In 1954, the National Institute of Mental Health learned of identical quadruplets, all with schizophrenia. This seemed a rare opportunity to research the hereditary source of the illness. But behind the idyllic public image of the Genain sisters lay a history of horrific abuse. This book explores their lives, and reveals how the nature vs. nurture debate regarding mental illness is more complex than it might appear.

This is a fascinating and often gut-wrenching read. It doesn't provide easy answers, but it asks many important and thought-provoking questions. Perhaps most importantly, it shows how silence and shame magnify the negative effects of abuse and mental illness.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

This is the book about the Morlock quintuplets Sarah Edna Wilma and Helen. They were not only the first set of quince to survive birth but also the first said that we’re all eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia undetermined. It seems they were public property from the time of their birth even their names were part of a raffle and although they were given a house by The town and people would stop in all hours of the day to gaze at the babies. Although they looked like “the perfect American family“ there were sinister secrets and child abuse of every kind happening in the home. It didn’t help that Carl who was German by Birth and a self-confessed Nazi thought only minorities gave birth to multiple children and it showed low breeding. He was verbally sexually and physically abusive to all of his children in Sadie wasn’t much better. They mostly took their anger out on Helen but none of the girls got out unscathed. They couldn’t have friends join clubs at school and even win a few of them got jobs as adults their dad would go and watch them work and be there to pick them up at the end of the day. It seems these girls were victims of every kind of horror from putting acid on their private parts to eventually getting them a female version of a circumcision. And I haven’t even told her the story. This was a very good book although there were some things in the book I thought should’ve been in a different type of book while telling the stories of the Morlock‘s the author also told the story of the Littles who lived in a white neighborhood and the father who was a preacher was killed in when his wife became pregnant by someone else they put her in a mental institution and although this is a very sad story and a story that has been told before I thought it was odd the way she would mention the more locks and then tell something about the Littles, Like to say this is what happens to white people and this is what happens to African-Americans as if to say the girls despite being abused we’re better off than the African-American family the Littles. She did this throughout the book no matter what the topic was she would always mention how that situation affected African-Americans and I just thought that odd because she mentioned no other minority and she even mentioned how when Carl was diagnosed they didn’t mention his racism but I would think if someone is racist that’s a form of mental instability because who hates a whole group of people they can’t possibly know all of. I did find the things about the history of African-Americans and the lack of psychiatric treatment interesting and I also think it would make for a great book on its own I just thought it weird to put in a book about the quintuplets. I was also shocked to see who the famous child of the Littles was and although I feel ridiculous now for not knowing I do think it would be better served in a book on its own. Having said all that this was a crazy book and one I would definitely recommend from beginning to end it is captivating and interesting and although there is a lot of stuff about things that aren’t apropos to the story except for the psychiatric connection I still found that interesting as well just thought it would’ve been better done in a different book. This is a definite must read however it’s so good and so worth getting to the end of. I received this book from NetGalley and Grand Central publishing but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

I had to take a break about a third into Farley's Girls and Their Monsters. The atmosphere of the novel, the pain and sadness Farley was uncovering, it all became a little too much. Or perhaps it got a little too close to home, because they way Farley unravels how society played a role in the mental health and lives of the Genain quadruplets was painful to witness. But I got back to it quickly, because Farley has once again written a fascinating non-fiction deep-dive that is at once utterly human and chockful of relevant information and insight. Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was astounded by Audrey Clare Farley's The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt when I read it in 2021. The way she was able to both guide the reader through Ann Cooper Hewitt's tragic life and through all the social issues that affected it felt like a masterclass on how to write accessible and thorough non-fiction. So when I saw that she had another book coming out, I of course wanted to read it. I had no idea how Girls and Their Monsters would affect me, however. As I wrote above, I had to take a little break from it at some point. I was kind of losing grip on my anxiety and realised that the book was becoming a little too real for me. The way Farley traces how society played a significant role, alongside genetics, in the mental decline of the four Genain sisters, made me realise how my own surroundings were also affecting me. Once I got a grip on myself again, I returned to the book with a new appreciation and was once again amazed at what Farley accomplished. She traces the role of eugenics in 20th-century America, how religion, gendered and racial stereotypes all played a part. While these are things one knows theoretically, it is a whole new thing to see it laid out the way it is in this Girls and Their Monsters. We are shaped by our society in a way we often do not even recognise. Another aspect which Farley traces in the mental health industry, and how it moved from looking for causes in family surroundings, usually the mother, to looking for genetic causes only. While there are still no definite answers on what, exactly, causes illnesses like schizophrenia, Farley lays out a convincing case for how both nature and nurture play their role.

