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A review by marycel
While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence by Meg Kissinger
4.0
My work book club finally picked a book I liked. Hallelujah!
This exceptionally well-written memoir explores the author’s family experiences with mental illness, including family members who have committed suicide. She traces the history of her relatives’ depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and more, as well as how the mental healthcare system and expectation of social silence failed them and others like them. This could have easily felt exploitative, but the book is written with warmth, love, and grace extended to her parents and siblings without minimizing the negative parts of anyone’s actions or choices.
I can’t imagine the vulnerability of writing this. I read one poem about a trauma at a poetry reading and then had nightmares for days, so the thought of putting a memoir like this out into the world is absolutely horrifying to me—but maybe it shouldn’t be. Normalizing that trauma, mental illness, and other kinds of emotional pain exist and are valid experiences that can be spoken of is the entire point of the book, and the fact that she got every one of her surviving siblings to give their blessing before publishing it is telling of how much love and support there is between them. As someone with mental illness and substance abuse in my family as well, I appreciate her efforts to shine a light on the ways in which we’ve let down people suffering with these issues, as well as the ways in which we could do better—on a personal level, but also in society as a whole.
This exceptionally well-written memoir explores the author’s family experiences with mental illness, including family members who have committed suicide. She traces the history of her relatives’ depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and more, as well as how the mental healthcare system and expectation of social silence failed them and others like them. This could have easily felt exploitative, but the book is written with warmth, love, and grace extended to her parents and siblings without minimizing the negative parts of anyone’s actions or choices.
I can’t imagine the vulnerability of writing this. I read one poem about a trauma at a poetry reading and then had nightmares for days, so the thought of putting a memoir like this out into the world is absolutely horrifying to me—but maybe it shouldn’t be. Normalizing that trauma, mental illness, and other kinds of emotional pain exist and are valid experiences that can be spoken of is the entire point of the book, and the fact that she got every one of her surviving siblings to give their blessing before publishing it is telling of how much love and support there is between them. As someone with mental illness and substance abuse in my family as well, I appreciate her efforts to shine a light on the ways in which we’ve let down people suffering with these issues, as well as the ways in which we could do better—on a personal level, but also in society as a whole.