Sunday on cspan2 or online at booktv. Org. Book tv 25 years of television for serious readers. Two years ago some colic so they started mine site news the only National News site focused solely on Mental Health reporting. We did so to fill a void but long before we launched my guest today Meg Kissinger was that ground is one of the only reporters in the country working squarely on the Mental Health beat for 35 years the walkie journeys sentinel covered the workings and failings of what we euphemistically called the Mental Health system in this country. Is meg also knew about those issues on a much more personal level as we will talk about today. Her memoir while you were out tells a story of growing up in the chicago suburbs with his Seven Brothers and sisters a charming but manic father, a brilliant but knowing an absent mother and a messy pile of secrets. Welcome it is so great to be with you in talking about this amazing work. Thanks rob i cannotth think f anybody i would rather be talking to about it that with you. It is my privilege. Thanks so much. What i love about this book is you break the kenai of a reporter, the storytelling shops that may be part of the kissinger dna and the passion of someone who looked squarely at humanl suffering and institutional failure wants to expose it. So lets start here. What prompted you to write this book . To dig through an air your family story . How did that flow from her years as a Mental Health reporter . Yes. It has always been inmate. As the fourth of eight kids and as you wisely point out a boisterous clan weas were. Th i was always the nosy when the e monkey in the middle so curious about what was going on in my family. We did not talk about it. That only made me even more curious. And when tragedies befell us and they did in spades that piqued my curiosity all the more. I was inclined to write stories about how people with Mental Illness suffered in this country and are not well attended. That provided me with the pretty lively career for quite some time i wasth very fortunate to work at the milwaukee sentinel which is ape regional paper with editors are squarely dedicated to writing about people less fortunate and gave me all kinds of support in terms of a 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 this that kind of the most intense story was the one i never really examined thoroughly thats a story of my own family. I do that the same way i approach investigative stories storythat are right for the newr which was a scary undertaking. It meant i had to file freedom of information request might Police Records i got there medical files it was a mystery that needs to be solved. As a very personal mystery i was more than a little nervous about doing it. That comes through the digging. Its an incredible piece of investigative work in this book. There is a lot of pain in the story but there is also humor. I ferocious drive by you and your siblings to help and protect each other. I think may be the best way to give ail sense of your family ad your delicious storytelling would be for you to read a couple off passages on the first chapter of your book. Could you do that for us . Quick short rob i shall thank you so much. This is the beginning of the book im going to skip down to the last section of the same first chapter. It starts out by saying that we were little mr. Patty and i like to pretend ferocious tigers lurked in the space between our twin beds just waiting to rip us to shreds. Ar they stocked us at nice with their razorsharp fangs growling and starting and licking their chops. Dip a toe or finger down to low and snap they chomp it off clean bone. We bounce from one bed to the next shrieking as we flew through the air. Pipe down u2 or i will come and there and beat you to a bloodied pulp. My mother would yell from her bedroom down the hall. The invisible tiger it scared us. Our mother did not. Watching this i whispered to patty as they leaned over the side of my bed slowly wiggled my fingers down into the pit. She would poke her curly little head over the side of her bed and stared at the big blacks hole. Nervously wheezing as she waited for one of the tigers toer take debate. I squeezed my eyes shut imagining the hungry beast skulking towards us the smell of their musky filling my nostrils the thumping of my heart in the middle of my throat. I said pipe down my mother would call out weaker this time. We knew she did not have the energy to beat us much less into a bloodied pulp. My mother and earth wild while debutante with a genius iq noun spent her days writing ointment ngon babies blistered at bottom. Bottoms. My pinks knocked off our faces fostering art with her spit and dripping warm medicine into her losing infected ear canals. She sucked our lunch bags with pita butter sandwiches have this conjugate latin verbs. Types are term papers from bouncing a baby on our lap and ironing our uniform glasses. Her own mother was. Dead and she had no sisters so it fell to my mother she raised her eight children more or less by herself. While my father was out of time most of the week on business. My father we called him homer sold advertising space at companies that manufacture tranquilizers at a socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals to harried mothers of the baby boom. Business wasnt brisk especially in her northshore chicago neighborhood where women come a great number of them Irish Catholics like my mother were expected to fill the pews with as many children as they could bear whether they had the stamina or not. Her fathers sudden mood changes and our mothers melancholia made as tense like little dear teetering through the forest. Vulnerable and unprotected we decided the tigers could come bounding toward us at any second. Our maybe they 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 dared ourselves to Fall Asleep Holding Hands over the tiger pit but we never stopped worrying about the beast we imagine swirled between our beds. We knew