49 pages • 1 hour read
Meg KissingerWhile You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Loving What Is Mortal”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Tiger Pit”
Content Warning: This section contains discussions of suicide, self-harm, domestic violence, child abuse, substance use disorders, and mental illness; there is also a brief reference to an antisemitic hate crime.
Meg Kissinger describes her family members and their prominent character traits to set the stage for the events that defined her family dynamic and the issues that shaped her and her siblings’ lives. Meg and her seven siblings (Mary Kay, Nancy, Jake, Patty, Billy, Danny, and Molly) grew up in North Chicago with their parents, Bill (who went by Holmer) and Jean Kissinger. Although Jean had other aspirations, she followed the dictates of her Irish Catholic background, in which a woman’s purpose was to bear children. She was a dutiful mother but had anxiety and depression. Holmer sold advertising space to drug companies, many of which sold the tranquilizers prescribed to women like Jean. He would often come home after work already intoxicated, and his moods were unpredictable—he hit the children impulsively, often for no reason at all.
Mary Kay, Meg’s oldest sister, was an art enthusiast. Nancy was smart but sneaky and often vengeful. Jake, the eldest boy, was often bullied at school, and looking back, Meg regrets never intervening. Meg was the fourth child and was deemed “slow” by her doctor as a small child. Patty, the next oldest, was Meg’s closest sibling, and they shared a bedroom as children. Billy was interested in girls from a young age and was a bit of a troublemaker. Danny, the youngest boy, was eager to please but mischievous. Molly, the youngest, was born when Meg was seven, and Meg was protective of her.
After Molly was born, Jean wanted to stop having children, and her doctor agreed that it wasn’t physically safe and prescribed birth control. When the pope declared that birth control went against the Catholic Church’s teachings, Jean asked her priest for an exception. Holmer often played with the children when he was home, but Jean did the majority of the work of raising them. Her depression and anxiety, along with Holmer’s unpredictable moods, created constant tension in the household, but the children always managed to find ways to have fun together. Meg compares the issues that slowly tore her family apart to tigers that lay in wait, ready to pounce and take their next victim.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Get Out of Jail Free”
A photograph of Jean and Holmer in 1950 gives the appearance of a happy couple, although they came from different backgrounds. Jean grew up wealthy and educated, in a stable household, while Holmer came from a more unpredictable, less fortunate family. Both had brothers named John, and Holmer’s brother died while training to become a pilot in World War II. Jean’s brother was born with Down syndrome, and when their mother developed breast cancer, he was sent to live in a home for people with disabilities.
Jean’s mother died a few months later, and Jean and Holmer met soon after, when Holmer’s mother saw Jean in church and decided that he should marry her, a girl from a wealthy background. Holmer’s wild and carefree nature was an escape for Jean, and the two often drank together. He proposed to Jean in church, where they went to confess before a planned night of drinking, and Jean said yes. She later revealed to Holmer that she was on medication for depression, but Holmer didn’t really understand. Jean was ashamed but also worried that Holmer was too wild for her; she wanted to call the wedding off, but her father wouldn’t allow it.
In 1951, Jean and Holmer’s first child, Mary Kay, was born. Holmer graduated law school and began selling advertising space to pharmaceutical companies that were profiting off the rise in anxiety and depression among both working people and stay-at-home parents—companies selling the same medications Jean was taking. In the mid-1950s, Holmer’s business took off.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Secret Hiding Places”
Meg first realized that something was wrong within her family in 1963, when she was six years old. Her mother disappeared without explanation, and she and Patty were taken to stay with Holmer’s cousin for a few days. They were confused and scared, but when they returned home, their mother was back and said nothing about her absence.
Meg started first grade at a Catholic parish school, in a class of 50 children. While many of the nuns at the school were known to be physically abusive, Meg’s teacher was not. Still, she often told Meg not to cry and preached about suffering as a way to become closer to God. One day, Jean disappeared again, and Meg came home to find her grandmother in the kitchen instead. Holmer’s parents often helped out, but Meg knew this was different. Meg’s grandmother preached about being Irish Catholic and promoted the idea of suffering, while her grandfather had the same unpredictable nature as Holmer. Meg’s grandparents had a distant relationship, and she suspected they never wanted to get married.
