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

Content Warning: This section contains discussions of suicide, self-harm, domestic violence, child abuse, substance use disorder, and mental illness.

“Eventually, we were all mauled and mangled. No one escaped unscathed.”

Meg Kissinger compares her family’s relationship to mental illness to growing up with tigers that prowl and wait to pounce on their next victim, a motif that she uses throughout the book. She sees the family as a collective unit that experiences everything together, in which members are interconnected and affected by what happens to every other member. Each person in the Kissinger family dealt with their own internal struggles and experienced The Dangers of Concealing Pain.

“So, she acquiesced, taking her chances that this marriage, beginning on the shakiest of grounds, might somehow turn out all right.”

Assuming Jean’s point of view, Kissinger explores her mother’s troubled life—the result, in part, of her sometimes volatile and often unstable marriage with Holmer. While they were deeply committed to one another, Jean and Holmer both had mental illnesses that affected their relationship with each other and with their children.

“Tigers! Sister knew about the tigers. What did she know about my mother? I was starving for answers. Where was my mother? Why did she leave us? When was she coming home? She was coming home again, wasn’t she?”

When Kissinger writes about her early years, she captures the panic and confusion she often felt when she was young and did not understand what was happening around her; here, a series of unanswered questions create a tone of escalating panic. Her mother’s unexplained disappearances and the resulting trauma for the children illustrate