Girls and Their Monsters tells the story of the Genain quadruplets, Edna, Sarah, Wilma, and Helen. Born in the mid 1920s, they were a sensation from birth and became something of celebrities in their home town. Growing up, they belonged to the town as much as to their parents and they were constantly looked at and presented. At home, they were also considered a unit, rather than four separate girls, by their mother and their access to the outside world was severely curtailed by their strict father. The book starts in 1954 when scientists from the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) visit them, with the hope to be able to study them. All four girls have, in one way or another, been diagnosed with schizophrenia, even if their parents and town still project the idea of them as four good, clean girls. From this point, Girls and Their Monsters investigates the girls' childhoods, their parents' history, the lives of the scientisits involved with their case, and the rising awareness and stigmatisation of mental health in America during the last 100-odd years. It is an incredibly comprehensive book, which touches on the widespread obsession with eugenics in 20th century America, the role of the Christian Right in the stigmatisation of mental health and schooling, the role of race is mental health diagnosis, and more. At the heart of Girls and Their Monsters, however, are always the four sisters and their struggles towards individual, fully realized lives.

As with The Unfit Heiress, I am amazed at the amount of information Farley is able to compile and make orderly and understandable, without loosing focus of the humans at the heart of Girls and Their Monsters. All four sisters come through strongly as individuals, something which was denied them for so long. Farley clearly has a lot of sympathy and understanding for them, and extends this, as far as she can, to those around them who may have contributed to their mental decline. In laying out the various social influences to which the sisters were exposed, Farley creates a comprehensive portrait of how mental health balances on the fragile line between nature and nurture. While the Genain sisters are at the core of the book, Farley also dedicates a significant amount of time to the primary psychologist who brought them to NIMH, Dr. Rosenwein, and through him explores the developments in psychology and psychotherapy. Another element she draws out is the racialised aspect of mental health, in part through the story of Louise Little. Like the Genain sisters, she lives in Lansing, Michigan. The Little family suffered through racial violence and after a nervous breakdown, Louise was confined to a mental health hospital for almost three decades. Her son was Malcolm X. Her story is in stark contrast to that of the Genain sisters and her inclusion in this book enables Farley to expand it beyond a tragic story and into an indictment of society. It is hard to encapsulate either the book or Farley's skill at writing it, so all I can do is wholeheartedly recommend it. It is necessary reading, in my opinion.

Girls and Their Monsters blew me away almost from the beginning. Farley has a captivating and personal writing style which flows seamlessly between human insight and social critique. Farley has become an instant-buy for me with this book and I can't wait to see what else she writes.

Will update with links on publication day!

Four kids simultaneously is a lot of kids. It would be very difficult to weather the storm of four kids showing up one day and having to figure it all out especially if you didn't know until the day they were born. Unfortunately for the Morlok quadruplets, their parents didn't have the skills to raise a bird let alone children.

Girls and Their Monsters by Audrey Clare Farley follows the lives of the Morlok quadruplets and the hell they grew up in. Their father was abusive in nearly every way and their mother was either abusive herself or at the very least complicit in the father's misdeeds. It is a tough read because you truly wish you could go back in time and somehow get the sisters to somewhere safe where they can be truly cared for. Farley does a great job laying out the timeline and developmental aspects of the sisters. The book is truly at its best when it focuses on them and how their upbringing, and possibly their genetics, affect them as they grow up. There is science involved in the story, although this wasn't nearly as engaging as the sisters home lives.

The reason this book doesn't get a full five stars is because of the other parts of the narrative not involving the sisters. Farley will occasionally dive into societal factors on mental health and child rearing. There are repeated references to racism which I found to be badly placed in the story. I understand Farley was trying to explain the time period but there is no real connection made between the sisters and racism. Other references to religious movements could have been more appropriate, but the direct effects on the sisters are never convincingly made. These passages in the book feel distracting and more like social points Farley wanted to make as opposed to important details needed to understand the sisters' story. Regardless, the book is still very good and worth a read.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Grand Central Publishing.)

Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America by Audrey Clare Farley is a highly recommended account of the Morlok quadruplets.

The four girls were born in 1930 in Lansing, Michigan to parents Carl and Sadie Morlok. The girls, Edna, Helen, Sarah and Wilma, were portrayed as part of a perfect family and even performed dancing and singing on stage for awhile. Behind closed doors, however, the girls were subjected to a turbulent home life and frequently cruel treatment from abusive and controlling parents. Their public image remained untarnished as the family made sure it was always portrayed as spotless.

By 1954 all four women, now 24, were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health wanted to study the genetics of the mental illness and once they learned about the Morlok quadruplets they immediately included them as part of their research. They were given the "Genain" surname pseudonym during research projects to protect their identities. Their research was not quite as straightforward as they hoped because it became clear that both genetic and environmental factors played a role in the mental health of the Morloks.

