Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind Of An American Family Quotes
"Everything about Donald confounds Mary, starting with his shaved head and continuing with what he likes most to wear: a reddish brown bedsheet, worn in the style of a monk."
"Mary’s mother is well practiced at laughing off moments like these, behaving as if nothing is strange."
"To complain or cry or show any emotion at all, Mary knows, will send the message that something might be wrong with her, too."
"And the fact is that the days when Mary sees Donald in that bedsheet are better than some of the other days."
"The children who did not become mentally ill were, in many respects, as affected as their brothers."
"For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member."
"Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes."
"That story is about, even after the worst has happened in virtually every imaginable way, finding a new way to understand what it means to be a family."
"The children were raised on a bevy of axioms: 'Pretty is as pretty does'; 'Tattle Tale Tit, your tongue shall be split, and all the dogs in the town shall have a little bit.'"
"This was a return of the smooth and seamless Don of his high school president days—and those years in the Navy, playing tennis with the captain of the USS Juneau."
"The greatest of all the good things happened in 1966, when Don retired from the Air Force and started a new career."
"In every family with lots of kids, a pecking order was inevitable."
"A mother should care for the development of her children."
"Interceding too much might send the wrong message, and the boys might never learn to get along with one another on their own."
"The blind were drawn, a fence erected, and the guns kept at the ready."
"If they had wanted to determine who was wrong in every instance, they would have had trouble figuring out whose fault it was."
"By the time he was a teenager, it was as if there was something keeping Donald from connecting with the world in a conventional way."
"In the end, they didn’t feel like they had a choice at all."
"Donald’s hospitalization... went unmentioned. Mimi dared not say a word."
"Donald took to declaring that his marriage to Jean was still in existence spiritually."
"He and Jean spoke for five minutes, long enough for her to tell him that she wouldn’t see him."
"The only person willing to break the silence around the problem of Donald was Jim."
"Jim came up with a nickname for Donald: Gookoid."
"If the human race survives, future men will... look back on our enlightened epic as a veritable age of Darkness."
"It was through his own reading and his own intellect, he said, that he found a way back to God."
"Everything she needed to do to get through the day, to build some sort of life she wouldn’t feel bad about, to survive."
"He swore off the whole project more than once, but kept turning around and digging again."
"What might help him in that search, he thought, was a large group—a family—with an extraordinarily large incidence of schizophrenia."
"What if he could isolate the gene irregularity that caused people to react this way to the double-click test?"
"The tragedy of Brian and Noni had brought low everyone in the family."
"This was her sister’s chance to have a new family."
"I don’t know what to do," Tim finally said. "But I know who would."
"Sexual abuse does not cause schizophrenia; that much is certain."
"Mimi renounced her faith. She wanted the world to know who was responsible."
"Blaming Father Freudenstein had, at least for Mimi, the virtue of taking some of the blame away from her."
"Maybe all the schizophrenia in the family was set into motion by the stress of this chain of abuse."
"They’re terrified of the disease, and simply don’t want to think about it."
"I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night."
"I’m like, ‘Well, Mike, if you’re willing to take them into your home, off their medication, by all means, go for it.’"
"We were an exemplary family. Everybody used us as a model."
"It was just all inside, and it was hard, that part. That’s where I think the crutch of the Church kind of helped me."
"I think I should and cooperate, with the Bible. I love you!"
"I just cooperate fully and do everything that they say."
"It’s a truly healthy coping mechanism for you to organize your sock drawer."
"The kids who don’t get the attention are the ones who often need it most."
"We all survived somehow. Everyone’s different way needs to be okay."
"There’s no real way around the anxiety. You have to go through it."
"I made such a deliberate effort to expose my children to my mentally ill brothers, so they would not have a bias or feel shame around it. It sort of backfired a little bit."
"Cold, perfectionistic, anxious, overcontrolling, and restrictive."
"Prototype of the middle class Anglo-Saxon American Woman."
"These descriptions seemed to lack a certain coherence."
"A way of playing possum…better to turn oneself into a stone."
"Insanity was a concept wielded by the powerful against the disenfranchised."
"Called the family structure a metaphor for authoritarian society."
"A childhood spent in chaos or poverty could be one cause."
"Embittered, aggressive and devoid of natural warmth."
"The case for heredity has held up convincingly."
"In the strictest sense, it is not schizophrenia that is inherited."
"An opportunity for vulnerability to germinate into disorder."
"That’s the brain disease you are looking at."
"Early detection and intervention model of care."
"A collection of neurodevelopmental disorders."
"Is it a classical organically based biomedical disorder?"