49 pages • 1 hour read
While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
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Part 1, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Loving What Is Mortal”
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “It’s All in Her Head”
Meg and her siblings rarely got their mother’s sole attention and relished the rare moments when they did. Meg recalls getting a paper cut in her eye that required an eye patch and being glad for the chance to be cared for and spend time with her mother alone. On the day the doctor told Meg she was healed, she and her mother went out for lunch and did some light shopping, which Kissinger remembers as a wonderful day. She craved more of those moments and even tried to cut her eye again.
When Mary Kay graduated high school, Meg cried, knowing that the family she grew up with was breaking apart. She feared growing up and wished she and her siblings could stay children forever. Mary Kay struggled at university. She became pregnant and had an abortion, although she did not tell anyone in the family until years later, hiding her experiences as was customary in the family. Meg’s second eldest sister, Nancy, became heavily involved in drugs, alcohol, and unprotected sex as she got older, and her volatile demeanor worsened. She was sometimes physically abusive toward Meg, who was too young to understand that Nancy had a mental illness. Nancy left for college but returned shortly after, having been in a car accident on her way to have an abortion. She spent weeks lying in bed, refusing to talk to anyone. One day she tried to die by suicide and overdosed on pills in the bathtub. Firefighters broke down the bathroom door and rushed Nancy to the hospital. Meg saw her sister being taken out on a stretcher, not sure whether she was alive or dead.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “While You Were Out: Grandma Died”
Nancy awoke in the hospital, angry to have survived. When she returned home, the mood among the family was tense. Nobody spoke about Nancy’s attempt, but everyone worried when the next incident would occur. Nancy spent several months in and out of hospitals, and her doctors diagnosed her with several different mental health conditions, none of which had a hopeful prognosis. While everyone was focused on Nancy, Jake became depressed and dropped out of college. Meg grew resentful of her sister for taking all the family’s attention, money, and time, and started to lash out and rebel in the same ways Nancy had. During one incident, Meg was so violent that Jean called the police. Meg worried that she would end up like her sister and decided to focus on journalism school.
While Meg was away at a small university in Indiana, her grandmother died. Nancy attempted to die by suicide again, and Meg responded to the chaos by getting as far away from home as possible. However, even while studying abroad, she still found herself worrying about her family. During this time, Holmer was in a car accident while driving drunk and decided to join Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). He threw himself into this project, and Meg felt a new sense of pride in her father. Jean worried that quitting alcohol would mean an end to her social life and continued to drink. During the summer, Meg called home to talk to Jean, but Nancy answered. Nancy was heavily medicated, and Meg became frustrated and angry. She asked Nancy what was wrong with her, and Nancy responded, “Fuck you.” These became the last words Nancy ever spoke to Meg.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “We All Have to Go Sometime”
A photograph shows Nancy smiling in 1972, six years before her death at 24 years old. On the day of Nancy’s death, Meg remembers watching her help Billy with his guitar picking in the morning. In the early afternoon, Nancy overdosed and had her stomach pumped at home. Some time afterward, she escaped the supervision of her family and walked into the path of an oncoming train. She was taken to the hospital and died of her injuries several hours later. Holmer identified her body, while Jean refused to see it. As the family came together to grieve and hold the funeral, Meg was more relieved than sad, knowing that Nancy’s suffering had ended.
Countless people attended the funeral, where Meg told the story of when Nancy was four years old and commented on her deceased uncle by saying, “Oh well. We all have to go sometime” (110). Her parents lied about Nancy’s cause of death because a death by suicide would be denied a Catholic funeral. At the cemetery, Nancy was buried in the wrong spot, and her casket had to be unearthed and buried again. Meg hoped that Nancy’s death meant life would settle down for her family, but Jean overdosed on pills and alcohol a few months later.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “A Hard Molt”
Jean survived and claimed that the overdose was an accident. Meanwhile, Meg noticed her mother was drinking more, including early in the morning. Meg describes the process of healing from Nancy’s death as a “hard molt.” Everyone’s pain was their own to bear, and everyone dealt with it in their own way. Meg focused on school and her work as the school newspaper editor but found herself drinking excessively and crying often. Nancy’s death was rarely discussed, and Jean continued to self-medicate with alcohol. Meg found out that Jean was no longer cooking meals for her three teenage siblings who still lived at home and became angry. When Jean overdosed, however, she decided to get help for her alcohol addiction.