Farley expands the account by including mid-century cultural factors, the background and practices of the psychologists involved, the exploitation of children, and other historical factors of the times. The story of the Morloks is compelling and horrifying. The background and extraneous historical and cultural information is not as interesting and not all of it was applicable to their story. There were several passages late in the account that had no association with the Morloks or their experiences and were more opinions on current cultural topics. Some of the things Farley attempted to associate with the Morloks did not apply to their situation.

The historical account involving the Morloks and mid-century psychology is interesting, horrifying, and powerful. This is what makes Girls and Their Monsters worth reading and what calls forth the comparison to Hidden Valley Road. There is some extraneous information and opinions which occur late in the narrative which should have been edited out.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Grand Central Publishing via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

Kind of an odd book - quadruplets and their abuse e parents and the schizophrenia they shared - and how they were treated and mistreated -

On May 19, 1930, Carl and Sadie Morlok were very surprised to find themselves the parents of four daughters. Marginally employed Carl was not prepared to support the new quadruplets and his wife, nor was his wife prepared to care for four infants. Who would be? But the community of Lansing, Michigan rallied around the stunned parents. Donations came in to fill their needs. A job offer came in for Carl. In exchange, the quadruplets became objects of curiosity. Visitors would barge into the Morlok apartment to look at the babies. When the girls got older, Sadie taught them to dance and sing. But, as Audrey Clare Farley reveals early in Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America, the family’s outward respectability covered abuse and mental illness. The Morlok sisters, we learn, would later become the subject of a study on schizophrenia, genetics, and upbringing by a group at the National Institute of Mental Health and the subsequent book, The Genain Quadruplets: A Case Study and Theoretical Analysis of Heredity and Environment in Schizophrenia.

A couple years ago, I read Robert Kolker’s family biography, Hidden Valley Road. Kolker recounts the story of the Galvin family. Six of the family’s ten children developed schizophrenia. Kolker shifts between chapters of family history and a history of research into schizophrenia, with an honest, humane tone. Kolker used interviews with surviving family members and friends and psychiatrists, as well as decades of expert research on schizophrenia. Hidden Valley Road is one of the best works of nonfiction I’ve read and casts a long shadow in my mind. When I asked to read Girls and Their Monsters, I was hoping to learn more about the interaction of genetics, childhood experiences, parenting, and mental illness and how all of these factors might result in schizophrenia. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed by much of Girls and Their Monsters.

When I finished reading this book, I skimmed Farley’s entire bibliography. I had been troubled by the lack of quotes and citations in much of Girls and Their Monsters. Several chapters involve Farley going on long, mostly irrelevant tangents about how schizophrenia diagnoses were weaponized against African Americans and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. The passages about the shift in psychiatric standards from Freudian psychoanalysis to a more bio-medical model were a bit more relevant to the different ways the Morlok quadruplets were viewed by the psychiatric establishment but were still light on historical and scholarly research. The bibliography contained at least four book reviews that I counted (rather than the actual books reviewed, a big no-no in research) and a lot of magazine articles instead of historical scholarship. I might have missed this but Farley doesn’t quote from Sarah Morlok Cotton’s biography of her sisters, which is another strange choice. Looking at the bibliography answered a lot of my questions about the author’s choices in this book.

The first half of the book is the most useful for readers curious about the effects of abuse and upbringing on the vulnerable Morlok quadruplets. Farley was able to find a lot of information about Carl and Sadie Morlok’s own troubling childhoods and was able to draw a lot of connections between those childhoods and the Morlok’s treatment of their children. Farley also found a lot of information about the quadruplets’ experiences at elementary and high school in Lansing. These parts are the most supported by citations. The last half of the book is much less so. These chapters were also the most packed with material not about the Morlok sisters and their lives. Girls and Their Monsters was a frustrating reading experience.

Readers and librarians should skip this book.

This book discussed the lives and psychology of quadruplets. I very much enjoyed this book, and felt it was engaging and descriptive. It enlightened readers of the impact of both nature and nurture on psychology. It reminded me of Hidden Valley Road, another great book. 5 stars.

I was expecting a riveting story about mental health, abuse, and quadruplets… what I got was a medical paper turned into a book. This read like a pubmed article that far exceeded its word count. If you’re interested in outdated medical information and a subjective view of mental health, I guess this one’s for you.

Four sisters, all quadruplets, grow up in an unconventional manner in Michigan in the early to mid 20th century. Their birth story brings them an amount of fame, but their lives aren’t rosy. Their father and mother are abusive, and all four girls eventually become mentally ill.

