Watch them all online any time booktv. Org. You can also find us on twitter, facebook and youtube at booktv. A few years ago some colleagues and i started mindsite news as Early National new site focus solely on Mental Health reporting. We did so to fill a void, but long before we launched, my guest today, meg kissinger, was plowing background is one of the only reporters in the country working squarely on the Mental Health beat. For 35 years at the milwaukee journal sentinel, she covered the workings and mostly the failings of what we euphemistically call for Mental Health system in this country. But meg also knew about those issues on a much more personal level as wewh will talk about. Her memoir while you were out tells the story of growing up in the chicago suburbs with Seven Brothers and sisters,ha a charmg but manic father, a brilliant but melancholic and oftente abst mother, and a messy pile of secrets. Welcome, meg. Its a great to be with you and talking about this amazing work. Guest thanks, rob. I cant think of anybody i would rather be talking to about it than with you. So its my privilege. Host thanks so much. I had to say that what i love about this book is that you bring the kenai of reporter, the storytelling chops and with that may be part of the kissinger dna, in the past and and ofe who is look squarely at human suffering and institutional failure and wants to expose it. So lets start here. What prompted you to write this book, to dig through an area families story and how to the flowa from your work as a mentl Health Reporter . Guest yeah, its always been in me. As the fourth of eight kids and as you wisely point out, a boisterous clan, we were, i is always the nosy one, the monkey in the middle, so curious about what was going on in my family, and we did not talk about it. So that only made me even more curious. When tragedies befell us, and they did in spades, you know, that piqued my curiosity all the more. I was naturally inclined and write stories about how people with Mental Illness suffer in this country and are not well tended. And that provided me with a pretty likely career for quite a long time. I was very fortunate to work at the milwaukee journal sentinel, which is a regional newspaper with editors who are squarely dedicated to writing about people less fortunate, and gave me all kinds of support in terms of the budget to go places and the time to write these stories in great depth. I was very grateful for that. But i realized years and years into o this that kind of the mot intense story was the one i never really examined r thoroughly, and that was the start of my own family. And if i was going to do that i would need told do that in the same way that i would approach an investigative story that i would write for the newspaper, which was a scary undertaking. It meant i had to file a freedom information act request for my brothers, my brothers andco Sisters Police records. I got through medical files. It was a mystery waiting to be solved, but it was a very i was morestery and than a little nervous about doing it. Host yeah. Well, that comes through, the digging, is just an incredible, it is an incredible piece of investigative work in this book. Theres a lot of pain in the story of your own family but also a lot of humor as we just referred to, and kind of a ferocious drive by you and your siblings to help and protect each other. Maybe the best way to give a sense of your family and your delicious storytelling would be for you to read a couple of passages from that first chapter of your book. Could you do that for us . Guest sure, rob, i shall. Thank you so much. So this is the very beginning of the book and then im going to skip down to the last section of the same first chapter. So start out by saying when we were little my sister patty and i like to pretend that ferocious tigers looked in the space between our twin beds just waiting to rip us to shreds. They stock to set night with a razorsharp fangs, growling and stored in licking their chops. Dip a toe or finger down to low and snap, they were chopped off clean to the bone. We bounced from one bed to the next shrieking as we flew through the air. I down, youd two or i will come into it and beat you towo a bloy pulp, my mother would yell from her bedroom down the hall. The invisible tiger scared us. Our mother did not. Watch this, i whispered to patty, as a leaned over the side of my bed and slowly wiggled my fingers down into the pit. She would poker curly little head over the side of her bed and stared into the big black hole, nervously wheezing as she waited for one of the tigers to take the bait. I would squeeze my eyes shut imagining the hungry beasts skulking towards us, the smell of their musky for filling my nostrils. And feel the thumping of my heart in the middle of my throat. I said, pipe down. My mother would call out, weaker this time. When you shouldnt have energy to beat us much less into any bloody pulp. My mother, an erstwhile debutante with the genius iq, now spent her days rubbing ointment on babies blistered bottoms, wiping start off our faces, plastering our colic with respect and tripping war medicine into our losing, infected ear canals. She stepped our lunch bags with Peanut Butter and potato chip sandwiches as she helped us conjugate latin verbs. Folded laundry while she quizzed as a multiple occasion tables and typed or term papers between bouncing baby on her lap and ironing our uniform blouses. My weather was my mother was im sorry to her own mother was dead and she had no sisters, so it felt to my mother to raise her eight children more or less by herself while my father was out of town most of the week on business. My father, bill kissinger, we called him homer, sold advertising space to companies that manufacture tranquilizers and other socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals to harried mothers of the baby boom. Business was brisk, especially in our north shore chicago neighborhood where women come a great number of the Irish Catholics like my mother, were expected to fill the pews with as many children they could bear, whether they had the stamina or not. My fathers side mood changes and our mothers melancholia made as intense, like a little dear teetering through the