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; there is also a brief reference to an antisemitic hate crime.

Meg Kissinger is the author of While You Were Out and the fourth eldest child in the Kissinger family. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband Larry and has two children, Charley and Molly. Kissinger is an investigative journalist whose work focuses in part on Humanizing Mental Illness and Improving Care, a focus directly inspired by her experiences with family members’ mental health conditions and experiences. She uses Loss and Hardship as Vessels for Purpose, sharing her family’s story and the stories of others to engender compassion and understanding in others. She wrote her memoir both to confront and understand her past and to contribute to the ongoing effort to destigmatize mental illness by ending the silence around the topic.

Kissinger has a dark, dry sense of humor that she uses in her memoir to add levity to the difficult subject matter. She grew up in the 1960s and 1970s just north of Chicago, and her life was in many ways shaped by