Take a photo of a barcode or cover
gracerowland 's review for:
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.
“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.