Darcia Helle's Reviews > While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

I had put off reading this one, waiting for the right mood. I was expecting an emotionally heavy and draining story. I didn’t get that here at all.

We start out with excessive detail about the author’s family, going back to her grandparents’ lives, how her parents met, etc. Then we moved on to a list of her sisters and brothers, how they related—or didn’t— to one another. We were given lots of surface information that could describe any family. I’m sorry, but it wasn’t all that interesting. I wanted to go deeper.

Then we got to a point where something awful happened to one of her siblings, and I felt… nothing. I mean, I felt bad objectively, as I would for any family in a similar situation, but that’s it. Even worse was that I couldn’t tell if the author felt anything. Of course, I know intellectually that she did, but I didn’t get any sense of emotion from her writing.

And this was the problem throughout the book. The author is a journalist, and that background followed her into this memoir. The writing is a recitation of facts, minus the emotion. I read memoirs for the emotional connection, and unfortunately that’s entirely missing here.

But this is just my opinion, and the author is certainly entitled to tell her story any way she wants. Lots of people have loved this book, and you might as well.

*I received an eARC from Celadon, via NetGalley.*