Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Mimi was born in 1924 to Billy and John Blayney. Her mother Billy was the daughter of the wealthy Kenyon family from Texas, and from an early age, Mimi learned to think of herself as part of a cultural and intellectual elite. However, her parents separated when she was five, so Mimi spent the bulk of her girlhood in New York City with her mother and stepfather. Here, she grew into an outgoing and ambitious young woman with a specific idea of the life she wanted to lead with her high school sweetheart, and eventually husband, Don Galvin.

In this respect, Mimi was disappointed even before her children began showing signs of mental illness; Don’s absorption in his work and hobbies frustrated her, as did his failure to achieve the kind of success she had envisioned for him. Meanwhile, Mimi felt that she had sacrificed greatly—dropping out of college, converting to Catholicism, etc.—to provide her husband with the large family he wanted, although it’s worth noting that this was a role Mimi also seemed to take great pleasure and pride in. Her daughter Margaret would later speculate that Mimi’s decision to have so many children was tied to the sexual abuse she had experienced as a girl: “[Mimi] had been binging on family—running away from the past and trying to build something ideal” (227).