What I Learned From Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

How to Find the Structure for a Work of Narrative Nonfiction--Biography


Hiddden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, a work of narrative nonfiction, elaborates the story of the Galvin family, a family of twelve children—ten boys and two girls whose births between 1945 and 1965 closely coincided with the years of the baby boom. Over time, six of the boys were diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Most stories about physical or mental illness focus primarily on the diagnosed individual. Kolker’s work focused on the six boys diagnosed with Schizophrenia, but also on the parents, the siblings, and the researchers struggling to understand the cause of this mental condition. This deep and nuanced approach to Schizophrenia confronted Kolker with questions about how to structure the book, questions he discussed at length in several interviews. *
 
Genre as a Guide to Structure

Kolker’s first decision related to which genre would provide the best structure for the story he wanted to tell. He could write a popular science book about Schizophrenia, detailing the research progress using the family as an example. He could also write a nonfiction multigenerational family saga, incorporating the science to provide context for readers to understand the symptoms of Schizophrenia, the options available for treatment, and an understanding of the causes of Schizophrenia at that time.  He decided that the family story would be primary because he could then use the science not only for context but as breathing space for readers entering this family’s extraordinary and overwhelming experience.

The decision to incorporate breathing space for readers is important when writing about traumatic situations because of the phenomenon of secondary traumatization. This type of trauma occurs when an individual experiences significant emotional distress when hearing, watching, or reading about an individual immersed in situations of severe physical or emotional pain. Kolker wasn’t a psychologist, but he was a very wise writer. He may not have known the term secondary traumatization, but he intuitively understood that he needed to present the family story in small pieces with frequent breaks, which is exactly what a psychologist would recommend. The structure for the book that evolved from this understanding was a dual narrative. Chapters related to the family story alternated with chapters related to the research about the causes of Schizophrenia.
 
 Chronology and Controversy as a Guide to Structure

Because Kolker decided to incorporate the research related to the causes of Schizophrenia to provide context for the family story, he read over one hundred books on the subject and conducted numerous interviews with experts. He needed a focus to wrestle that mountain of information into a unified, coherent narrative. His love of historical narratives provided a solution. He conveyed the research about Schizophrenia, chronologically, by elaborating the ongoing debate over decades about nature or nurture as the cause of Schizophrenia. 

What makes the research Korler presents so engaging is that he focuses on individual researchers or a team of researchers in a given time period, relating their theories and research conclusions through their professional and personal stories. For example, to explore the nurture side of the debate, he presents the work of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge in the 1940s. At a time when psychiatry warehoused individuals with mental conditions in asylums and prescribed insulin shock treatment and lobotomies, Fromm-Reichmann prescribed the talking cure. She believed that the origins of Schizophrenia were the result of a domineering, controlling mother. She labeled this type of mother as the Schizophrenogenic Mother. Schizophrenia’s origins were not the result of biology and heredity; parents, especially mothers who were ineffective nurturers, were to blame. Kolker presents the nature side of the debate through Lynn DeLisi and other researchers focused on brain imaging and genetic studies. 
 
Reading Broad and Deep as a Guide to Structure
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 With fourteen members in the Gavin family, Kolker also faced a dilemma about how to approach the chapters detailing the family story. To support readers as they navigated so many individuals, Kolker used several strategies. On the first page of each chapter, all fourteen family members are listed with the family member(s) who is the focus of the chapter in bold font. Additionally, at the front of the book before Part One, he provides a chart with the name of each family member, date and place of birth, and, where appropriate, the name of the spouse, number of children, and the date the individual died.

Kolker discovered another strategy to unify the family story and to support readers as they encountered the different family members through his love of reading multigenerational sagas in fiction and nonfiction. East of Eden by John Steinbeck was divided into parts with each part concentrating on a different generation. Applying this structure to Hidden Valley Road, Kolker focused the first part of Hidden Valley Road on the parents of the children, Mimi and Don—their dating years, their marriage, the birth of each child, the years of working toward the American Dream, and the years in which that dream shattered. In the second part of the book, he focused on the children as they grew older and worked through the traumas of their childhood.

These strategies supported the reader as they navigated a story with fourteen family members, but writing his first draft, Kolker realized that he was covering the experiences of too many people in a single chapter. Once again, a work of fiction guided Kolker to a solution. While revising, he dipped into War and Peace and discovered that Tolstoy often focused a chapter on a single character. He decided that if he used the same technique and focused chapters on only one or several family members, readers would understand that he would pick up the storyline of other family members in subsequent chapters. Recently, I discovered this same approach while reading Middlemarch by George Elliot. Surprisingly, those very lengthy classics still have a lot to teach modern writers. Reading books in the genre you’re writing, but also books outside that genre—contemporary and classic— enables you to discover solutions to problems you encounter when completing a manuscript.
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Hidden Valley Road, with its many family members and many researchers posed a challenge nonfiction writers often confront—a mountain of information that must be distilled into a coherent narrative that will engage readers. With decades of experience as a journalist, Kolker brought well-honed skills to the task, but still encountered difficulties as he wrote and revised. Surprisingly, fiction provided the mentor texts that would guide him to develop the structure of his nonfiction book, proving that it should become a truth universally acknowledged that writers must not only consistently show up at their desks to practice their craft, but they must also read deeply within their chosen genre and widely outside of their chosen genre.
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Politics and Prose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76OzuGHtJDE
New York Times Podcasts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaHXuadUYfQ
NPR
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/05/826695581/in-hidden-valley-road-a-familys-journey-helps-shift-the-science-of-mental-illnes
Book Report Network
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8q7ERWS5Pk
Aspen Words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p_ipAuA0qE 

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