like a couple of weeks, and then it went. Then my agents helped me revise it, and then we sent it out in the spring. Um uh, the timing of it. There was some particular reason to send it out then, and um, something like a dozen publishers received it, and I took meetings with ten of them, and eight of them bid on it. And the interesting part was that I have a good friend, one of

my best friends, Jennifer Senior. She she's an author and worked with me at New York Magazine and most recently has been a book critic and cultural critic at the New York Times. She's on the op ed page now. And she said, I predict that the people you meet with who have the most people in the room are the people who are going to bid the highest. What

was the thought there? The thought was that they were so that there would be enough instito usitional investment in the idea of the book, that there'd be people in the house, would be so psyched about it that they would want to try and put on a good show for me. So um lo and behold, she was right. Double Day had the most people in the room, and and and they won the auction. And I could not be happy. Or my editor, Chris Popolo, is one of the best in the business. It's been a wonderful experience

the whole way through. Okay, how luquiative is a deal like this, Well, it had to be enough for me to work full time on it. Um Uh. That was not the case with my first book, Lost Girls, where I had enough time to maybe take six months of leave from my job at New York Magazine at the time and write it, and then I was working full time and revising the book for the next six months

to a year. That that was difficult, But that would not have been possible with a book like this because while I certainly had access to the family and could go and interview them any time I wanted to, the science of schizophrenia was something I was starting at zero with and I really needed to hit the books and really need to needed to interview researchers and understand neurobiology and biology and genetics and psychiatry and brain chemistry and pharmacology.

It was very daunting, and so there was no way I could do what so many people I admired you, which is, you know, wake up at four in the morning and write for three hours and then go to their day job. It just wasn't going to happen with a book like this, so that the advance had to be enough to sustain me for a few years while I worked on it. Luckily, I had written one book before, so I had a bit of a track record. So

I wasn't. Um, I wasn't somebody coming in out of absolutely nowhere saying I got a book idea and you gotta give me a lot of money. I had a little legitimacy. I get it. Okay, did you do any other work while you were writing this book? No? It was all full time. And then if you say you started four years ago and ultimately the deal was six months after you started, how much time did you actually

spend writing the book? I mean we start drinking in writing. Um. Well, um, the from the I I first met the Galvins on that phone call in the spring of and I handed in a manuscript in um September. Um. But it really was a year and a half of full time work, not two and a half years, because um uh, that first year I was still you know, talking to the family and putting the book proposal together and whatnot. How how come the book was turned in in September and

didn't come out for another sixteen eighteen months. That's the book business. It's really unbelievable. Um. But but things moved very very slowly. The book was pretty much ready nine months before its publication date in April, UM what what the publisher needed was time to build buzz. Because this is a big book. It's a thick book. It has

lots of footnotes, you know, it's it's heavily researched. It is not realistic to however, just saying people who have not read the book, it's not dry in any form or fashion. I don't want to make it sound like a toll. Oh yes, of course. Um and uh you know, god willing you read it and you think, oh, it's like a novel, you know, lifts off exactly. That's a great thing about it. Um. But it's an ambitious, big,

big book of the year. And with an ambitious big book of the year, they don't want to just dump it on people and say, Hi, review this for next week please. They want to start building up interest and sending it out early and getting it to critics and getting it too bloggers and getting it to uh special readers on good Reads, just to get people starting to

talk about it. Um. They put me in front of the media in December with people like um People magazine or the Wall Street Journal, places that plan their news coverage way in advance. So so it really is a function of the book promotion business. It's not about it's not about the physical act of publishing, which of course they could do with the push of a button and get it people's kindles tomorrow. To what degreed is the success of the book align with your personal expectations. It's done,

it's it's it's it's been overwhelming. It's more than I ever could have imagined. I am. I had in my fondest dreams. I imagined it would be very well reviewed and respected, and everyone would say, oh, it's a very noble book, when very well intentioned, and how interesting that you did all this work. And the people in it, I'm sure they're very happy to tell their story told. But you know, big nonfiction books like this that are narratives that are about a specific issue, they all are

like that. They're all big swings for the bleachers. And they either either get published and people say, oh, nice, good job, and then move on to the next thing, or they build up ahead of steam and momentum and really connect with a lot more people. And so I'm when I write a book. When when I write books like this, and this is my second one, they are bets at the big at the High State table for sure in that sense. Okay, Uh, what day did the book actually come out? April seven? Okay, so right in

the heart of the COVID nineteen era. I've talked to other people whose books were in the pipeline, and they say, traditionally, other than the big media you're talking about, the Wall Street Journal, at the Times, Washington Post, they go on a tour, which, needless to say, you cannot do now. So was it a good or bad thing to put out the book then? And how did you promote it beyond the traditional outlet? Um? I had book dates set

up at bookstores around the country. It was going to be a solid week of running around basically every region very quickly. UM. And of course all those dates got scrubbed as soon as the shutdown started happening. UM. I had one huge advantage and I and I don't want anyone who's listening to think that I would complain about publishing in the time of COVID at all, because I'm in a very privileged position. Because the book got selected for Oprah's Book Club, and uh that I knew about

that a few weeks before it actually was announced. So I had a few weeks there where the pandemic was was coming, and without Oprah, I would have been very, very despondent and sure that my book was going to fall off the face of the earth. But because it was part of Oprah's book Club, I knew it was going to get a huge publicity push. No matter what

that a lot of people would order it online. Even if Amazon wasn't shipping packages on April seven because of a world economic collapse, people could still read it on April seven. It gave me a bit of calm, and so I don't want to give anybody the impression that that I was cool in the pool while other people were sweating for for no good reason. There there was a very nice turn of events for me that I don't take for granted. Okay, in April um Amazon went

out of a lot of physical bestsellers. Did that happened to you. There was a little bit of a lag at some point where, but but I think that was mostly because they were prioritizing shipments for essential supplies. So normally Prime members could get the book in a couple of days, but they were getting notices saying it's going to be a week or so because we need to send out hand sanitizer to people around the country. Um, And that that that subsided after a little while. But

that was minor that issue, okay. And how did it become one of Oprah's picks? Well, as far as I know, Um, the books editor at Oprah Magazine heard about the book early during that press period that I was telling you about earlier, and she put it in front of Oprah because Oprah was planning to do a TV special for about mental health. She was going to work on it with Prince Harry And I don't know if she's done

that yet or that's still in the works. Her deal is with Apple Plus, the streaming service, and so she was going to put together a special for Apple Plus. And so this is the way it works. Apparently people put books in front of Oprah and she has a bunch of them, and then one of them, you know, she just says, let's make this the book club book. And that's what she did this time. She went back to Lee Haybor at Oprah Magazine and said let's make this the book club book. And Lee said okay, And

she okay. In talking with me, she said, I mean, mental health is a big issue for her. It's important. You spoke with Oprah? What what was that like? Well, I, Um, I did not have one of those moments where she called and I said, you're kidding, it's not you know, your your friend playing a joke on me, Like she sounds exactly like Open Winfrey. So I immediately knew who she was. And as I said, I was sitting there at home sweating out pre publications. So the minute she called,

