While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

Award-winning journalist Kissinger (investigative reporting, Columbia Univ. Graduate Sch. of Journalism) calls on her investigative skills to write about her family in her debut memoir. Kissinger was the fourth child in an Irish Catholic family of eight children, growing up in 1960s Chicago. When Kissinger was young, her mother was hospitalized to treat anxiety and depression. The book describes how she drank to self-medicate and occasionally disappeared for days or weeks at a time. Her mother’s absences were never explained, but Kissinger later learns that her mother was receiving psychiatric care. The book portrays Kissinger’s father as addicted to alcohol, capricious, impulsive, and prone to flying into occasional fits of rage that left the author and her siblings shaken. The author says her parents’ struggles became her siblings’ struggles as well, and the mental health care system repeatedly failed them. After multiple attempts at suicide, the author’s once vivacious sister Nancy killed herself in 1978, and a couple of decades later, her younger brother Danny died by suicide after living with bipolar disorder for years. The memoir reveals how the specific tragedies in Kissinger’s family catalyzed her to spend her career investigating and reporting on the broader failures of mental health care in the United States.