The news is the only National News site focusedfo on Mental Health reporting. The only reporters in thesq country supporting the Mental Health. The milwaukee journal the workings and what we called the Mental Health system in this country. Also those issues on a more personal level we will talk about today, the memoir while you are out tells the story of growing up in the chicago suburbs, Seven Brothers and sisters turning manic father, brilliance mother and a messy pile of secrets. Welcome, it is great to be with you talking about this amazing work. Thanks, rob. I cant inc. Of anybody i would rather talk to about it. It my privilege. I have to say what i love about the book is bring the storytelling that me be part of the dna and suffering and institutional failure and wants to expose it so what prompted you to write this book . Your familys story and how you got to your work. As the board of eight kids and you pointed out, a boisterous plan, i was always the nosy one, monkey in the middle curious about what was going on in my family and we did not talk about so that made me even more curious and when tragedies befall us and they did, curiosity all the more and i was inclined then to write stories how people with Mental Illness suffer in this country and provided me with a bicyclist for a long time and i was fortunate to work at the journal which is a regional newspaper, the editors squarely dedicated to write about people less fortunate and gave me support in terms of the budget to go places and time to write these stories and great depth so i was grateful but realized years and years into this the most intense story was the one i never examined thoroughly and that was the story of my own family. If i was going to do that, i would need to in the same way i would approach an investigative story i would write for the newspaper whichs was scary undertaking that meant i had to file freedom of information act request, my brother and Sisters Police records. I got there medical files, it was a mystery waiting to be solved. A personal mystery and i was more than nervous doing it. That comes through the dating, an incredible piece of investigative work. There is a lot of pain in the story of your own family but also humor. A ferocious drive by you and your siblings to protect each other and a sense of your family and delicious storytelling would be for you to read a couple of passages from the first chapter of your book. Would you do that for us . Ik shall, thank you so much. This is the beginning of the book and then i will get down to the last section so it starts out saying we were little, mr. Patty and i like to pretend they worked in the space between waiting to rip us to shreds. They started with razorsharp things, licking chops. The finger down to low, they chopped off thing to the bone. We bounced one but the next shrieking as we the end. Pipe down, you to or ill come in theredy and beat you to a bld he pulled my mother would yell her bedroom down the hall. The invisible tiger scared us. Our mother did not. Watch this, i whispered that i leaned over the side of the bed and slowly little fingers down. She poked her head over the side of her bed to the big black hole. Nervouslyng wheezing as she waid for the tiger to take debate. We know she didnt have the energy to beat us, much less into any bloody pulp. My mother, an erstwhile debutante with the genius iq,ub now spent her days rubbing ointment on babies blistered bottoms, wiping snot off our faces, plastering our colic with respect and tripping war medicine into our losing, infected ear canals. She stuffed our lunch bags withc Peanut Butter and potato chip sandwiches as she helped us f conjugate latin verbs. Folded laundry while she quizzed us on multiple occasion tables and typed or term papers between bouncing baby on her lap and ironing our uniform blouses. My mother was my mother was im sorry, 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, 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 us intense, like a little deer teetering through theab forest, vulnerable and unprotected. Rs we fretted the tigers could come bounding toward us at any second. Or maybe they would creep up on us slowly slinking through the glades as tigers often do. We wanted to be good. We tried our best to be brave. Once we get ourselves to Fall Asleep Holding Hands over the tiger pit, but we never stop worrying about the beast that we imagined swirled between our beds. We knew we were no match for them and we dreaded the day that 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 end of the chapter . Host sure, if you feel, if youre up for it that would be great. Sure, great drama they were not real target tigers. Guest but a minister since ferocious with the power just as 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 to 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. Pound them into submission once and for all. If not, they would surely come back and get us, too. Host wow. T what a great way to start a book. Guest thank you. Host looking back on lifeeh in the kissinger household, what were the signs even in retrospect that things were not all good with your mom and dadod 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 . S guest yeah, i think ihi 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 drifte off, and its hard to kind of get to her. She was quite busy. As i 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 lull 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, 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 kind of find comfort with each other. Where 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 ran 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 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 looked to each other. Host yeah. As you had to i guess. You wrote a lot about secrets in your family, some which you didnt really 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. D tell us what you learned about him and other pilots in training. Guest yeah, rob, this blew me away. So this was my fathers older brother jack, and we imagined or think we 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 assumed 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 said a prayer for him every night when we would say grace at dinner. We would often include a little 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 soil of course in training, and that it was they were so desperate for piloo in the early goings, this wasd 1943, so the beginning of the american involvement in the warm and they 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 its 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 away 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 aroundoo the neighborhood that people would make the assumption that it was her baby. But anyway, my uncle also named john was born with down syndrome but my grandparents were never really accepting of that andey they really resisted the opportunity to get him into the care that he really needed. And so that was i think that was a great source of great sorrowgr and frustration for my mom. So they came into the marriage, both of them, with these secrets and the sadness from within, and they had never really resolved those traumas when they began their own baby production. So it was on shaky ground that this family 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 tried to fake his way into the air force. He had bad 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 into a pilot, into the career as a pilot that he wanted. Guest right. We wouldnt be having this conversation probably. Host thats right. So your moms hospitalization later, well actually i just gave away the punchline, i was going to say there was a time, there was a day that you came downstairs and your mother wasyo nowhere to be seen and your father loaded you 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 he and another guy started this magazine, its 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 the early 1960s, 61, 62, and tranquilizers were coming onto the market place fast and furious. Milltown, the early versions ofi 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 out 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 tumult there and we moved back in a hurry, and my dad bought this 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 she was just gone. E anyway, we were not told where she was. We had 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 didnt know 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 howevey 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 mourning 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 decline of your sister nancy into severt depression and eventually to her death by suicide. Some years later your brother danny also took 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 didnt 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 kind of 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. 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 could 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 path. H. And when she got sicker and sicker i was a teenager and i was trusted with 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. But 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, the 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 tell you this, that the night that she died my dad called us all 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 buy that . Th everybody had known, everybody in our parish, everybody in our block, all of our friends knew that nancy had attempted suicide many times. They werent going to buy any kind of cockamamie explanation that it was an accident. My dad wasnt trying to be mean he was worried. He was worried that she would not be afforded a funeral, that the 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 funeral or be buried on catholic grounds. My dad, one of my dads best friends had his son who died the year before of suicide, and my dad went to that funeral and came home heartbroken. Th their parish priest knew that the boy had died by suicide and didnt allow his body into the church. Bo so they had a Memorial Service and the boys casket was, you know, in a hearse idling down the block. Anyway, that was the atmosphere that nancy died, and that was the motivation for my dad telling us not to reveal that she had died by suicide. But what that did to me was to make me more ashamed and to suggest that nancys death was something that we should be ashamed of, and that her Mental Illness was a choice. And i think that set the stage, i know it set the stage for us to try and push that down. She died on a friday night. Her funeral was on monday morning. On tuesday i went back to mysd summer job. I was going into my senior year of college. We all just went on about our business and really we never sat down as a family to discuss it. That seems insane to me now, but thats how it was for us. Host yeah. Theres a little passage in the book where you write about sort of the way that your family sort of dealt with some of this and im just going to read that quickly. Our family language of wisecracks and one lighters have been our way of keeping us all from panicking, to distract usin from the truth that we were scared out of our minds. We used humor as a kind of band aid to keep the fear and anger from infecting us. But wounds also need fresh air and s