how to write with vulnerability

MEG KISSINGER KNOWS HOW to write with vulnerability. After years of work as an award-winning reporter, she has brought her eye to a memoir of family mental illness. Listen in and read along as we talk about how to write with vulnerability, and so much more.

Marion: Today, my guest is Meg Kissinger, who spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she’s won two George Polk awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards to name just a few. She teaches investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a visiting professor at DePaul University, her alma mater. Her stories on the abysmal living conditions for people with mental illness inspired changes to Wisconsin law and led to the creation of hundreds of new housing units. Now she has brought the knowledge, insights, determination, and humility of a reporter’s eye to the vulnerability needed to get to the heart of her own origin story. And she’s published this new book called While You Were Out: The Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. I hope you can tell that I am a super fan. This is such an honor for me. Welcome, Meg.

Meg: Marion, thank you. The honor is mine. Absolutely. If you’re a super fan, I’m a super, super fan.

Marion: Well, we’re going to get along just great.

Meg: Right.

Marion: So as I said, the title of your book is While You Were Out: The Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, and it speaks volumes of the territory covered in this remarkable book. But I want to zero in on the phrase in an era of silence because I think we can most easily set up the book with that in mind as well as understand what you’re packing, not only from your family’s history of mental illness, but what I would call the repressive atmosphere of your coming of age in regard to the prohibitions on telling the truth. So the backstory is eight kids, two loving parents, everything looked good. Behind closed doors, there’s a heavily medicated mother, hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence in children, with bipolar disorder, depression, two of whom take their own lives. So silence is as big a character in this as any of you. So explain please, the use of silence here in the title and to give the listeners some context about how you chose to stage this story.

Meg: The era that I grew up in and you grew up in was all about the messaging of happy family life. It’s what we saw on TV, “Leave It to Beaver.” All of our cultural touchstones were of jolly good fun, post World War II families coming roaring along, especially when you’re Irish Catholic. And we had indeed a lot of fun. So I don’t want to give the impression that this was a slog from the time I came home from the hospital until the time I left for college because I had a lot, a lot of fun and there was a lot of warmth and a lot of love and a lot of joy in our family.

But the fact of the matter was there was also a lot of illness and it was an illness that we didn’t have the language for. So the silence comes from a lot of different places. It comes from the repression of the era. It also comes from the ignorance of how to talk about this. So I didn’t want it to sound like a screed or a whining jag. I was very mindful to write this in a way that shows people trying to do their best, but they’re up against formidable odds with the inability to know how to process what was going on all around us.

Marion: Yeah, and you mentioned faith there in your answer, and I think that’s an important thing to layer in here because you said it, the Irish Catholic faith, and your faith plays a huge role in this story. And the Irish Catholic family is brought up to believe that suicide is a sin and that compounds shame. And then there is the fact that the gift of your faith, which teaches us the story of Good Samaritan and to treat others as we would like ourselves to be treated, really informs you. So talk to me a bit about living with that competing narrative in your head as you start to plan this story that sin, shame, and the need to treat others as we’d like ourselves to be treated. This has really got to be a complex assignment as you sat down to write.

Meg: It was very confusing growing up and being taught that suffering is good, that a lot of our actions were sinful. It was a sin of course, to disobey your parents. It was a sin to act out in class. The neighborhood that I grew up in was predominantly Irish Catholic and the school that I attended was busting at the seams. So you had 50 kids lined up in a classroom and one tired old nun at the front of the classroom. And so a lot of mayhem ensued.

At the same time, they were really trying to teach us very important lessons, to be caring of one another, to be good citizens, to give back to the world, to be people for others. So those were messages that I really glommed onto over the years. And the same was true at home. My mom and dad were indeed very giving people. My mom was the Brownie leader and my dad was on the school board and he coached the football team and they were very involved. But there was always that kind of threatening, I don’t know if you could really call it a cloud, but it was a tension that was all around us always about not wanting to do the wrong thing or act out in such a way that would have terrible consequences. So we were nervous a lot. It was hard to control big groups of children either in the classroom or at home.

Marion: Yeah, nervous a lot. That gives us such a good place to think about the … It sort of trembles right there on the page. I felt that. And you’ve got secrets and lies being a huge part of this with the silence. But telling the truth is a job of a reporter and you were not yet a reporter when your father attempts to cover up the death of your sister Nancy and instructs everyone in the family to call it an accident. I mean, you were no longer a child, you were a young woman. And the insights you provide of your consciousness and how you’re building it on the topic of lies and the clever damage lies do is another major character in this book. It’s fascinating. I got to watch you build yourself into a reporter.