forest, vulnerable and unprotected. We fretted the tigers could come bounding toward us at any second. Or maybe it would creep up on us slowly slinking through the glades as tigers often do. We wanted to be good. We tried her best to be brave. Once we get ourselves to Fall Asleep Holding Hands over the tiger pit, but we never stop worrying aboutee the beast thate imagined swirled between our beds. We knew we were no match for them and wee dreaded the day tt they would rip us apart. It seemed like only a matter of time. Indeed, one day the tigers did. Do you want me to finish that little and of the chapter . Host sure, if you feel, if youre up for that would be great tragedy sure, great drama they were not real target tigers. Guest but a minister since ferocious with the powerad justs deadly. They scratched and clawed until the made mincemeat of us all. Some and her family were devoured from head to toe your never to be seen again. I sister ripped to shreds and swallowed whole. Then years later a brother snatched before our very eyes. We could see it happening. We just couldnt do anything to save him. Or maybe we were too scared to try. Those of us who were left tried toe hide, but the beasts were relentless. Just when we thought that we were free, one would spring towards us, and then another, and another. Eventually we were all mauled and mangled. No one escaped unscathed. In time, we learned that if we were to survive we couldnt you shiver under our covers the way patty and i used to. We would each have to figure out a way to fight back, wrestle those to the ground. Called them into submission oncl and for all. If not, they would surely come back and get us, too. Host wow. What a great way to start a book. Guest thank you. Host looking back on life in the kissinger household, what were the signs even in retrospectot that things were nt all good with your mom and dad and later with some of your siblings . And what strategies did you and your siblings devise to deal with some of the chaos and confusion that seems to have reigned . Guest yeah, i think i first picked up on it as a fiveyearold. My mom who was really loving, wonderful person but she could be very spacey. She would often kind of drift off, and its hard to kind of get to her. She wastl quite busy. As a just outline she had eight kids in 12 years, and it has been that was gone a lot. But how we would cope with that, we would lean on each other i think. We would look to each other for comfort. My sister patty and i, roommates that we were, we would loll ourselves to sleep. My mom didnt have the bandwidth to attend to us too much. She did read to us each night which i loved, but we didnt have, there wasnt come we didnt have the full opportunity to get rocked to sleep every night. So we kind of did that for each other. And then as we got older, and things were more apparent that there was trouble within, we, just again, we tried to can find comfort with each other. Where i i grew up was really an enclave, a very big family, being catholic and in the neighborhood that we grew up in was one of some wealth. So we had some privilege, and there were just big old families, and if you rent out of a brother and sister there were plenty of families down the block with lots of spare brothers and sisters. So we all kind of, these families kind of the melded together and im sure, i know now as an adult, i know that a lot of those families were also struggling with alcohol abuse or Mental Illness. So we look to each other. Host yeah. As you had to i guess. He wrote a lot about secrets in your family, some which you didnt will figure out until decades later as you were writing the book. For example, you had an uncle and all you know about him, or thought you knew, was that he was a pilot who died during world war ii. Tell us what you learned about him and of the pilots in training. Guest yeah, rob, this blew me away. So this was my fathers older brother jack, and we imagined or think west just assumed that he was killed. We knew he died during world war ii and that he was a pilot, so i think we connected the dots and assume that he was killed someplace in germany or japan, you know, valiantly. But what, and again my parents, my dad never talked about it and neither did his parents, my grandma and grandpa didnt, they lived with us off and on for some time when we were young, and all we knew about uncle jack was that we set a prayer for him every night when we would say grace at dinner. T we would often includable shout out to uncle jack. Anyway, what i came to learn by getting his army records was that he was killed in texas on american soilof of course in training, and that it was they were so desperate for pilot in the early goings come this was 1943, so the beginning of the american involvement in the war, and it would take these young guys and just put them up in these planes with almost no training. And that was the case of my uncle who was scrambling to finish his Flight Training and went up on a saturday night unsupervised, and i came to learn that over 15,000 young, im assuming men, although probably exclusively men in those days, 15,000 died in training. Thats just staggering to me, and itsat a story that is not very widely known or told. So that was one secret. Another was on my moms side of the family, my moms youngest brother was born when she was aware at her freshman year of college. She was embarrassed that her mother was having a baby while she was afraid that people would think it was her baby because she was 18, and if she was strolling a little baby around the neighborhood that people would make the assumption that it was her baby. But anyway, my uncle also named john who was born with down syndrome but my grandparents were never really accepting of that and they really resisted the opportunity to give him into the care that he really needed. And so that was i think that was a great source of great sorrow and frustration for my mom. So they came into the marriage, both of them, with these secrets from within, and they had neverre really resolved those w traumas when they began their own baby production. So it was on shaky ground that the sound was even launched. Host yeah, i had to chile the piece about the pilots in training struck a chord with