Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | While You Were Out | 2023 | Meg Kissinger | Buy |
While You Were Out (2023) is Meg Kissinger’s memoir about growing up in a large Milwaukee family haunted by mental illness. Kissinger, a longtime investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, spent her career covering psychiatric care and the people who fell through the cracks. In this book, she turns that lens on her own household.
The memoir traces how depression, addiction, and suicide affected the Kissinger family across generations. Meg writes about losing multiple siblings and the toll that secrecy and stigma took on everyone involved. She also connects her family’s experience to the broader collapse of America’s mental health infrastructure, making the personal and the political hard to separate. The book received strong reviews for its honesty and for the way Kissinger avoids easy answers about what could have been done differently.