we were no match for them and we dreaded the day they would rip us apart. It seems like only a matter of time, indeed one day the tigers did come. Joe made to finish the end of the chapter . Sure if you are up for that would be great. We are not real tigers i think. Guest they were not real tigers of menace justice ferocious with the power just as deadly. They scratched and clawed until they made mincemeat of us all. Some and our family were devoured from head to toe. Never to be seen again. A sister ripped to shreds and swallowed whole then years later a brother snaps before our very eyes we could see it happening when just cannot do anything to save him or it may beat we were too scared to try. Both of us left tried to hide but the beasts were relentless. Just when we thought we were free one would spring toward us and then another, and a nether eventually we were all mauled anded mangled. No one escaped unscathed. In time we learned if we were to survive we cannot just shiver under our covers like patty and i used to. We would each have to figure out a way to fight back wrestle them to the ground pound them into submission once and for all. If not they would surely come back and get us too. Oh wow. What a great way to start a book. Guest thank you. Stu went looking back on life in the kissinger household what were the signs even in retrospect that things were not all good with your mom and dad and later with some of your siblings. What strategies did you devise to deal with some of the chaos and confusion that seem to have rained . Guest i think i first picked up on it as a 5yearold. My mom was really a loving wonderful person. But she could be very spacey she would often drift off and it was hard to get to her. She was quite busy as i just outlined she had eight kids in 12 years and a husband that was gone a lot. But how we would cope with that . When leaned on each other i think. We would look to each other for comfort. My sister patty and i, the roommates that we were we would lull ourselves to sleep. My mom did not have the bandwidth to attend it to us too much but she did read to arched each night which i w love. We did all 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 there was trouble within, we just again tried to kind of find comfort with each, other. Where i grew up was an enclave of very big families being catholic. And the neighborhood we grew up inin was one of some wealth waso we had some privilege. There were just big old families. But if you ran out of a brother or sister there were plenty of families down the block with was spare brothers and sisters. These families kind of melded together. I am sure, i know now as an adult a lot of families were also struggling with alcohol abuse or Mental Illness. So we look to each other. See what you had to i guess. You wrote a lot about secrets and your family some of which you did not really figure out until decades laters your writing the book. For example he had an uncle all you knew about him was he was a pilot who died during world war ii. Tell us what you learned about him another childs in training . Is blew me away. This is my fathers older brother jack. We imagine or think we just assumed he was killed we knew he died during world war ii and he was a pilot. We connected the dots and assumed he was killed someplace in germany or japan violently. Again my dad never talked about it and neither did his appearance my grandma and grandpa they lived with us off and on for some time when we were young. All we know about uncle jack is we set a prayer for him every night went we would say grace at hodinner we would always includa shout out to uncle jack. Anyway when it came to learn by getting his army records was that he was killed in texas american soil of course in training. And they were so desperate for pilots in the early going this was in 1943 so the beginning of the american involvement in the war they would take these young guys and put them up in these planes with almost no training 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 over 15000 young i am assuming men was probably exclusively men in those days 15000 died in training. That is just staggering to me it is a story its not very widely known or told that is one secret another was on my moms side of the family my moms youngest brother was bored when she was away at her freshman year of college she was embarrassed her mother was having a baby she was afraid people were going to think it was her baby because she was 18 years old and she was throwing a baby around the neighborhoodio people would make baby. Sumption it was her anyway my uncle also named john was born with down syndrome. But my grandparents were never really accepting of that and they resisted the opportunity to get him into the care that he really needed. I think that was a source of great sorrow and frustration for my mom. So they came into the marriage both ofhe them with these secres and sadness from within. That never really resolved those traumas when they began their own and baby production. It was on shaky ground the family was even launched regrets i have to sayts the piece about the pilots and training stuck a chord with me because my own kefather tried to fake his way into the air force. He had a bad vision he tried to volunteer and he tried to fake his way to the vision test but failed to do so and ended up in the army. It makes me realize i am glad he did not make his way into a pilot was in the careers of pilot that he wanted for. We would not be having this conversation probably. That is rates. So your moms hospitalization later, actually gave away the punchline. It was a day you came downstairs and your mother was nowhere to be seen. Your father voted you into the car and drove you off somewhere. Tell us about that. This session we just moved back from connecticut. My dad had started a magazine he and another guy started this magazine it still around called physicians management. It was intended to be a business