Meg Kissinger: Writing Painful Stories About the People You Love Most

A part of the 2024 Chippewa Valley Book Festival!

The truth hurts. But it doesn’t have to ruin your relationships. Meg Kissinger will explain how she wrote an honest, unflinching memoir about some of the most humiliating and painful experiences in her family and still gets invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Attendees will learn how to tell the truth. Where to find medical records, police files, court cases and other family secrets. How to interview family members, their friends, and associates. What to put in and what to leave out.

About the Author

MEG KISSINGER, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, will help you see and think about people with mental illness in a new light. Her engaging memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, has been praised for its incisive reporting, boundless compassion and surprising humor. It was named as an editors’ choice by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, Goodreads and Independent Booksellers Association. Audible chose it as the Best of the Year.

Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on our nation’s failed mental health system. Her reporting led to change in state laws and the addition of hundreds of new supportive housing units for people with serious mental illness. She taught investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is a trainer for the school’s Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism.

Kissinger lives in Milwaukee, Wis., along the shores of Lake Michigan, her favorite place to plunge, even on the coldest day in January.

Learn more about Meg Kissinger at megkissinger.com.