Girls and Their Monsters, by Audrey Clare Farley

Trigger warnings for physical, verbal, and sexual abuse of children.

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.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.