Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America

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, now in paperback. 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 had been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe it. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission. But the case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets 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 and been the object of paranoid public fantasies. 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, shocking lives of the quadruplets while exploring the delusions that gripped the American psyche in the middle of the twentieth century.