I started laughing. I burst out laughing because I knew there could only be one reason why she was calling and um and uh, and that I was suddenly being saved. I was being being really helped out tremendously by a tremendous act of kindness by her. So I was I was hyperventilating, and I was laughing, and then I was thanking her a lot and telling her how much it

would mean to the family too, you know the family. Uh. The girls say that they would watch over show as kids, and they would say, the people on the on her show have nothing on us, like we should really be on her show. So I think that might be why Oprah was interested too, because it is that the family at first glance would be a good subject for the Oprah Winfrey Show. Okay, did you have a substantive conversation with her, or was just basically I'm calling to congratulate you.

She um, she was calling to congratulate I. Um. I said to her that, you know, I love I said, I, but I was extremely grateful, and I said, it was the challenge of a career to be able to weave together so many different perspectives of so many different people, to to juggle so many characters, if you will, it's

not characters because it's nonfiction. A juggle twelve kids and two parents in a book and have readers actually be able to keep track of it all was a huge challenge, and that I wanted to try to make it like something like East of Eden. And I mentioned East of Eden to her because I know that that was an Oprah's Book Club pick a couple of years ago, and that she liked it and that was an influence on me as well. And she got it. She said, Oh, yes, of course, this is a lot like this makes me

think of used to be eating a lot. I see what you're saying. So she definitely read it. Oh yeah, she definitely read it. She's a reader. The other day in the prior to her leaving television, the book would also get a TV segment. So they say, it's great having Oprah picket. But what does it that actually mean today other than, you know, giving a higher level of notice to the book. The new version of Oprah's Book Club is a promotion deal with Apple, so she um.

Obviously the books available everywhere, including Amazon, but when she promotes the book online, she said, has swipe up to buy it on Apple Books. And when she does a TV show about the book, it's a special for Apple Plus. So I was interviewed. Unfortunately it was on Facetown because of the pandemic, but family members and I and experts were all interviewed on FaceTime for a show that will be out on June four or June five, I think

on Apple Plus on Apple Plus. But the big thing, and the thing that I did not realize that she does, is that she and the club actually read the book together week after week after week. They've divided this book into six weeks and they meet on Instagram on on the Oprah's book Club account and each Monday morning at ten am for the last five weeks. The last one

is next Monday. UM her account runs a short video by Oprah who she's holding my book and she says, Okay, so we've read chapters whatever through whatever, and this happened, and that happened, and this happened. My question for you is how what do you think Lindsay was feeling when she made that decision? And then in the comments section of Instagram, hundreds of people start to weigh in in real time giving their perspectives on the book. So it is a real live book club that is actually reading

the book. And for an author, it's been mind blowing week after week to watch hundreds of people reading your book and talking together about it, and I get to sit in and look at it. It's it's more than I could ever have imagined. It's just stunning. If someone is picked by Oprah generally speaking, how many additional sales do you get? Well, I only know that they increased my my initial print run dramatically by like tens of

thousands of copies. I don't know if it's different for fiction or if it's you know, or different for from book to book, but it it's a it's a huge leg up. Okay, So how many did they ultimately print? Originally double day, Um, they print. Originally they printed close to a hundred thousand copies and um hardcover, and now they're up to like a hundred thirty three thousand hardcover. Okay, what's the arc of a book like this? So, I mean every book is unique, but is it tend to

be front loaded forgetting the paperback sales? Somewhere down the future a hardcover book? Will it sustained for months? Has it already peaked? Is it yet to peek? I think that, Um, this book's a little bit of an outlier because it has because it's been very successful, so it has remained on the best seller list. Um, the sales are not what they were in the first couple of weeks. They've they've gone lower, but the sales are still high enough

to keep it on the best seller list. But sometime soon, you know, the house always wins, you know, someday soon one week coming up, maybe next week, maybe two, three, four, seven weeks from now, it will fall off the best seller list and then hopefully it will it will develop some sort of niche where it continues to sell let's hope thousand cops a week or something like that, and then it becomes a regular earner for the company, and then within a year the paperback comes and gives it

another jolt, and that that's at a different ice points. So it really is, it's really appealing to an entirely different book buying public. There there are people out there who never in the world in their in their lives have bought a big, heavy, first edition hardcover book because it's so expensive. They wait for the paperback, and so that whole market gets reached. Meanwhile, electronic books, especially in

the time of COVID, are basically half the sales. Um, so wait, wait, wait, slow there half of Hidden Valley Road was essentially kindled. Yes, but um, I'll be why don't I be a little clearer. Let's say this. It's like, roughly is Kindle or Apple books or electronic, Roughly forty or forty one is hardcover books, and then the rest is audiobook. The audiobook sales are not trivial. They're they're over some Sometimes it seems like it's closer to audio

books are a big deal. Okay, who reads the audiobook? Um, well, anyone who drives? Um no, no, no, no. Who literally did the reading of the book for the recording? Oh? Um he's wonderful. Sean Pratt, he's terrific. He actually read Lost Girls, which was my first book, and they asked me if I was all right with using him again and using him some bad term. He used me, I'm really fortunate. He's a star. People love him and he did. My brother in law listen to it, actually said it

was great. Okay, you're obviously a student of the game. Uh. If you read the New York Times Walt Three Journal, kindle sales continued to decrease as the percentage of overall sales. Yet in your case, they're really notable. Is it a COVID thing? What do you think's going on here? I think it's a COVID thing. And also the the book. A lot of bookstores just aren't open, and which obviously

