kellielynn13's review

2.25
emotional slow-paced

csaxton's review

4.0

Wowsas. That’s some bad genetics right there.

agrao10's review

5.0
challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

gracerowland's review

4.0

3.5 stars rounded up

“While You Were Out” is part family memoir, part commentary on our national response to mental illness, and part reflection on writing a memoir. It deals with depression and bipolar disorder, suicide, alcoholism, and psychiatric care. Given all of these elements, it should have been right up my alley, but I found it lacking. The author acknowledges that she has had difficulty processing the emotions related to her family’s traumatic events, and this is probably the problem. Her style as a journalist is apparent; her response to the events told as a daughter and sister are more detached. It just lacked the emotional resonance you would expect from the description. I think it may also have been trying to do too many things without enough space, or perhaps with the wrong proportions— we get extremely in-depth sketches of family members up to the author’s grandparents, but not enough detail about the decades of journalistic work she did exposing the mistreatments of psychiatric patients in cities like Milwaukee. I would have preferred a different balance, but that is pretty subjective.

There is helpful discussion on how families can respond to mental illness and talk about suicide, so I appreciated that. But this memoir did not live up to its potential for me.

csjones129's review

3.75
emotional reflective slow-paced

"To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:
To love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

 Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family’s love and resilience in face of great loss.  The first part is a detailed and thorough exploration of Kissinger Family – and the second part focuses on our flawed mental health system, terrible public policy (only to get worse currently in my opinion) and research surrounding mental health and the care of mental health. 

Meg's book is an excellent glimpse into alcoholism and mental health and how these challenges can effect a whole family for generations. Meg talks about the common struggles and those that might not be so well known. Her honest conversations about dealing with mental health and death are also refreshing.
dark emotional sad medium-paced

maggiejay's review

4.0
informative medium-paced
lisettemarie's profile picture

lisettemarie's review

4.0
challenging emotional reflective sad

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