So along with the plot and advocacy for better mental health illness services in this country and the story of silence, this book documents building your own awareness. So writers always ask if they should sit down and make a list of themes they intend to take on, or if they discover that list along the way to writing, what would you say, having now tackled a book with an extraordinary number of themes?

Meg: Yeah. Well, Marion, I followed your excellent advice and I did sit down, well, I did. Your memoir project was integral to me being able to write this book.

Marion: Oh, thank you.

Meg: Yeah, no, I read it many times and referred to it quite often as I was writing this. And one of the very first things that I did was to sit down with my legal pad and sketch out 75 scenes from my life. I had this huge challenge because it wasn’t a memoir just about me. This was really a memoir about a family. And my editor kindly reminded me of that from time to time when I needed it. I would sometimes go into a little bit too much detail about my own life and she would just gently say, “This is a story about your family and what a family goes through when there’s so much mental illness from within.” But anyway, I did, I wrote all these scenes, me falling off the pier as a tiny little kid in northern Wisconsin, all of our shenanigans at the beach when we were combing the shores for our brother Billy. Just one scene after another, me kind of trudging along in upstate New York after I moved there as a young reporter.

Anyway, a scene that I didn’t write down but just came to me as I was putting this together was actually one of my favorite scenes. And that was when I was in third grade and I cut my eye and my mother comes to pick me up to take me to the eye doctor, and I’m so pleased that she’s by herself. There’s no babies, there’s not a dog in the car. It’s just my mom and me, and how delighted I was and how desperate I was for an audience just with her. So that when the doctor gave me the all clear sign and said, “No need to come back, the eye looks great.” The first thing I did when I got home was to sneak into the bathroom to try to cut my eye again because I wanted to be with my mother that desperately.

Marion: What an extraordinary story.

Meg: Yeah.

Marion: And what a complex series of decisions of what to leave in and what to take out. I want to get into the idea, and I think maybe you more than anyone I’ve ever interviewed, have taken on the largest layer cake of ideas and put them in memoir form. And you’ve just touched on leaving some stories out, but you didn’t leave a single theme out that I thought needed to be included. But you’ve written for the Columbia Journalism Review on the need for us to write more about suicide. You’ve written multiple series for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on patients and the whole systems in peril. So why memoir? You’re imminently qualified to write a book railing against the mental health system and pointing out where we can and should have hope, both of which this book does. But you chose memoir. So what did memoir allow here that another nonfiction format would not have allowed you as a writer?

Meg: I knew from all the years as a reporter that people who live with serious chronic mental illness can be so much more than the ways that we think of them. So we often assign either adjectives like pathetic or victim or menacing. Most of the adjectives that we assign to people living with chronic mental illness aren’t very complimentary. But I knew them to be in a fuller way, to be hilarious and thoughtful and engaging. And I also knew that my brothers and sisters are quite charming people and I knew they could help me upend the narrative. Again, what many people assign to people with chronic mental illness. And Marion, you know as well as anybody, probably better than anybody, that what we’re in the business for in journalism is irony. We’re looking for ways to turn conventional wisdom on its head. And so that’s what I knew that my brothers and sisters could deliver that for me.

So yes, all those years, I spent 30 years writing about the failures of the mental health system in America, where I thought I could do it most impactfully or really open people’s hearts was to tell the story that I knew the best and that is the story of my family. So for so many years I turned to strangers to ask them to describe what it was like to live with this burden of severe mental illness because I was too afraid to ask the people that I loved the most. So I relied on those strangers. And when I finally came to decide, the most urgent story is the one in my own lap, and that’s when I knew I had to turn the notebook around and use all the tools that I learned as a journalist to go back to my family because they are really lively, loving, entertaining, and interesting people.

Marion: They are funny.

Meg: They’re funny.

Marion: They’re very funny. Speaking of your family, I’ve read that you would not have written this book without their approval. Let’s talk about this. Really important. Let’s start with the most basic of questions. When more than one person is involved in a tale, whose story is it and how do you make that determination? And then I’m going to really ask you to stage for us that getting permission thing, but whose story is it? I get this question every day from the writers that I work with.