contributes more to the kindle thing. But it means fewer people are browsing and seeing the Oprah's book club stand and saying, oh, I'll buy this. So who knows, maybe that will change. Maybe in the fall, um the hardcover will be sitting at airport bookstores again and people will be flying again. I'm being a little optimistic thinking that people are gonna be flying in the fall. But you know what I'm saying, Okay, you got your advance. When

will you see another check? Well, typically it's for payments, UM, so I'm gonna use fake numbers. You know, if the advance is a million dollars, you get two dollars when you sign, you get another two fifty when um, you deliver the manuscript and the publisher decides it's good enough to be edited and a play, see you on the schedule. So that might that's a little wiggly, that could be. That could take some time because they might want you

to do another draft or do another revision. But once it's once it's put on the schedule, payment number two comes, and then payment number three comes on publication day, and then payment number four comes a year after publication day, which more or less usually coincide it's with the paperback coming out. Well, in this particular, Kay, you're obviously have earned back the advance already. So in terms of royalties,

those will come a year from publication. UM. I usually get a royalty statement twice a year, in April and October, and it's pretty much right up to the date. So if this book earns back by the end of the summer, which hopefully it would. I might actually see some royalties in that October statement, Okay, with such a successful book, even though we're in the COVID nineteen era, did you splurge it all in your personal life? No? It basically gave me peace of mind in the COVID nineteen era.

It meant that, UM. It meant that I didn't have to worry about lining up a new project right away, that I could that I can sit and and take care of my family and and take it slow during this difficult time and not sit and worry about the house being far closed on. The book is a huge success. S Has this even though we're in this crazy era? Has this led to any new opportunities? Not yet. UM. I have a couple of ideas that are hopping, but nothing,

nothing that's really book length. Um. The biggest opportunities have been uh meeting other people, UM who are in the mental health community, people who have been touched by mental illness, either in their family or through their work. And those

people are emailing up a storm. And so I'm I'm handling a lot of reader feedback at the moment from people who have really emotionally connected with the book, And have you personally been to therapy, Yes, but not for anything but remotely like schizophrenia, and of course not, but you had some experience in the field. We live in a world where many males or anti psychotherapy. That's why

I asked the question. Oh yeah, sure. Um, it's been like regular meet and potatoes therapy for for for garden variety anxiety and um and so I've done on and off chid this and that with various people over the years. Um and UM. I think it's terrific. And it's also I mean as a writer and someone who interviews people, I'm basically sitting and witnessing the therapists interviewing style and getting pointers from them and tips from them on how they how they listen and how they draw me out.

So I have an appreciation for that as well. While I'm in the middle of it, Okay, you have the deal, it's a go. You start. How do you start? Tell us some of the story? Um? Well, uh, the story is is the American dream that that is suddenly shattered when when everything goes wrong. It's about a couple that falls in love during World War Two and raises their family during the Cold War. And then by the late sixties their model family that everyone else looks up to.

They're smart, they're charismatic, they're cosmopolitan. In what is basically a very small town out in Colorado Springs, they have a high profile, and they are self consciously invested in being a model family toward others. It makes them feel good that other people think that they're perfect. And then

the worst happens. Then this illness hits them, and and they have the bad luck of it happening at a time where half of the experts want to blame them for causing schizophrenia in their children, and the other half want to put them in institutions and medicate them into a stupor for the rest of their lives. Um there's no middle ground, and there's no no way to really do anything without becoming scandalized, and so they try to cover it up for a few years, and then things

get worse and worse and worse. Another son gets sick and abuses his wife and starts surreptitiously abusing the two younger sisters. And then a third boy decompensates you know, uh, in the middle of his classroom at a young age. He's only fourteen and then uh, in the worst possible moment, the golden child Michael, sorry not Michael Brian, who has gone off to California to be a rock star, he

kills his girlfriend and then shoots himself. Um, and everybody wonders if it could have been prevented and what what is going on? And finally that the by five or so, the family can't hide it anymore. They they they have at least three mentally ill sons living at home. They have two more with the warning signs. They have one who's dead. And um that the families in totally dire straits and that that's when the father has a stroke. Um I I. As I tell the story, it sounds impossible.

But then um, interesting things happen. Stuff that's out of Charles Dickens, like a wealthy family that's friendly with the family with the Galvin family. They they pluck one of the daughters up out of the family and they move her in with them and they help her out. And then Lindsay goes off to hotch Kiss and tries to she changes her name. She actually was born with the name Mary, and now she goes by Lindsay. She tries

to reinvent her life. There's a quickie marriage that one of them has in order to try to run away from her family. There's um years of therapy where they try to find a way to confront their abusive brother, and then there's different levels of denial that their mother continues to go through because they can't understand why their

mother shows the six sons over them. They feel forsaken, they feel abandoned, and then, out of nowhere, in the middle of the nineteen eighties, there's a knock at the door, and it's a medical researcher from the National Institute Mental Health.

She's there to tell uh Mimi that her family has a genetic disorder, that it's not bad parenting that caused it, that it's not something in the drinking water, that it's not a contagious disease, that she's not to blame at all, And and they suddenly become studied by some of the pioneers in mental health medicine, and and the story takes an entirely new and potentially quite hopeful turn as the daughters start to rebuild their lives, as everybody starts to

see their parents with new eyes, and as further secrets get revealed later on. It's the way I try to describe it. It does sound enormously twisting and turning and complicated with a lot of moving parts. There are interesting subplots to where one son goes off to a commune and lives there and it changes his life. Um. I wanted it to have this kind of epic feel where you can follow the family on different detours and digressions and see how many different people experience their family in

different ways. I wanted it to have that kind of, um, big Russian novel kind of feeling, so that you got so swept up in the families ups and downs that you forgot that you were being spoon fed a lot of technical information about neurobiology. Okay, we covered your initial conversations with Margaret and Lindsay, what were your conversations like

with the rest of the members. The father was already dead when you started then, and there was one brother who was dead, but you spoke with all these people. What was that like. Well, the one big challenge was to talk to the mother of the family, Mimi, who was nine. She was my first phone call after the sisters, and it was it was it was really really quite wonderful. This is a woman who, despite everything she's been through, is a tremendous good cheer and really um tries very

hard to look on the sunny side of things. That that means that she was very willing to talk to me because she knew that this book would be more about the genetics and less about UH judging her, and she was tired of being judged by the medical establishment. That was really a big problem for her. The problem with Mimi is that she didn't want to really talk

