Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America

For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an ＂intimate and compassionate portrait＂ (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences.​

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 had been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe it. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission. But the case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets 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 and been the object of paranoid public fantasies. 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, shocking lives of the quadruplets while exploring the delusions that gripped the American psyche in the middle of the twentieth century.

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.