[ “Hidden Valley Road” is one of our most anticipated titles of April. See the full list. ]

The Galvin children were all born between 1945 and 1965, during the two decades of the baby boom. It was a time when the psychoanalytic approach to mental illness, with its theory of the cold and domineering “schizophrenogenic mother,” reigned supreme. What began as a more holistic rejoinder to the crude biological reductionism of the early 20th century soon hardened into its own orthodoxy. According to its proponents, mental illness was a disease of nurture, not nature; as one psychiatrist put it, the schizophrenic patient “is always one who is reared by a woman who suffers from a perversion of the maternal instinct.”

Image Robert Kolker, whose new book is “Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.” Credit... Jeff Zorabedian

Mimi, the mother of the Galvin children, felt like doctors were always judging her, and she tended to react by doubling down on her own coping mechanisms. Kolker’s depiction of her is humane yet unsparing. He describes her fastidious perfectionism and what sometimes looked like willful denial. She would never admit it to anyone, but Kolker — who interviewed her before her death in 2017 — suggests that Mimi was understandably overwhelmed, a feeling she managed with a twice-a-week, two-shopping-cart grocery haul and adherence to strict routines. Keeping the household running consumed her fortitude and the family’s resources.

Don, the paterfamilias, had a military career and was mostly absent — leaving Mimi to serve as the lightning rod for most of the blame, not only from doctors but from her own children. Mimi was the omnipresent disciplinarian; Don was the gentler authority figure, fleeting and playful, selling his sons on self-help books like “The Power of Positive Thinking” and telling them they could fight one another, but only while wearing boxing gloves.

As Kolker puts it, the combination of order and chaos meant that the Galvin home on Hidden Valley Road was “a place where two different realities existed at the same time: the wrestling pit and the church choir.” The boys bullied one another, and their jostling would sometimes escalate to brawls that drew blood. The two girls, the youngest children in the family, were so eager to leave the house that they would spend weekends with Jim, one of their adult brothers, who sexually abused them and beat his wife.