about unpleasant subjects. She was had spent a lifetime sort of deflecting unpleasantness, and so it took the personal visit with her, with help from her daughters also to try to nudge her into a place where she felt comfortable talking about the years and years of shame she was made to feel for having this problem in her house, the way that she was told that she was a failure, the way that she sometimes felt unsafe around her own sons,

and how she had to keep that to herself. Um, these are things that weren't easy for her to talk about. But but but to her credit, she really did. But mainly I found her inspiring. I mean one of her big sayings was you can't be heartbroken every day, which I think, you know, for someone who's been through everything she's been through, is a pretty astonishing thing to say. And sometimes if I'm having a bad day, I think about that still, I think, well, it can't be heartbroken

every day, and maybe maybe there's something to that. And then I talked to medical before you leave, Mimi, since you're with an observer and you wrote the book, how do you believe she coped? Um? I think she developed a certain set of blinders where she decided, um that that certain things were important than other things she was

going to ignore. And I think that some of the things that she decided to ignore were the healthy children and her family, which was a you know, of course, something the healthy children grew up feeling horrible about and really judged her for. But this was her this was

her survival strategy. She was going to focus on making sure that the sick boys like Donald and Peter and Matthew and Joe and Jim, not Brian because he had died, We're getting all the help they they could have and had a place to come home to if they needed to, if they weren't in the hospital or in a group home. And and that meant seeing a million doctors and going all over the place and becoming an advocate basically for

her children. But it didn't It meant that if little Lindsay or Margaret went to their mother and said I have a problem, the response for Mimi would be, you don't have any problems. You know, these boys have problems. You You're fine. And so they they basically lost their mother, and and so that that that this was her strategy. And in a way, um you see as the book goes on that that the children, as they grow up,

they start to understand her strategy better. They may not forgive her everything that she's done, but they get her in a way that they didn't get her when they were children. And this is something I think that we as readers can really um identify with. We all judge our parents in a certain way when we're younger, and then we all see them with slightly different eyes when

we get older. Sometimes it's because we have children of our own, or sometimes because you learned things that you weren't told when you were a child, or sometimes you're just older and you get what it's like to be fifty and have responsibilities or whatever. So um to me that that it was. It was exciting to be able to try to tell that version of the story in

the book. But what it means is that in this book, the first part of the book, Mimi comes off pretty terribly, but in the second part she comes off in a slightly more nuanced way. And I'm very very glad about that actually, because I think there are too many stories out there, both fiction and nonfiction, that really where the mother really takes it on the chin, where it's the mother's fault, you know that the mother has caused all the problems, and I didn't want this book to be

unnecessarily about that. Let's switch back to the father, because on one hand, he's a real achiever. He enters the military, ends up the Air Force, he develops the Falcon logo insignia for the Air Force. But there's some subtleties. Actually

he's kinda pushed off the fast track. He's now in PR and then they you know, you say that he ran this big Western States UH Arts and Development unit and then he but in the in the interim, he had been into what will just labeled generally a mental hospital, but bab on all your research, was this a stable guy or was this guy? The other thing you did say was despite there being twelve kids, he was not that engaged and he had a fears himself. Well, what

was your insight there? Um, he was most certainly a man of his time, and that he didn't he might have taken intense pride at having such a large family and really loved being the captain of the ship or the leader of the football team or whatever of of of his little troop of kids, but that he wasn't gonna really just you know, concern himself with the minute to minute domestic issues in the house. And that meant that at all, that that was the wife's job. And

also he had a globe trotting job. He in the beginning he was um with the military, Harry Flatt, going around everywhere, and then as the years went on he was working nights to get his master's and PhD. And became an instructor at the Air Force Academy. And then he didn't stop there. He became the head of the falconry program and traveled all over the country flying falcons at football games wherever the Air Force played, and tid

doing speaking engagements about falconry. And then he didn't stop there. Then he went and worked for NORAD and he traveled all over the country to give information sessions during the Cold War about everything that Nora could do. And then he didn't stop there. He went to work for the International, you know, for International for the Western States lobbying organization, and he went to Washington to lobby for more resources, and he gave out grants to dance companies and arts organizations.

And he had Mimi on his arm a lot of the time, but a lot of the time he was off alone. So he was he was a mythic, iconic, highly idolized figure in the house. But when he came home, he was about being everybody's buddy and not really necessarily about being too too deep into what was going on. And so the parents, the kids tended to just judge

their mother harshly because she was the disciplinarian. As the years went on and as they got older, they started to ask themselves more realistic questions, like, wait a minute, where was Dad when all of this was going on? He could have gotten out, She couldn't she stayed, you know, she could have she could have blown out of town too, and we all would have been on the street. Um, but she didn't. She stayed. Okay, let's talk about the oldest brother who first shows signs of schizophrenia. Don He

goes to Colorado State. He has an early marriage. One thing that is consistent through the book. Even though his wife at some point ex wife moves to the Northwest to pursue further education, he is constantly trying to win her back in his mind. How long does that actually go on for and what's the status? And did you ever speak with her and get her perspective? Um? I never spoke with her, Um I I did, was never

able to track her down. UM. But I know from the medical records and from you know, from written records of the time that when he would break away from the house or break away from a medical setting, it often was to go to Oregon to try to find her. And then there'd be one line in the medical records saying he was not able to see her, or he made it to her house and they did not let him in, or they talked for five minutes and she told him to leave. UM. So it was it was

never very productive. His psychotic break was was contemporaneous with the end of his marriage, and the marriage seemed to be extremely important to Donald because it was the signal that he was a grown up, independent man who could make his own decisions. Um, he really needed that in his life, perhaps even independent of his mental illness. He needed to be the the to to inherit the mantle of his father, to be the big shot of the family, to be everybody's role model. And for a time in

high school he was. He was an all state athlete and the wrestling champion, a star football player. He climbed and repelled and jumped out of airplanes. He dated the general's daughter. He was really big deal in high school. But um, he was masking a lot of real difficulties. He was having trouble connecting with people. He was really happier outside repelling off of cliffs than he was hanging out with friends. And once he was at college he

started to really become very strange and insecure. He would do impulsive things that he didn't understand why he was doing them. This is a hallmark of schizophrenia. He would he jumped into a bonfire and burned himself. He he tortured and killed a cat. He wandered into health services one day convinced that um he had his roommate had syphilis and that he was going to give it to him. Yeah, he's just started to lift off away from reality for a little bit, and and he was troubled by it too.

