Bob Kolker

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to The Bob Left's podcast. My
guest today is Robert cole Curl, author of the best
selling book Hit in Value With Robert, it's great to
be here, Bob. Thanks so much for having me on
the show. Now you're like me. We're talking before we
started that you're Bob. Were you ever? Robert? I was
Bobby until I think the day I arrived for college

(00:32):
and um, someone asked me my name and I tried
to say Bobby, but I, um, I got stuck on
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.

(00:54):
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,

(01:15):
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,

(01:39):
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

(02:03):
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

(02:24):
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

(02:44):
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

(03:05):
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,

(03:26):
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,

(03:48):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:33):
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

(04:55):
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

(05:17):
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,

(05:40):
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

(06:01):
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

(06:24):
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

(06:47):
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

(07:09):
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

(07:30):
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

(07:55):
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

(08:18):
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,

(08:42):
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

(09:05):
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

(09:28):
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

(09:50):
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

(10:12):
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

(10:34):
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

(10:55):
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

(11:16):
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

(11:36):
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

(11:59):
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

(12:19):
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

(12:40):
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,

(13:05):
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

(13:25):
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

(13:49):
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,

(14:11):
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

(14:33):
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

(14:55):
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

(15:17):
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

(15:38):
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

(16:00):
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

(16:22):
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

(16:44):
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

(17:05):
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

(17:27):
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

(17:47):
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

(18:09):
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,

(18:32):
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

(18:54):
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

(19:17):
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

(19:40):
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

(20:03):
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

(20:24):
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,

(20:46):
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,

(21:07):
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,

(21:28):
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

(21:49):
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

(22:10):
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

(22:31):
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,

(22:53):
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

(23:16):
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

(23:37):
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,

(24:01):
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

(24:22):
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

(24:44):
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

(25:06):
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

(25:27):
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

(25:50):
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

(26:12):
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,

(26:33):
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

(26:54):
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

(27:14):
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

(27:35):
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,

(27:57):
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,

(28:18):
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.

(28:39):
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.

(29:00):
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,

(29:21):
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

(29:42):
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

(30:06):
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,

(30:31):
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

(30:51):
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

(31:14):
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

(31:37):
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,

(32:03):
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

(32:25):
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.

(32:48):
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

(33:12):
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

(33:33):
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.

(33:53):
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

(34:17):
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

(34:41):
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

(35:04):
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.

(35:25):
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

(35:50):
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

(36:11):
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,

(36:32):
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.

(36:53):
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

(37:17):
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

(37:40):
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

(38:04):
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

(38:25):
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

(38:46):
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,

(39:08):
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

(39:31):
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

(39:54):
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

(40:17):
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

(40:39):
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

(41:01):
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.

(41:21):
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.

(41:44):
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.

(42:06):
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,

(42:26):
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

(42:50):
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

(43:12):
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

(43:35):
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

(43:55):
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

(44:16):
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

(44:37):
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

(45:00):
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

(45:21):
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

(45:43):
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

(46:04):
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

(46:26):
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

(46:46):
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

(47:10):
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

(47:33):
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,

(47:54):
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

(48:16):
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.

(48:40):
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.

(49:04):
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

(49:26):
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

(49:49):
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

(50:10):
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,

(50:30):
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

(50:54):
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

(51:15):
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,

(51:36):
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

(51:58):
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

(52:20):
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,

(52:41):
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

(53:02):
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

(53:23):
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

(53:46):
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

(54:07):
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

(54:29):
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.

(54:49):
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

(55:13):
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

(55:34):
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.

(55:58):
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

(56:20):
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,

(56:41):
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.

(57:01):
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

(57:24):
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

(57:45):
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,

(58:07):
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

(58:29):
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

(58:52):
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

(59:13):
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

(59:34):
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

(59:58):
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.

(01:00:21):
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.

(01:00:43):
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,

(01:01:03):
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.

(01:01:26):
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?

(01:01:49):
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,

(01:02:11):
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

(01:02:33):
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

(01:02:54):
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

(01:03:14):
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

(01:03:38):
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

(01:04:01):
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

(01:04:23):
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

(01:04:45):
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

(01:05:08):
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

(01:05:28):
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

(01:05:48):
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

(01:06:11):
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

(01:06:32):
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

(01:06:55):
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

(01:07:15):
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

(01:07:36):
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

(01:07:58):
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

(01:08:19):
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

(01:08:40):
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

(01:09:03):
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,

(01:09:26):
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

(01:09:46):
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

(01:10:07):
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

(01:10:28):
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

(01:10:49):
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

(01:11:11):
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

(01:11:32):
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

(01:11:54):
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

(01:12:15):
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

(01:12:37):
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

(01:13:02):
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.

(01:13:23):
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

(01:13:43):
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

(01:14:04):
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

(01:14:28):
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

(01:14:49):
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

(01:15:12):
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

(01:15:32):
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

(01:15:54):
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,

(01:16:19):
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,

(01:16:41):
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,

(01:17:03):
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

(01:17:24):
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

(01:17:47):
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

(01:18:07):
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

(01:18:27):
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

(01:18:50):
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

(01:19:10):
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

(01:19:32):
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

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Bob Lefsetz

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Therapy Gecko

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Bob Kolker