
Girls and Their Monsters
The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America
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Narrated by:
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Kate Udall
About this listen
For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an “intimate and compassionate portrait” (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences.
In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution.
The case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets, they soon found, was hardly so straightforward. Contrary to fawning media portrayals of a picture-perfect Christian family, the sisters had endured the stuff of nightmares. Behind closed doors, their parents had taken shocking measures to preserve their innocence while sowing fears of sex and the outside world. In public, the quadruplets were treated as communal property, as townsfolk and members of the press had long ago projected their own paranoid fantasies about the rapidly diversifying American landscape onto the fair-skinned, ribbon-wearing quartet who danced and sang about Christopher Columbus. Even as the sisters’ erratic behaviors became impossible to ignore and the NIMH whisked the women off for study, their sterling image did not falter.
Girls and Their Monsters chronicles the extraordinary lives of the quadruplets and the lead psychologist who studied them, asking questions that speak directly to our times: How do delusions come to take root, both in individuals and in nations? Why does society profess to be “saving the children” when it readily exploits them? What are the authoritarian ends of innocence myths? And how do people, particularly those with serious mental illness, go on after enduring the unspeakable? Can the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood help the deeply wounded heal?
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Story
Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life - his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home.
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Brutal and Beautiful
- By 3dogknits on 07-14-21
By: Vince Granata
What listeners say about Girls and Their Monsters
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- Sonya
- 01-30-25
Not what I expected
I was under the impression the book was going to be about the lives of the sisters. Instead you get bits and pieces of their biography woven with ramblings of how racism & religion cause mental illness. I had to skip through a lot of crap to get to parts actually about the sisters. The narrator was great but the book itself was a waste of time & money.
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- Pink Amy
- 06-23-23
A writer with an agenda
I don’t like books with agenda, especially when I was expecting a book about mentally ill quadruplets. A certain amount of the history of mental health is always helpful, for those who aren’t familiar with the history of psychiatry/psychology. Even when I agree with the writer’s point of view of the agenda, I don’t prefer an unbiased view. I care about racism, sexism and antisemitism and while they historically have impacted diagnoses and treatment, the quads were white children, so repeated reminders of how racist the USA was/is didn’t factor into the the girls’/women’s history. If Audrey Clare Farley wanted to write a book about the history of race and mental health, I’d be interested. Don’t bait and switch me about quadruplets in the blurb.
I enjoyed the parts about the quadruplets, though toward the later parts of the book GIRLS AND THEIR MONSTERS was low on info, high on speculation and filled with extraneous history.
Farley didn’t seem to have a full grasp on schizophrenia and its etiology. I doubt she spoke with many sufferers. Based on GIRLS AND THEIR MONSTERS, I’m not certain the diagnoses were accurate for all of the girls based on 2023 understanding of the disorder.
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3 people found this helpful