Journalist Meg Kissinger gives a stellar narration of her extraordinarily affecting memoir about growing up in the 1960s in a close-knit Irish-Catholic family of eight children, many of whom were afflicted with mental illness. Kissinger's father suffered from bipolar disorder, her mother was hospitalized for depression during Kissinger's childhood, and she lost a brother and sister to suicide. Kissinger sensitively takes listeners into the climate of those times, when mental disorders were a taboo subject and those afflicted often suffered in silence and with great shame. Yet this memoir, especially as it moves to the present day, is filled with moments of compassion and emotional support among family members. This unforgettable memoir is the perfect guide for listeners seeking to better understand the impact of mental illness on families. M.J. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

★ 07/31/2023

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. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Sept.)Correction: A previous version of this review inaccurately explained why the author’s mother was absent for periods of time during the author’s childhood.

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

“The raw intimacy of [Meg Kissinger’s] prose exemplifies the empathy our society so desperately needs.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Meg Kissinger has courageously given us a chronicle of love, loss, family and obligation, all refracted through the lens of mental illness. Here is a story as urgent and indelible as the bonds that hold its characters together. In speaking to her family’s experience she has laid bare our own collective one.”
—Lit Hub

“A startling, important book.”
—Los Angeles Times

"Meg Kissinger is a world-class reporter and a rip-roaring storyteller. Her heartfelt, eviscerating, deeply introspective investigation of long-held family secrets will leave you quaking with rage about our broken mental-health system—and grateful that writers like her are on the case."
—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road

"As a journalist, Meg Kissinger has long been shining a light on our broken mental health care system by telling the stories of people struggling with mental illness. In While You Were Out, she tells the more personal and painful narrative of the people in her own family who have struggled with mental illness. A gifted storyteller, Kissinger reminds us, in the words of her deceased brother, 'Only love and understanding can conquer this disease.' This wonderful book offers us both."
—Tom Insel, MD, Former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health

"Frank and revelatory, While You Were Out is a story of overwhelming power, chronicling the kind of American tragedy that feels both aberrant and ever-present."
—Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves

"Bearing witness is an act of courage. Meg Kissinger has courageously given us a chronicle of love, loss, family and obligation, all refracted through the lens of mental illness. Here is a story as urgent and indelible as the bonds that hold its characters together. In speaking to her family's experience she has laid bare our own collective one."
—Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School and author of The Substance of Hope

"For years, Meg Kissinger had the mental health beat pretty much to herself. For the readers of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, she turned out one incredible story after another about the ordinary people who suffered from mental illness and addiction—and from the failure of health care institutions and local and state government to care for them. She wrote occasionally about her own family too. Now, in this gripping and poignant memoir, she has put it all together, telling the big-picture story of this country’s catastrophic inability to create anything resembling a mental health system and the impact that those failings and a ruthless illness had on her own family. If you want to understand mental health in America, this is required reading."
—Rob Waters, Founding Editor of MindSiteNews

"Meg Kissinger's memoir of a boisterous, loving, troubled family does the nearly impossible: tells a deeply personal story in the context of a nation-wide mental crisis, treating siblings and strangers with equal compassion and journalistic rigor. A beautiful, heartfelt book."
—Liz Scheier, author of Never Simple

"A smart, stirring family memoir of suicide and survival, and a bracing call for more investigative journalism on mental health and addiction."
—Patrick J. Kennedy, former Congressman (D-RI) and New York Times bestselling co-author of A Common Struggle

"More than a poignant memoir....this is an important and wise book, one which sheds light on a subject that is still surrounded by shame and silence."
—Daphne Merkin, author of the memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression and the novel 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love


"Kissinger paints a singular portrait of her family’s pain and the culture of silence that exacerbated it."
—The Atlantic

2023-06-15
A stark examination of the tragic cost of untreated mental illness.

Award-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigative reporter Kissinger examines the country’s inadequate mental health system through the experiences of her own troubled family. “We were a family of eight children,” she writes, “born over a span of twelve years, to parents with serious illnesses who gobbled tranquilizers and drank themselves silly many nights.” Her mother was repeatedly hospitalized for anxiety and depression; her father, who exhibited inexplicably sudden mood changes, eventually was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Both were alcoholics. In light of their parents’ behavior, the children felt “like little deer teetering through the forest, vulnerable and unprotected.” During Kissinger’s childhood, her mother would go missing periodically. No explanation was given to the children; once, she and her sister were packed up and taken to a relative’s house for a few days, not knowing why or if they would ever be retrieved. By the time she was in high school, it was clear that many of her siblings were suffering from depression, and one of her sisters repeatedly tried to kill herself. Sent to the Menninger Clinic for treatment, she returned home “meaner and more physically abusive than ever.” With the help of her siblings, Kissinger pieces together the depression, paranoia, and mania among them that had never been talked about as they were growing up. After every crisis, she writes, “we simply went back to our old routines with no therapy or family discussions. None.” Unsurprisingly, mental illness became her focus as a journalist, and her reportage on her county’s mental health resources led to reforms of state law and won a George Polk Award. Expanding that investigation for this book, Kissinger identifies endemic problems in dealing with mentally ill individuals, including housing, social support, medical treatment, and hospitalization. When, she asks, should a person’s right to autonomy “yield to their safety or the safety of others?”

An impassioned argument for reform in caring for the afflicted.