He was very anxious and upset, and so the marriage or dating and girlfriends was one way to tell himself that everything was all right. You know, that if he could just get married, then he could become a man just like his father. He could he could have a family just like mom and dad. Everything would be fine. But it wasn't fine. He and his wife, the marriage was extraordinarily difficult. At some point she decided she was going to leave, and that brought him back into therapy again.

And just when the therapist was convinced that he was starting to mellow out a little bit, he had an enormous psychotic break and almost did real serious harm to his wife and to himself. That was the end of the marriage, and that was Donald's first trip to a

real heavy duty mental hospital in Pueblo, Colorado. Okay, you actually spoke to the schizophrenic brothers who were still alive I did, and that was another huge issue going forward that I really overlooked earlier in our in our talk that early on, I really I said to myself, I can't write a book about six people with schizophrenia where they just go crazy and that's the end of it. I don't want to say. And then Joe went insane too,

and then we walk away from that. I needed to be able to write about these people as people, not just as a cookie cutter sufferers of the same illness. And so when I met the three surviving mentally ill brothers, I was pleased. And perhaps I shouldn't have worried at all about this, but I was pleased to see that they were different people, where where their illness manifested in different ways, and they had different personalities and and so it was not difficult at all to write about them

as individuals. Peter is a peripatetic and high energy and affectionate, a gregarious guy. He loves to play the recorder and and loves his family and knows and loves to recite everybody's name and um. Matthew is cantankerous and grumpy and self pitying, and often goes on long jags about how the Stato's in money and how um he if he doesn't get what he wants, that big hurricanes are going to happen um. But he is gentle as as can be and and nothing never ever acts on any of

his anger. And Donald, who we still spoke about a moment ago. Donald has been through decades of difficulties but now is quite quite serene and quite calm. He still has this intense hyper religiosity that he developed in the seventies and never let go of, but he's quiet about it and and very very peaceable around everyone. Doesn't say much, but knows exactly what's happening. You can ask him about his family, and he knows who everybody is and who's

related to everyone else. But then he will spin off into his delusions. He'll say that he is h descended from an octopus, or that um he actually his parents aren't actually Don and Mevie Mimi Galvin. He was born a few years before in Ireland to another family named Galvin, and they sent him here and then he designed ten thousand buildings because he's an architect, And then he has eight thousand other careers and his favorite one is a falconer um. You see, it's become sort of a word

salad after a while. So he's not able to sustain it. But but he's I guess the point I'm trying to get at is that these aren't these aren't straight jacket maximum security hospital situations for these guys. They all are under some level of care and and getting lots of prescriptions. But you know, Matthew has been able to live independently most of his adult life in federally subsidized Section eight housing.

He can drive a car. Um the other guys, you know, they can be with their family on holidays and on weekends of they their guests and and so it's it's been interesting to see um how they have come along over the years. Of course, their their family only sees the loss like they see what the people they used to be. And Okay, so talking about the other two brothers who are still with us, you could have a conversation with them just like you're having one with me

right now. Not just like it. No, they all have cognitive issues. It's it's you're definitely talking with somebody who is disabled in some way, and they all have convert they all have subjects that they like to go back to and become broken records about um. So you they basically control the conversation and it's about one or two or three limited subjects. Um uh. But in the in the fringes, you sort of get little senses of their memories,

their childhood memories. You see the tenderness they feel towards their their family members who come to visit them quite often. You see the gratitude that they have towards the family members who come to visit them, which is really quite nice to see as well. So it's a at this level, at this age, with this this many years of medication behind them, it's become more a little bit more analogous to visiting a relative with Down syndrome, let's say, or

what comes syndrome with Down syndrome or something like that. Somebody, they're just cognitive issues, right, But uh you did you feel any danger being around them? Oh? Absolutely not. No, No, They're all everybody's And then that's I think the trajectory of this illness is that the volatility and unpredictability and anxiety it one people tend to mellow out a little bit by the time they're in middle age, and then sometimes the drugs they've been taking for decades of muffled

the symptoms as well. Okay, so um, one thing even I know from writing about it. Uh, it's almost like the Democratic left in that some of the terms are very touchy. You know. You say that now schizophrenia is a spectrum, mentally ill is an issue. So what is the proper terminology today? Well? I think, um, the safest thing would be to say that someone has been diagnosed in schizophrenia. Um. I think these thing schizophrenic as a noun, like like, you know, three schizophrenics walking to a bar.

That's not cool. Um. It that the word schizophrenic, even as an adjective, tends to be sound a little pejorative. And so I actually did a little house cleaning with the book late in the game, and I went and vacuumed out all the times that I use the word schizophrenic as an adjective and or as a noun, and instead I would say people with schizophrenic neo or patients diagnosed the schizophrenia or schizophrenia patients. Just to make sure

that I wasn't seeming too cavalier. Um, I don't think that that's a I don't think that these are these are huge abusive terms necessarily the way that some other terms might be. But they but but it's that's the recent thinking on that stuff. Okay, John ends up moving to Idaho and pretty much distances himselves from the family. You believe that self preservation. He's working as a music teacher,

not making a huge income. What's your perspective on the well, his He's the third child, and the two older brothers, Jim and Donald, they they feuded amongst one another, and they bullied one another, but they also bullied everybody younger than them. So John was directly in the line of fire of that. Growing up, the parents were so invested in being a model family that they kind of turned a blind eye to any rough housing and kind of orowed it off. But John was legitimately afraid. He was

getting beat up a lot. And then, of course you can't discount the fact that there probably were early signs of extreme mental illness in both Jim and Donald, and so they didn't probably didn't know limits, and they probably you know, things probably got pretty ugly. So I think John was very happy to leave for college and then very happy to meet and marry someone almost immediately, and

and and really not come back. Um. He came back to visit obviously, and he has good relationships with a lot of his siblings, but he really did not, um, you know, he really was glad to get out at that time. Okay, the father at first, he's in the year force. The mother doesn't work outside the home. How does this work monetarily with twelve children? Is it just a different era or were There's there a lot of sacrifice, so there was enough money. Well, she made all their clothes,

