The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome local author Audrey Clare Farley to Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on her new book, GIRLS AND THEIR MONSTERS: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America. This event is free and open to the public. Farley will be in conversation with local author Katy Giebenhain.
For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., a harrowing exploration of violence against children and its psychological and political consequences, from the author of The Unfit Heiress.
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?
About the Authors:
Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress, a page-turning drama about reproductive rights and eugenics framed by the story of Ann Cooper Hewitt, as well as a writer, book reviewer, and historian of twentieth-century American literature and culture. Having earned a PhD in English from University of Maryland, College Park in 2017, she occasionally lectures in history and literature at local universities. Her essay on Cooper Hewitt, published in July 2019 in Narratively, was the publication's second most-read story of the year. Her writing on the eugenics movement and other topics has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Public Books, Lady Science, Longreads, and Marginalia Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
Katy Giebenhain is the author of Sharps Cabaret (Mercer University Press). Her MPhil in Writing is from University of South Wales (Glamorgan). She co-hosts a First Friday poetry series at the Ragged Edge Coffeehouse in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and has been a regional judge for Poetry Out Loud. Her poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Quarterly, New Welsh Review, Bridge Eight, The Examined Life Journal, The Arkansas Review and elsewhere.