To celebrate Meg’s graduation from university, Mary Kay took her and Patty to Ireland to see where their family came from. When they returned, Meg moved to Watertown, New York, for a position with their local newspaper. Before she left, however, she found her mother drinking again.
Meg had a difficult time adjusting to living on her own and being so far away from her family. When she begged to come home, her mother wrote her a letter of encouragement. Holmer even came to visit and check on her, and Meg was grateful for the time she spent with her father. He reminded her that she was capable, and as she began to achieve great things in her work, testing boundaries and sharing unpopular opinions, she began to believe it. Meg broke a story about a well-known Vietnam counter-culturalist who was evading the FBI by living under an alias in Watertown, bolstering her confidence further. While in Watertown, Meg met Larry, a man defined by stability and the functionality of his seemingly perfect upbringing. They began dating, and Larry introduced Meg to the world of new foods, wilderness adventures, and his happy family. Meanwhile, Patty began a career as a children’s nurse, and Larry proposed to Meg. Their parents were both thrilled, and everyone began planning Larry and Meg’s wedding.
Part 1, Chapters 5-8 Analysis
In these chapters, the motif of tigers as a metaphor for the unpredictable way that mental illness affected Kissinger’s family continues to appear in the text. During her and her siblings’ upbringing, countless signs of the tigers appeared, but nobody had the resources or knowledge to address and change it. Jean’s mental illness affected her ability to parent to the point where her children began hurting themselves or faking illness to gain her attention. Nancy would soon attempt to die by suicide for the first time, and Mary Kay had depression, which no one else knew about. Kissinger feared the disintegration of the family when Mary Kay left for college, but each family member was already isolated, illustrating The Dangers of Concealing Pain. Kissinger’s fear and isolation led to outbursts of rage, echoing Nancy’s, highlighting how concealing her pain only made it worse. In reflecting on the slow decline of her family, Kissinger notes, “There are only so many empty chambers before the one with the bullet fires” (78). She uses this metaphor of Russian Roulette, a deadly game of chance, to explain her belief that because of the level and severity of problems that the Kissingers were experiencing, something tragic was bound to occur.
Narratively, Nancy’s death comes as the fulfillment of this foreshadowing and also marks a turning point in the text. When Nancy died, the entire family dynamic shifted, and everyone was left worrying about what would go wrong next. Kissinger believes that the grief she experienced was unique to losing a loved one to suicide, as she felt relieved for Nancy’s peace but also overwhelmed by the fact that she lost her sister. After Nancy’s death, Jean began using alcohol more heavily, and Kissinger delves into how her complex feelings toward her mother became even more fraught as she needed her mother’s support but felt angry at Jean for neglecting her family.
Kissinger also highlights the fact that alongside the internal workings of the family, outside factors also influenced the family deeply. The Kissingers were shaped by the era in which they lived, including politics, environment, and social attitudes. Following the hardships and tragedies of World War II, people were expected to put on their brightest, happiest faces and be strong, but contrary to this expectation, Kissinger’s narrative shows the dangers of concealing pain. At the same time, while political conversations surrounding the need for Humanizing Mental Illness and Improving Care did happen, changes were not occurring quickly enough to help the Kissingers. Their grief remained unspoken, and they each had to deal with it on their own.
Through her losses, including the dissolution of the family unit and the loss of Nancy, Kissinger leaned into her work to cope. She discovered how to use Loss and Hardship as Vessels for Purpose and used her family experiences in journalism to begin exposing how people with mental illness are often neglected and mistreated. This is a turning point in which she begins to conquer her fears and inner demons:
I wasn’t Nancy. I was different. Yes, I was emotional, and I felt things intensely. But that didn’t mean I was destined to end up like she did. If I could take on these authority figures, challenge the status quo, arm wrestle a radio announcer, and stand up to a misogynistic army officer, I could get past a ‘case of the blues’ (128).
Kissinger came into a new sense of her strength, and this was also bolstered when she met Larry, who offered her a sense of stability she had never known before.
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