she worked the sewing machine. Um. The Air Force gave them health benefits obviously, so there wasn't that kind of issue. Um. But no, money was very very tight all the time. And and that was the one good thing about writing about this particular family is that they really weren't They didn't send anybody to the Meninger clinic. There was nobody who who went to I don't know, to Sweden or

something to to deal with their psychiatric issues. There was these were these were middle class people with with real money issues, and they often ended up in the state mental hospital. But yeah, there was it was clear they would have to go to state colleges and and they when they bought their dream house in nineteen in the suburbs on Hidden Valley Road. It was a ranch house that it was extremely ordinary looking and that barely held

them all. You know. It wasn't like they suddenly everybody suddenly had a room of their own with twelve children. They had like three different rooms with two bunk beds in them. Let's talk about the survivors. Who can we say mentally ill? Because I got to blow back on that. Sure, Okay, the survivors were not mentally Lindsay does a lot of psychotherapy, gets her older sister Margaret, a little bit into psychotherapy, but Lindsay ends up being hands on and Margaret is

definitely hands off. So of the remaining people with there's John, There is it Michael who was in the uh, the farm or whatever it was, So there's there there for any other ones who were not diagnosed. There's Mark Mark Mark, who who has led a quiet life. He worked at the University of Colorado bookstore for a while and Boulder and now is uh he's retired. That he married and had a few kids, but he kind of kept to himself.

Mark was a sad case because in any very large family that the siblings closest to you become your sort of family unit within the family. And so he was one of a foursome with with Peter and Matthew and Joe. The four of them played hockey to that they were on the same teams. They often were in the paper together about scoring goals together. They really were, we're tighter than than the rest of the family was to them. But all three of those brothers all became mentally ill.

He lost Matthew, Joe and and and and it was really hard for him. It was like he lost his whole family. So, of the five remaining I'll say lucid members, to what degree are they affected permanently by this upbringing?

I would say that the one thing they all share as a certain hyper vigilance that that even if they Michael may not acknowledge it because he's a, you know, sort of a child of the sixties and a hippie and feels as if he's laid back, but it's clear from my observation that he's And and Margaret and Lindsay

and Mark that they all are are. They remember what it was like to grow up in a house where either you were going to go insane yourself, or you were going to watch somebody else in your family go insane. And so you would go to bed every night wondering would you wake up the same in the morning, And then once you were up, you were wondering, I sure hope that I don't step out of line, or else my parents will think that something is wrong with me.

And so that sort of hyper vigilance doesn't really ever go away. And they all they all lead functional lives and are I you know, have had happy marriages and many of them have kids. And but but I think if you talk to them at length, you'll get the

sense that they have a certain watchfulness and weariness about them. Okay, if you go into the science, which was threaded throughout, even when we get to the end, and I don't really think I'm giving anything away here, there is not a definitive solution in terms of what exactly is going on and how to treat it. Can you amplify that a little bit? That's true? And I didn't want to oversell the book that way. I didn't want to say that there was a smoking gun or a Rosetta stone

that the family supplied. But um, I do think that they had something of value to offer that they were um, they existed at a time when we were just discovering, uh, how to understand the genetic code and how to analyze the human genome, and at the time there was a lot of excitement that if you just had a general understanding of what a normal so called normal human genome should be, all you'd have to do is look on the computer and compare that with somebody who had schizophrenia

or cancer or any other you know, disease, and just see what was different, and you would solve the problem by dinner time. Like you you you would be able to find the smoking gun genes that would cause the cause those diseases. But what we learned once the human genome got sequenced is that for complicated diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's and schizophrenia, it's not one gene, and it's not three genes, and it's not four teen genes.

It's more than a hundred genes so far that they have found that have genetic irregularities that might play some

tiny little role in schizophrenia. And that is that's been very dispiriting, but What that's meant is that the people like the researchers in Hidden Valley Road who have been studying families like the Galvin's, it means that they would have been on the right track all along, because it's those families who actually might be able to demonstrate exactly how the disease plays out in uh, not just in genetics, but in the brain because they all, if they all

share a certain mutation, they can see how that mutation might affect brain function. And so there's promise from them in that regard. That's kind of a long answer that the shorter answer to your question is um to me that the science and this story serves the family story, that the that the march of progress in science is not like not everything is polio and not everything is a horrible illness that one day we just solved and then we we we all can go to bed um.

Most sciences wiggily and wobbly and two steps forward and one step back. And that's been the story of schizophrenia so far. And this family is our window into that story. What amazing thing is because you know, you start early in the last century and then the kids are born in the baby boom era is. You know, you're talking about the research and then it's ten years later that these people come back in that you say, this was not a wealthy family. They could necessarily seek out the

best and the brightest. They're living. You know, people come in, we got the cure, and then they disappear for ten years.

That must have been very depressing. I don't know how they kept it together, absolutely, and and I think one reason why they they finally decided to move forward with the book is that they had some inkling from one research team that there was some work being done that they had a and in helping out with, but they really didn't know what was going on with the other team, and so they were hoping a reporter could help with

that too. So I almost one of the very first things I did was I called up Dr Lynde de Lacy in New England and I said, you know that the family says that you studied them long ago, And she said, oh, yes, I remember them. I've been meaning to call them because we just found out something about their jeans. And I said, you've got to be kidding me. And so they connected them together in and a lot of the revelations from that are sort of at the end of the book. So let's talk about you for

a second. You're from where originally? Um, My whole family's from Baltimore, and I um as a kid, I moved out to the bourb So I'm from Columbia, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. And your parents did what for a living? My my dad was a real estate developer who's retired now, and my mother for twenty five years was what worked in the in the psychiatric part of our little local hospital. She was she was not a psychiatrist. She was a She had a master's in counseling psychology, so she was

a psychosistant. And this was a local hospital where you know, people would cycle through who maybe maybe there'd be some people with schizophrenia who would go into their health benefits ran out for the month and then they so they'd come for a few days at a time, but mostly it was trauma from people who were in car crashes or teenagers with suicide attempts, you know, the sort of thing a local hospital would deal with. So she was and she was not a theoretician. She she didn't come

home and talk about Freud and young with us. She was very practical and very pragmatic and really was really just there to help out. So it's I don't want to go to suggest that I got this fascination with psychiatry from my mother, but I did get her listening skills, for sure. She was a really, really good, active listener, and so I credit her with that. How many kids in the family, I'm the youngest of three, and so you go to college where um I went to Columbia

University undergrad and I got here in New York. I arrived in the fall of n when nobody wanted to move to New York, and so it was very easy to get into Columbia. And my friends and I from that time we all say how we never could have gotten in now, because that's what they say. But leaving that aside, at what at what point do you decide you want to become a writer? UM? I loved writing

from from fifth grade onward. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I just thought I would keep going with it, and I really was not. Didn't discover reporting until I was twenty three and out of college for a year or two and working at a little local neighborhood newspaper doing neighborhood news um when I was a kid in the eighties. But the people who wanted to become reporters wanted to be Woodward and

Bernstein or a foreign correspondent or Sam Donaldson. They were you know, in the white House pool and these were things that I just never really connected with emotionally. I wanted to be, you know, maybe a movie critic or an essay writer or something. But then, um, I majored in history in college, and I love the narrative aspect of history, the the idea of different concepts coming up over and over again and following them through over time.