Holmer moved the family to New York for business but moved them back to Chicago shortly after. This took a toll on everyone, especially Jean. The new neighborhood was filled with other Irish American families, and Meg and her siblings spent their days and nights playing with the local children. Jean disappeared again, and still, nobody told Meg that she was in a psychiatric hospital. When Jean came home, everyone was nervous, and Nancy kicked Meg under the table at dinner, causing her to scream. Holmer grabbed Meg and locked her in her bedroom. Meg cried and thought about what would happen if she died and her father felt guilty about it. Later, she snuck into her parents’ room to snuggle with her mother but found Jean’s side of the bed empty and her mother gone yet again.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Dangerous Tricks”
After Thanksgiving, Jean returned home for good, but she was heavily medicated and emotionally numb. She often left the children unsupervised at home and in public. Jean started to view her children as though they were ticking bombs, and sure enough, each had at least one brush with death in their early childhood. Meg’s own experience involved falling into a frozen lake while her four-year-old brother was supervising her. Holmer saved her at the last possible moment. Danny was caught in a snow drift, Nancy once fell out a window, and Mary Kay flipped the family car while driving. Molly overdosed on children’s aspirin thinking it was candy, and Billy wandered far away from home at age four. However, along with these nearly tragic incidents, Meg has fond memories of spending days at the beach with her family.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In the first part of her memoir, Kissinger provides exposition concerning her family life and the events, circumstances, and internal struggles that led to the issues that occurred later, immediately addressing the need for Humanizing Mental Illness and Improving Care. Rather than excusing her parents’ mistakes or the shortcomings of the mental health care system, she offers complete and unflinching details about her family to illustrate the multitude of complex factors that shaped her family’s sometimes tragic history. Jean and Holmer’s marriage began on unstable ground, as both were already self-medicating alcohol and had undiagnosed mental health conditions. Jean was also burdened by the obligations of Catholicism, which dictated that she should have as many children as possible. Kissinger highlights the complexity of this issue by flatly stating, “If my mother had gotten her way, my siblings and I would have never been born” (17). Kissinger here frames her and her siblings’ lives as “problems” from the start, foreshadowing troubles to come as well as suggesting the causal links between her mother’s ambivalence about parenthood and her siblings’ later experiences with mental illness.
Further complicating matters, there was a dark irony to Jean’s and Holmer’s relationship, as Jean was dependent upon medication while Holmer was selling it. Kissinger highlights the lack of information about medication at that time—the expectation was that doctors were trustworthy and medication was safe, so nobody was aware of the detrimental effects that these intense, first-generation medications were having on Jean. At the same time, Holmer’s bipolar disorder remained undiagnosed for decades, leaving him and the family to deal with his vacillating exuberance and dark moods. Kissinger compares these underlying family issues to tigers lying in wait to highlight its all-consuming nature: It always seemed like someone would be “next.” This complex, nuanced, and multigenerational portrait furthers Meg’s purpose of humanizing mental illness by showing its manifestations in her own family.
To make her family’s issues even worse, the attitudes of the era along with Irish Catholic ideals meant that Kissinger’s family never discussed their mental health, and these opening chapters begin to highlight The Dangers of Concealing Pain. Holmer and Jean both “learned early how to pretend like nothing was wrong. Glide on your charm” (220). Both of Kissinger’s parents dealt with major loss growing up but, as was customary both during the era and in their religion, didn’t talk about it. They masked their sorrow with drinking and dark humor and passed these same coping mechanisms on to their children. Kissinger’s grandmother reinforced this message from the perspective of religion. From all sources and directions, Kissinger was told that suffering was good and that she should endure it privately: “Better to save them [tears] for when a tiger starts chasing you through the jungle” (46). However, the narrative immediately highlights the disadvantages of this approach. When Kissinger’s mother started disappearing without explanation, Kissinger blamed herself and experienced a period of severe self-doubt when she could have just been told that her mother was at a psychiatric hospital. Instead, she developed a heightened sense of responsibility that would follow her into adulthood: When she grew up, Meg continued to worry about her family, ever burdened by the possibility of future tragedy.
The memoir includes difficult and painful material, written in serious, honest, and straightforward prose, but Kissinger also includes examples of the dark humor that defined her family’s attitude growing up. She juxtaposes positive memories with painful ones, discussing the way her grandmother’s strict Irish Catholic ideals dictated her life while also joking about the unbelievable volume of Irish American families that lived in her neighborhood. Kissinger is also honest about the fallibility of memory and the fact that she may not remember everything exactly as it happened. To delineate this for the reader, she only quotes what she knows to be fully accurate, italicizing approximations. She also reveals the flaws in her memory when she notes the following:
I remember hearing Grandma snore in the next room while her false teeth soaked in a glass on the bathroom sink. Or do I? This sounds like a cartoon. These flourishes are a little too tidy. It can’t really have happened that way. But, as I strain to fill in the blanks, that’s the way I remember it (52).
The memoir’s style also reflects Kissinger’s journalistic origins, using narrative techniques like foreshadowing to increase tension. Her stories of the Kissinger children’s brushes with death foreshadow their future difficulties and the deaths of Nancy and Danny.