me because my own father try to fake his way into the air force. He had that vision and he tried, he tried, he volunteered, he tried to volunteer and he tried to fake his way through the vision test, but failed to do so and ended up in the army. And it just, it makes me realize that im glad, im glad he didnt make his way into the come into a pilot, into the career as a pilot that he wanted. Guest right. We wouldnt be having thisnd conversation probably. Host thats right. So your moms hospitalization later, well actually i just gave with the punchline, i was going to say there was a time, those e was a day that you came downstairs and your mother was nowhere to be seen and your father large into the car and drove you off somewhere. Tell us about that. Guest yeah. So this, i just moved back from connecticut. My dad had started a magazine come he and another guy started this magazine, is still around called physicians management, and it was intended to be kind of a business magazine for physicians and tips on how to manage their practice. But really the beauty of it was that it was chock full of advertisements, and especially, this is an early 1960s, 61, 62, and tranquilizers were coming onto the market place fast and furious. Milltown, the early versions of prozac, or i should say sedatives of anyway, the socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals which meant that you got prescriptions for them, and america was going gang busters with pharmaceutical sales. So we moved down to connecticut so that my dad could manage the business in new york city, and lived in an idyllic town of new canaan. But it went bad for my father quickly and he began kind of having doubts about his business partner, and the tension between the two became so much that he quit. He ended up suing his business partner. So there was some old there and we moved back in a hurry, and my dad bought thisot house that my mother had not even seen and it was not really to her liking. Anyway, she was quite frazzled and she just had her seventh the baby, and i was going into first grade and i came down the stairs one morning and shehe was just gone. Anyway, we were not told where she was. We hadad no idea. I thought maybe she had another baby. But the other, the current baby was only about five months, so i just didnt know, you know, i did note details at that stage of a gain. Anyway, we were hauled off, my sister patty and i come to my uncles house in chicago. It was an adventure but it was a bit great invention because we know where were going to why. We were there for i dont really think were even there very long, rob, when youre five years old, three days or however long it was, seemed like a long time, especially when you dont know why you were there. I later came to learn my mother was just being hospitalized for depression, and she would go back into the hospital a few months later and just kind of almost like cinematically it was the very week that president kennedy was assassinated. So while america is morning this horrible tragedy, i am a little first grader worrying again about where my mother is. So it was a pretty intense time in my life, and the life of america. Host yeah. And that hospitalization of your mother would be followed by others, and later by the decle of your sister nancy into severe depression and eventually to her death by suicide. Some years later your brother danny also take his own life. So how did your family navigate and talk about these issues, about the Mental Health problems that were smacking you in the face . Guest yeah. Well, the short answer is we didnt. So at first, i mean, ultimately it could not have been avoided. But i will tell you about the night that my sister nancy died. So nancy was very troubled, and again in that era, so now were talking about the mid1970s. We didnt have, they did refer to people as bipolar. I think now they would, that would probably be what she would be called, but she had severe mood swings. She was very impetuous. She got psychotic. She had hallucinations and delusions. Ive seen some medical records where it refers to her as having schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. I can think more she was, im not a professional by any stretch but knowing what i do now know having spent so many years, you know, writing about the Mental Health system, my hunch is that she was really bipolar but had psychotic features. Es nonetheless, she was quite ill and it was very disruptive. She could be violent. She could be very menacing. She could be very she was hilarious and she was brilliant, but should be a tough one to live with. So i steered clear of her. I was four years younger than she, but we, i just knew to stay out of her bath. And when she got sicker and sicker out of her path. I was a teenager and i was trusted with i her. I was angry with her for taking up all the oxygen in the room and making my mom and dad so worried. My dad was a very emotional guy and he would cry. He would be so worried about her and so sad. And my mom was not one to show great emotion. I think maybe that went hand in glove with her depression or more of a flat affect. What i knew she very worried about her. So nancy, nancy had many, many suicide attempts and some more public than others. When she finally did die, and i go into kind of the mystery that surrounded the actual, a day that she did finally died, and what i learned in writing this book, which really floored me, and i wont spoil it. Im going to add that as a little twist. But i will play this, that the night that she died my dad called us allan into the living room and he instructed us, you know, in no Uncertain Terms he said, if anybody asks, this was an accident. So that seemed kooky to me, like why would anybody in the world by that . Everybody had known, everybody in ourn parish, everybody in our block, all of our friends knew the nancy had attempted suicide many times. They work going to buy any kind of cockamamien, explanation that it was an accident. My dad wasnt trying to be mean. He was worried. He was worried that he would not be afforded ane funeral, that te Catholic Church did not look thoughtfully or kindly on people who died by suicide. They consider that a sin, a mortal sin, and you are not to be given a fu