And then as a reporter, I found that I was talking to people who where everyday people people who never thought they'd ever be in the papers, and they were dealing with situations on their block, like I don't know, fighting the local market because they were littering, or worried about a drug war happening on their block, or um fighting the skyscraper that was planned to go up two blocks away. And I would come back to them week

after week after week, and it became a serial. It became like a like a soap opera, and I also developed nice relationships with those sources and got to know them as people. And so I was writing about everyday human dramas and UM. When my career really took off several years later and I got worked at New York Magazine, I was able to spin out reporting like that into longer, bigger feature stories with that that were about higher stakes

issues and higher profile things. But I never really stepped away from that approach, which is to tell narrative stories about people going through difficult situations. Now, you did or did not go to graduate school. It's unclear here. I did not, um the way you were talking about that, I went to undergraduate school, not that you had to, but I was wondering whether it was a shoot a

drop there. No, I'm smiling because I worked at the school paper, in the arts section of the school paper, and and there was a reverse snobbery at Columbia's UH school newspaper where where everybody said, we don't have to go to J school because we're putting out the school paper at Columbia and you know, we're better than the

J school and who needs J School? And of course half the people who who said that ended up going to J School, and and J School is great, but most of the many of the people I love in my career went to J School, but I just never ended up there for one reason or another. Okay, so how did you end up working at New York Magazine? Well? I got there when I was twenty nine. Before that, I really jumped around a lot. I Um, I wanted

to work in magazines and wasn't sure how. I didn't know how to make that jump from little weekly papers to magazines, and so I worked at Backstage the Theater newspaper, and I edited articles for them, and I wrote articles for them, and then um, one day, Time Out magazine announced that it was going to launch its New York City version of the magazine, you know, the London Time Out magazine. So Time Out New York launched in and that was suddenly, in a very difficult time financially in

New York. That was thirty new journalism jobs suddenly, and I was one of the people hired there, and I was part of a launch, which was great, and it was like being in college all over again. We worked twenty four hours a day to get this thing off the ground, and I was writing City stories that were really that would have been at home at New York Magazine.

And so it kind of makes sense. And in site that three years later, I got hired at New York Magazine to do a lot of the same sort of stuff that I was doing at Time Out Magazine, and you ultimately wrote a story about a superintendent of schools on Long Island that was just recently a very highly

reviewed HBO series. Yes, I can take no credit for the movie, but it's the sort of thing that magazine writer's dream of happening, that one day somebody's making a movie and options your story and and uh and uses it and it makes it into a movie. And the New York Magazine has a nice track record with that. Hustlers came from a New York Magazine story, and American Gangster came from a New York Magazine story, and Saturday Night Fever obviously came from a New York Magazine story.

But the in this case, I've been writing a lot of stories set out on Long Island. Um. I think it's because I live in Brooklyn, which is not so far from Long Island, and that I had a car, so they thought, well, you can go out there, it's easy for you, and they were all these kind of gritty narratives. This was This was a few years after Amy Fisher enjoy Bafuco. But there were plenty of other

stories like that happening out there. And this was an amazing story about UM the biggest public school system embezzlement scandal in America, all happening in a very high profile, very swanky part of Long Island where the kids all went to Harvard Um called Rosalind and Um the superintendent was a was a was a god um there. He was really held up in high esteem because he was

delivering for everyone. And he probably would have done that for years and years more if if his if it hadn't been found out that he was, you know, stealing from the register. And so the question I asked in that article was did he swindle the town or did the town allow him themselves to be swindled by him? Because, you know, because they needed his success, they needed him to be delivering for them. And I never dreamed it

would be a story. And then there was a young man named Mike mccowski who was a junior high school student at the time of the scandal. Years go by, he grows up, he becomes a screenwriter, and he decides to write about it, and he options my story. And I know, I don't blink an eye, like I think, well, these things never get made into movies. And then one day I get an email from the magazine, years after I left the magazine saying good news, they're starting to

shoot it with Hugh Jackman and Alison Janney. And I was, you know, I fell on the floor. It was wonderful, really wonderful, and I really I really liked the movie a lot. Okay, what is the deal with New York If you write something and it's optioned? Uh, do you split it with New York Magazine or you get all of it? Or how's it work? Well, in the old days,

you'd get all of it. And then that was just sort of a convention of the business that you um that that that even if technically it was a work for hire, um and uh, and it was technically the intellectual property of the publication, it was a professional courtesy that they would sign a one Sheeeter called a Bulsher's release and allow you to option the story and you

would get the money for the store. The idea was that it doesn't happen that often, and that the magazine was too busy making money other ways to try to horn in on these deals. Because the amount of time and hours it takes to try to develop those deals, you end up spending all the money that you would

make on those deals. But then the business changed and and uh, this is maybe longer answer than you're expecting, but the business really contracted and every and everybody needed money everywhere, and there were a couple of huge successes out there that the that the publication didn't get a dime from, and UM speaking specifically of Sex in the City and the New York Observer, Like the New York Observer was this tiny little paper that was losing money

all the time. And Canadas, Bushnell sold the idea for Sex in the City, which was printed in the Observer, and the Observer didn't get a cent from it. And so I think magazines and publications started to wake up about ten or fifteen years ago and say, all, we can't let that happen, And so they started to negotiate with their writers and UM and they started to come up with revenue sharing arrangements. So now even the New York Times, which develops TV series and movies from and

and reality shows and whatnot. From various things that they print. They have a revenue sharing arrangement where the paper gets some and the writer gets some, and I think New York Magazine does too. What happened on your deal on

that movie? I think I was grandfathered in so, like everything up to this exceanely high amount, I was going to get a percent of and then if it if it became a superhero franchise or or Sex in the City or something like that, then then I would start having to split fifty cents on the dollar with the magazine. But when the picture actually went to HBO when it was developed, you got another payment. Yeah, exactly when they when they started the day they started shooting, with the

first day of principal photography, I got another check. Okay, did you have any other stories option that didn't ultimately go to screen? Oh? Yes, Um, those were all for TV movies because you know, there was even before the true crime boom of the streaming era with Making a

