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Meg Kissinger, author of While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

Growing up in the 1960s, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding --- a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it. WHILE YOU WERE OUT begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles and then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care.

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Week of September 2, 2024

Paperback releases for the week of September 2nd include HOLLY, a thrilling novel that marks the return of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, Holly Gibney, who must uncover the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town; THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story --- and who gets to be believed; Jesmyn Ward's LET US DESCEND, a haunting masterpiece about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War; GOOD BAD GIRL, a drama-filled and surprising thriller from Alice Feeney in which nobody can be trusted and the twists come fast and furious; and WHILE YOU WERE OUT, Meg Kissinger's searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them.

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