magazine for physicians tips on how to manage their practice. But really the beauty of it was that it wasas chockfull of advertisements and especially this is in the early 1960s, 61 or 62. Tranquilizers are coming onto the marketplace fast and furious. The early versions of prozac or i should say sedatives. The socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals which meant you got prescriptions for them. America was going gangbusters with pharmaceutical sales. So we moved out to connecticut so that my dad could manage the business in new york city. I lived an idyllic town of new canaan. But that went bad for my father quickly and he began to have doubts about his Business Partner and the tension between the two became so much she quits he ended up suing his Business Partner there is to molt their e move back in a hurry. My dad about this house my mother had not even seen it was not really to her liking. Anyway she was quite frazzled she just had her seventh baby i was going into first grade i came down the stairs one morning and she was just gone. Anyway we were not told where she was we had no idea. I thought maybe she had another baby. [laughter] the current baby was only about five months so i just didnt know the details at that stage of the game. Anyway we were hauled off my sister patty and i to my uncles house in chicago it was an adventure but itt was a scary adventuree because we had no ida where dhec we were going or why so we were there i dont think we were even there very long. But when you are five years old three days or however long it was seemed like a long time especially when you dont know why you are there. I later came to learn my mother was being hospitalized for hedepression. She would go back into the hospital a few months later almost like symptomatically it was the very week that president kennedy was assassinated. So while america is morning this terrible tragedy im a first grader worrying again about where my mother is. It was a pretty intense time in my life. Other would be followed by others and later by the decline of your sister nancy into severe 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 . Well the short answer is we didnt. At first. Ultimately it could not have been avoided. I will tell you about the night my sister nancy died. So nancy was very troubled. And again in that era we are time with the mid 1970s they dideo not refer to people as bipolar now that would probably be what she would be called. She had severe mood swings she was very impetuous. She got psychotic she had hallucinations and delusions. I have seen some medical records it refers to her as having schizophrenia or affective disorder. I kind of think i am not a medical professional by any stretch but knowing what i now know having spent so many years writing about the Mental Health system my hunch is she was bipolar but had psychotic features. Nonetheless she was quite ill it was very disruptive. She could be violent. She could be very menacing. She could be she was wholly reason she was brilliant but she could be a tough one to live with. I steered clear of her i was four years younger than she. I just knew to stay out of her path. When she got sicker and sicker i was a teenager and i was frustrated with her i was angry with her for taking up all the oxygen in the room making my mom and dad is so worried. My dad was a very emotional guy he would cry he would be so worried about her and so sad. My mom was not one to show great emotion i think maybe that went hand in glove with her depression and more of a flat affect. I knew she was very worried about her. So nancy had many, many suicide attemptsli some more public than others. When she finally did die and i go into that mystery that surrounded the actual day she did finally die and what i learned in writing this book which really floored me and it wont spoil and went at that is little twistel. I will tell you this the night she died my dad called us all into the living room he instructed us in no Uncertain Terms hef said it if anybody as this wasnt an accident. So that seemedd kooky to me why would anybody in the world by that e . Everybody had known, everybody in the parish, everybody on the block, all of our friends knew nancy had attempted suicide many times. They were not going to buy any kind of caulk may be an explanationthat it was an accid. My dad wasnt trying to be mean he was worried. Hed was worried she would not e 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 you were not to be given a funeral or be buried on catholic grounds. One of my dads a best of friends had a son who died the year before of suicide my dad went to that funeral and came home heartbroken their parish priest knew the boy had died by suicide and did not allow his body into the church so they had a Memorial Service the boys casket was in a hearse idling down the block. So anyway that was the atmosphere that nancy died in. That was the motivation for my dad telling us not to reveal she should died by suicide. But what that did to me was to make me more ashamed. And to suggest nancys death was something we should be ashamed of. And her Mental Illness was a choice i think that sets the stage for us to try to push that down. She died on a friday night. Her funeral was on monday morning. On tuesday ier went back to my summer job i was going to my senior year of college. We all just went on about our business and we never sat down as a family to discuss it. That seems insane to me now. But that is how it was for us. Theres little passage in the book were you write about the way your family dealt with some of this andnd im just going to read that quickly. Our family language of wisecracks and oneliners had been our way of keeping us all from panicking to distract us from thesc truth we were scared out of our minds. We usedd it as a bandaid to kep fear and anger from infecting us. But often made fresh air and sunlight to heal and we still were not ready to sit down as a group