Murderer and whatnot. Um, there was always a demand at like the forrom the A and E Channel or from from from Lifetime you know, for for a quick grip from the headlines movies, and so quite often the reported stories like the ones I did for New York Magazine got option. There was one about John O'Neill, the FBI's terror asm expert who who died in the World Trade Center attacks. That was optioned. It never got made into anything.

And then the murder of Ted Ammen out in the Hampton's he was a huge multi millionaire whose wife hadn't killed That that got made into a movie, but not my story. Someone else's the Vanity Fair story got option. And then the story of Carlina White who solved her own kidnapping one day she she uh one day she did a little legwork and saw that the woman she thought was her mother had actually kidnapped her as a

baby from the hospital. That was an amazing story that got made into a Time a Lifetime movie, but again not my story. It was somebody else's story. So but they all everybody's sort of putting little bets on the table. So they pick up these stories every now and then. And how do you end up leaving New York Magazine? UM I had written Lost Girls, which was a success.

Um it was a you know, briefly a bestseller, it got option for the movies and eventually became a movie this past spring on Netflix with Amy Ryan that I'm really proud of. UM. But UM, the magazine at that time went bi weekly. Instead of being coming out every week, it was coming out every other week, which meant that they need fewer people like me to write the big, longer stories and cover stories. And so they started talking with each of us about how our roles might change.

And I thought, well, this is the right time for me to you know, write elsewhere, and to to write continue writing for New York but also right for the New York Times magazine, to write for Wired. UM. And so I did I UM, I moved on and then I quit very quickly got recruited by Bloomberg Business Week to be an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Projects reporter for them.

And that was an amazing job, a wonderful job because I could write really exciting, entertaining, propulsive narrative feature stories for for Business Week magazine, but the subject matter could be new and fresh to me, and I would learn something new every time. And because it was Bloomberg, it was worldwide. I was no longer just writing about the New York metro area. I was flying all around the

world writing about stories. And it was shortly after I started my job there that I first had that first phone call with Lindsay and Margaret, with the Galvin family. Yeah. One of the things I said to them was, I just started a new job. I can't exactly walk a way from it, but anyway, it all goes slowly anyway. Books take forever anyway, so let's keep talking. And that's how it happened. So you ultimately did quit Bloomberg. I did. They're very good with book leave at Bloomberg, but they're

at a totally different model. They the people who go and write books for them. They are beat writers who have a certain expertise, Like they read about Jeff Bezos, or they write about Instagram and they break away for six weeks and write their book about Instagram and then they come back. Whereas I was having to learn about schizophrenia from the from scratch and so I had to go away for too long. But I love those guys. I'd write for them again. They're okay. So you referenced

the family. What is your family look like? Your personal family Um, I'm I'm married. My wife is Kirsten Danis. She's a superstar editor at the New York Times. She she um, she and it's investigative reporting stories for the Metro section for the New York City section, and her reporter just want to Pulitzer. So it's been an exciting for her, very proud of her. And our kids are seventeen and fourteen. Um, the fourteen year old is going to go into high school next year, so they're really

turning the corner. And we're lucky that way into in a sense because um, during this quarantine period, it means, um, they aren't three and four years old and running around like they have their things to do, and they're they're they're cool to hang out with. I actually was listening to you talk to Titus Boliver and he said his kids were similar ages, and I thought, oh, I know what he's I can picture of what he's experiencing. So

how did you meet your wife? We were in college together, but she was always more of a news e than me, Like I was like an arts writer writing movie reviews and editing the arts publication of the school paper, and she was a year younger, and uh, news reporter and then eventually became the editor in chief of the Columbia newspaper. And then she stayed in We stayed in New York

and stayed together, and we married many years later. But we circled with each other like sharks for many many years, and then we married in our late twenties, but it was always a relationship then or oh yeah, yeah, we're always together since my senior year, since and her junior year. Okay, So needless to say, Hidden Valley Road is a is both a financial and a critical success. And as we've established earlier, as much as you loved it even beyond

your dreams. So what's the dream? Now? That's a really good question. Um I am. I'm delighted to be in a position where, um, when I have an idea for another book, that the doors might open more quickly than they might otherwise, that I it won't just be somebody calling up somebody saying, hey, I'd like to talk to you. It's the guy who wrote that book calling to saying I want to talk to you. So I'd like to take that that new situation for a spin and see

where it takes me. I'm starting, it's starting to dawn on me now that um, I could just cold call a lot of very smart people out there to find out information about new subjects and I and I might get the calls returned more often now because I'm the guy who wrote that book. So I'd like to see where that takes me. And um, I do love drama, dramatic, vivid stories about people, and it always starts with the people.

If it's about a family, so much the better. If it takes me into a subject area like schizophrenia or or any other subject area where I'm learning something new, so much the better. I love books that do that every everything from Moneyball to Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Catherine Boo. Anything that takes me somewhere else and helps me relate to the people who are experiencing those things

is good in my book. Well, you're very articulate, and some writers they can put their fingers on the keyboard, but they can't really talk. That certainly isn't you. And by my standards, you earned your acceptance at Columbia and any event. In any event, Bob, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks Bob, I really appreciate it, and I highly recommend this book. I wrote about it, and then Bob reached out on Twitter. This is not something put together by a publicist. This book is truly great. And

I'm not saying that because I'm talking to you. I'm blowing smoke up your rear end. What you had to write about it on your newsletter was so kind and so flattering. I was just had to reach out to you and thank you well as I say the good That's one thing I have you. One thing I know is if I write something, the person reads it sequentely, they get back to me. If I say something not so positive, you never know if you're bumped into him and said, oh, they read it and any event, thanks

so much for doing this. Thank you, Bob. Until next time, It's Bob left Sense s