Meg: I want to say it’s my story, but because I took your fine class, I know that it’s really the reader’s story. I mean, you have to always be mindful of what the reader needs. I thought about this so much as I was writing this book. So I knew what I didn’t want. What I didn’t want was a memoir by committee. I didn’t want this thing to be full of bromides and kind of just cheesy, false, treacly scenes. It had to be the real deal. So it had to be bearing witness to what it’s like for a family to live through severe mental illness. And so I approached my brothers and sisters because first of all, we’ve been through a lot. So to lose a brother and a sister to suicide and then all the trauma associated with our parents’ illnesses, I just didn’t need to add to that. But I also knew we had a hell of a story to tell, and I also knew that my brothers and sisters are generous people and they want to help people in a way that they can. So that’s what I did.

I approached them and said, “What do you think? I want to write this book, but I’m going to be the one writing it. I’m going to tell this the way that I see it.” And that’s very flawed. Memory’s very fuzzy. I think because of all the years as a reporter, I was very concerned and very careful to document as much stuff as I could. So report what I know and don’t report what I don’t know. But again, I just didn’t want this to be a memoir by committee and to be flabby. So once I got all of their approval, which didn’t take any doing really, we were off to the races and what I told them was I’m going to collect everything, I’m going to put it in a Google Doc, so I’m going to get the police records from the days that Nancy and Danny died. I’m going to get the medical files as best as I can collect them. I’m going to look through my mother’s diaries. I’m going to read Homer, my dad’s little chicken scratches in his AA book.

I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was pretty scary actually. But that was all family archival material. And I said, “You can access it if you want, but you don’t have to. But what I am going to ask you to do is before I hit the send button to my editor, I want you to read this. And if there’s anything in there that you can’t live with, let’s talk about it.” So they did. There was nothing. Nobody took anything out. I think in a way I was hardest on myself. I mean, I know myself the best. So some of the most embarrassing scenes involved me.

Marion: Yeah, that’s such a beautiful answer. Some of the most embarrassing scenes involved you. Yes. And I’ve read that you credit your family history for your award-winning reporting on the American mental health system, how it fails people, how it varies and more. And many people listening have family of origin stories that really do give them enough authority to write from there, if they just believed in that connection, in that authority, in that area of expertise. Can you just help me here motivate a couple of those, maybe some number of those writers out there listening that authority is sometimes an area of expertise is sometimes living in a family and keeping your eyes open.

Meg: And it kind of goes against the grain of what we were trained as reporters. Back in the day, you were not supposed to write about yourself. You weren’t supposed to put yourself into the story. You were supposed to go to the experts. It’s only been in recent years that journalists have come to see that they are authorities on some things. They studied it more than most, and especially as an investigative reporter, I learned to really drill down and learn that system inside and out. A lot of that was very boring, tedious, hard lifting work, going through lots of county board minutes and looking at budgets and knowing policies in and out. But once you do that, then yeah, you can speak with authority.

And so for listeners who are writing memoir and have mental illness in their family, I mean Marion, you say this all the time in your classes and in your book, you are the expert on you. You do have that ability to say what happened to you and describe it in the clearest and most compelling way. But I was also very mindful when I was writing this not to kind of devolve into a pity party or whining or something that just sounds so self-absorbed. I mean, you’ve read plenty of memoirs that fall into that trap. I have too. And the reader feels kind of played and you don’t want that.

Marion: Yes.

Meg: You want them to get value. What’s in it for the reader? What can the reader learn from what you went through? Your algorithm? What did I learn? What was my argument and what was my message? So I kept that in mind throughout.

Marion: You make a very interesting decision here amid so much that happens in this tale, suicides, your mother’s illness, the manic father, and then you get cancer. This might be something that some writers might leave out, but you state that in the world of cancer, you felt an added urgency to get done those things you needed to get done. And I completely understood the motivation for the story in this book, but let’s talk about that decision because I get this question all the time. “Well, but then I got cancer,” as one person said to me. “And then the dog died.” Life keeps happening, and let’s talk about the decision to put in the cancer as well as the urgency you felt in writing about it.

Meg: Well, I was really mad when I got cancer. I was on the roll of my life.

Marion: I bet.

Meg: I was killing it journalistically. This was right in the era when I was writing about the horrible housing conditions. There was a front page story almost every day, and we were really moving the needle, which is very hard to do, to persuade public opinion, to get stuff done, to help people with mental illness. People with mental illness are so lacking in political clout. But I was lucky enough to work at a newspaper where the editor fervently believed that we were on a mission and he gave me that bully pulpit. So when I was diagnosed with cancer, my prevailing emotion was anger because it was taking me away from my crusade to write these stories that were going to help people live a better life.

And so it was only months later as I was into my chemotherapy and then eventually radiation that I started to think, “Well damn, I might not get better from this.” And that was scary, but I was most struck by how well I was treated. So when I was diagnosed, they rolled out the red carpet and I got a little hat to cover my bald head to get through the cold Wisconsin winter. They gave me a little cloth bag. I had breast cancer. They gave me a little cloth bag to keep my materials, which I called my tit kit.