Although I was interested in reading about the study of the origins of mental illness as well as the lives of these four women, I was tremendously disappointed by this book. The topics covered are incredibly sensitive and require careful thought and verbiage that this book lacks. This reads as much more voyeuristic than journalistic. As interesting as these women are, they deserve a more thoughtful approach than this.

When I saw this I was eager to be approved so I could read it as soon as possible. Having mental illness in my family, as well as twins, it was something I really wanted to learn about and read more about.

I have always been interested in twins, having them, as well as knowing them. I used to wish I was a twin. There was a lot in this book that appealed to that interest! There is so much lore and interesting facts behind twins, as well as not so happy history. I really learned a lot about twins and the schools of thought that went along with them in history. Some of it was of course really heartbreaking and appalling and hard to wrap my brain around, but I should have known to expect as much as things that are out of the norm have not traditionally been easily accepted by the masses.

This covered a lot of bases, it's a detailed history of not only twins and all that lore, but of mental illness, racism and public policy as well. It was a lot to take in, and it wasn't always easy reading, it is impossible not to have your heart broken a little bit and feel ashamed of our history, but this was great for me as someone who is interested in these topics and that is someone who has her own experiences and wants to hear others'. It helped me to not feel so overwhelmed and daunted, and to realize that as bad as the healthcare system is and mental health care is now, that it has come a very, very long way and things could truly be a lot, lot worse like they once were. Super interesting book, it fulfilled all my expectations and I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in psychology &, mental illness. I learned a lot.

The book was the most compelling at the beginning, as it described in detail what life was like for these four young girls. You could really understand the development of schizophrenia later in their lives once you understood what they'd been through. Even the descriptions of their lives during their time at NIH were very interesting. However, after leaving the NIH there's not much detail in the book about their lives. The book transitions to a description of the societal and political landscape of mental illness in the 60s and 70s, and there are only brief mentions of what the girls experienced later in life. I would have preferred more detail about the women they became and what their lives were like during that period as well.

I was intrigued by this book after reading Hidden Valley Road.

I loved the lore of multiples, the history, their childhood, and how they Were brought to the attention of researchers.

I wish that I had more of their history. I feel that there was just too much parental control and possibly sexual molestation by the parents to some of the girls.

My heart went out to the girls and to the mother.

The researchers had really one goal in mind to show a connection between DNA and mental illness. As such the quads were recruited. It sounded like they had an okay life at the research facility.

The book got a little bogged down with the scientific breakthroughs, the competing thoughts, the prescription medication rise, etc.
The author could have cut some of the stuff out.

Overall, a great book on the quads and a little history of psychiatry.

This was a fascinating book for a lot of reasons. I enjoyed the story about the siblings, but it was also fascinating to get a portrait of life during the times the girls were growing up especially the things that aren't necessarily mentioned in history books. Not only would I recommend this for those interested in the study of mental health, but to those interested in family stories and sagas as well.

I ultimately wanted to like this book more than I did. I found the parts about the quadruplets really interesting, but the other background information lost me in multiple areas.

An incredibly deft blend of history, science and narrative. Deeply readable, sensitively told, and totally fascinating.

An incredibly compelling read, even though it was frequently hard to stomach. Highly recommend reading this for fans of history, crime, public policy, and the places were all those combine.

I picked this up initially because I am a mother of identical twins and old timey twin lore is facinating to me. People not long ago used to assume you were cheating or part animal, or even evil, if you had multiples. The lore is also racist.
It was, and still is, bizarre. Plus twins still get a ton of attention. I made it a point to raise mine like little individuals but when two people have the same face society is curious.
This book was that and so much more. It was a detailed history of mental illness, racism, and public policy I didn't realize I needed to read until I started.
I also have a brother who is schizophrenic so that aspect was fascinating to me. We still don't know what causes it but three direct relatives in my family suffer from the disorder. However, two of them suffered head injuries and abuse.
I can't praise this book enough. The unbelievable amount of research the author did is so impressive. We have access to all the angles.
This is likely one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read!

I picked this up initially because I am a mother of identical twins and old timey twin lore is facinating to me. People not long ago used to assume you were cheating or part animal, or even evil, if you had multiples. The lore is also racist.
It was, and still is, bizarre. Plus twins still get a ton of attention. I made it a point to raise mine like little individuals but when two people have the same face society is curious.
This book was that and so much more. It was a detailed history of mental illness, racism, and public policy I didn't realize I needed to read until I started.
I also have a brother who is schizophrenic so that aspect was fascinating to me. We still don't know what causes it but three direct relatives in my family suffer from the disorder. However, two of them suffered head injuries and abuse.
I can't praise this book enough. The unbelievable amount of research the author did is so impressive. We have access to all the angles.
This is likely one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read!