Meg Kissinger, whose reporting on the broken Milwaukee County mental health care system led to public policy changes, has told the story of her own family’s mental health crises in her new book “While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence.”
Through interviewing her surviving siblings; digging through diaries and letters, public and medical records; and even tracking down a babysitter from decades ago, Kissinger pieces together the portrait of a clan that’s simultaneously loving and troubled, writes Jim Higgins of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“There was a lot of love in that house,” a former live-in babysitter for the Kissinger kids says in the book. Yet two of Kissinger’s seven siblings died by suicide, and a third has lived with persistent mental illness.
Kissinger, a Milwaukee Journal and Journal Sentinel reporter from 1983 to 2018, grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, the fourth oldest of eight children. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has won dozens of accolades, including two George Polk Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards.
She now teaches investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a visiting professor at DePauw University, her alma mater.
Kissinger will talk about her memoir “While You Were Out” with Jacki Lyden at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 5 at Milwaukee Public Library Centennial Hall, 733 N. Eighth St. Register for this free event at megkissingermpl.eventbrite.com.