Marion: There’s that sense of humor.

Meg: Yeah. And then they said, if you need a ride to chemo or if you need help getting your medication, whatever, here’s somebody called a journey coordinator. And I thought like, “Well, that’s really nice of you, but I don’t need a journey coordinator. I happen to have this great husband and these two cute kids.” And anyway, but people who do need journey coordinators are people who are living with serious chronic mental illness. So the dichotomy of that struck me and I thought, “Well, that’s a pretty good thing to add in the book to show just how differently people with one kind of illness are treated up against people with an illness that my brother and sister had that actually killed them that we don’t speak about or we don’t give that kind of treatment to.”

Marion: I think that was brilliant. I think the juxtaposition is it just really makes that point. And I want to offer because people need to know that this book is only out a few months and it’s already a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Los Angeles Times September Book Pick, an Indie Next Book Selection and Amazon Editor’s Choice, a Goodreads Choice and so much more. You are just so right to do this exactly the way you did this. And so I ask this anytime I have on a memoir writer, what are we asking of a memoir writer when we ask them to go back and report on their own trauma? Are we asking them to re-inhabit it? Are we asking them to reimagine it, reanimate it, relive it? Or are we asking them to stand coolly over here and report on it with some perspective?

Meg: Well, not the last one. Not coolly report. Actually maybe a measure of that. But what I think you’re asking us to do is to open our hearts and open our souls to sit with that. Yeah, I guess to reanimate, to go back and figure it out. So Marion, again, you have said this in the book and also in the class that I took, that it’s not just therapy for you. Again, the reader has to get something out of this. So I needed to go back and figure out what did I learn from all of this, which I could have done just sitting in a therapist’s office, I suppose, if I’d had the courage to actually access therapy before I turned the tender age of 64.

But writing, going back and plowing through all those old scenes of your life, you can’t help but learn from them. Of course, you’re filtering it through the eyes of a older person now. I’m looking back on things as a 60 something year old talking about my first grade nun, so I’m going to have a different opinion of her now than I did back in the day. But what we need from people writing a memoir is to bear witness, to tell it as best as you can. So you do have to go back and put yourself in that mindset, and then you do have to take a step back and realize that you’re filtering it again through the scrim of somebody who’s had the life experience to be able to reflect on that.

Marion: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. And I’d like to just get two adjoining couches and just kind of lie down and talk about that all day long. But I know you’ve got stuff to do. So I’m going to start to wrap this up by asking you this. People ask me all the time if they must have everything neatly tied up in a bow, all the questions answered, all the tension resolved, everybody happy before they write, and certainly by the end of the book. And I think immediately about how you end this book with a question unanswered by your father. And without giving all the story away because I want every single person listening to buy this book. I wonder if you’d comment on getting comfortable with ending your book as you did.

Meg: That scene was originally at the end of the second chapter, and my son said, “It needs its own space, that that is really central to the theme of the whole book.” Should this family have come about in the first place, should we even have been here? And I felt it was very important not to tie everything up neatly with a big shiny bow, to leave the reader twisting a bit because I’m still twisting about it. And I think that’s truer to the way life is, especially life when you have a lot of mental illness in the family. There are so many questions that don’t get answered, so much doesn’t make sense. It’s left for us to wrestle with. And that’s the beauty of it. That’s what makes life interesting is to consider what could have happened, what should have happened.

I base the whole book on this Mary Oliver poem, and I’m not a big poetry reader, I’m embarrassed to tell you that, but I’m a newspaper reporter, damn it. I’m just the facts ma’am. But this poem, a friend of mine called my attention to this beautiful poem by Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” and the last stanza of which just spoke to me so much about, “To live in this world, you must do three things. Love what is mortal, hold it against your bones, knowing your whole life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” And that’s what writing this book did. It helped me to let go. And I hope it’ll help readers to let go and to just know that we can’t control everything. And that’s okay.

Marion: Yeah, it is. Well, that’s the perfect place to end and thank you, Meg. Thank you for answering my questions. Thank you for writing this book. Thank you for the reporting you’ve brought to one of the most important problems of our time. And thank you for showing up on the page. It is an honor to read your work and an honor to speak to you. Thank you so much.

Meg: Marion, thank you.

Marion: The writer is Meg Kissinger, see more on her at Meg Kissinger dot com. Her new book is While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. Just out from Celadon Books, get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve be listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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