While You Were Out
An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
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4.6 • 41 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them.
Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard.
But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding—a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it.
While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies.
Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family’s love and resilience in face of great loss.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Advocacy lies at the center of Meg Kissinger’s heartfelt memoir While You Were Out. Born in 1957, she had a seemingly idyllic childhood in a large Irish Catholic family in Chicago. That outward appearance covered up her mother’s crippling depression, her father’s bipolar disorder, and the mental health issues affecting her siblings. Kissinger treats her family’s struggles with warmth and humor but doesn’t hesitate to expose the tragedy, especially her sister’s and brother’s suicides. That her family’s struggles were seen as something to either hide or laugh off—normal then—now seems jarring. A longtime journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, she uses her family’s experiences as a gateway to a discussion about the mental healthcare system and its continued inadequacies. Telling her own story in full provides Kissinger with a disarming way of bringing attention to an issue that requires discussion, not silence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searing debut memoir, Pulitzer finalist Kissinger documents how mental illness impacted her family and led her to spend more than 20 years reporting on mental health in America. Born in Illinois in 1957, Kissinger was the fourth of eight children raised by parents "who gobbled tranquilizers and drank themselves silly many nights." Her mother, Jean, battled depression and anxiety, and was hospitalized several times during Kissinger's childhood, while her father, Holmer, was prone to rages and violence. Two of Kissinger's siblings—her older sister, Nancy, and younger brother, Danny—died by suicide in early adulthood. After highlighting these difficulties, Kissinger moves on to her career as a reporter of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and discusses how her family life encouraged her to cover gaps in America's treatment of the mentally ill, particularly the 5.6% of adults with "serious and persistent mental illness." She resists calling that treatment a "system," because "very few things work together to help people with mental illness." Throughout, Kissinger brings passion and immediacy to the subject, sharing her own story and those of her sources with bracing frankness. She's particularly good at the complexities of talking about suicide, and how pressures against such conversations may have prevented her family from averting tragedy. As both a candid family portrait and a polemic against institutional neglect of people with mental illness, this delivers.
Customer Reviews
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Honest and eye opening. Childhood while short is deeply impactful and this book truly makes that connection. Honest reflection on families with profound mental health problems.