Melody Beattie, former addict who wrote bestsellers on rising beyond codependency, dies at 76

Melody Beattie, 76, a Minnesota native who overcame a turbulent childhood and drug addiction to author a string of bestselling books about codependency, relationships and caring for yourself, died on Feb. 27.

The cause was congestive heart failure, according to her daughter, Nichole, of Los Angeles.

Beattie was evacuated from her Malibu, Calif., beach home in early December by the Franklin fire and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital. She wanted to move back home but needed care and stayed at Nichole’s house in the Los Feliz neighborhood, spending her last days in hospice there.

Beattie’s rise to writing fame, following a drug-fueled youth that nearly killed her, was a rags-to-riches story. But the death of her 12-year-old son, Shane, in an Afton Alps skiing accident just as she found success shattered her world all over again. She left for California as soon as Nichole graduated from Stillwater High School.

The 1986 book that launched her career, “Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself,” was a meditation on loving and letting go inspired by women she met while working as a drug counselor in Minneapolis.

When she was writing it, Beattie was freelancing articles for the Stillwater Evening Gazette and raising Shane and Nichole by herself in a home they shared in Stillwater’s Croixwood neighborhood.

“Codependent No More” stands as one of the bestselling self-help books of all time, with some 7 million copies sold. Beattie went on to write more bestsellers, establishing herself as a major voice in drug counseling and therapy work who could write from her own experiences with abandonment, abuse, addiction, divorce and the death of a child.

Born in Ramsey to Izetta Lee and Jean Vaillancourt, she was just a toddler when her father left the family. In a 1988 Star Tribune profile, Beattie said her childhood home was dysfunctional. Several relatives were alcoholics, and she was briefly abducted by a stranger and molested when she was 5. The episode wasn’t talked about, Beattie said, and by 12 she was running home from school over the lunch hour to numb her pain with whiskey.

A good student even as her addiction took hold, she attended Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis for three years before graduating with honors from Harding High School in St. Paul. By day, she held down secretarial jobs at a law firm and 3M Co., and by night she scoured street corners for dealers who could supply her with marijuana, pills, amphetamines and eventually heroin.

She worked briefly as a stripper on Hennepin Avenue and then got pregnant, giving birth to John Thurik, who was raised by her first husband and his parents. She continued using drugs and was committing crimes to support her habit when she was caught trying to crawl through a rooftop vent of a pharmacy in Mora, Minn., and sent to treatment by court order.

It was in treatment months later at Willmar State Hospital that she said she had a flash of the divine, became aware of God’s presence and found sobriety. She left treatment at the age of 26.

Two years later she met David Beattie, whom she later married, and began working as a dependency counselor at Eden House in Minneapolis. There she met wives of addicted men, finding them angry that they couldn’t control the drinking of their husbands. She studied their behavior while formulating the ideas and stories that would become the inspiration for “Codependent No More.”

Her marriage was unraveling — David was both a counselor and an alcoholic — and broke one night when she suspected he was drunk while on a trip to Las Vegas. Calling him repeatedly at his hotel to try to get him to stop drinking, Beattie gave up after several hours.

“Something happened inside of me, and I let go of him,” she told the Star Tribune. It was the first step, she said, in recognizing her own codependency: Allowing someone else’s behavior to control you and becoming obsessed with controlling their behavior.

“We don’t have to take things so personally,” she would later write in her book. “We take things to heart that we have no business taking to heart. For instance, saying ‘If you loved me you wouldn’t drink' to an alcoholic makes as much sense as saying ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t cough’ to someone who has pneumonia. Pneumonia victims will cough until they get appropriate treatment for their illness. Alcoholics will drink until they get the same.

“When people with a compulsive disorder do whatever it is they are compelled to do, they are not saying they don’t love you — they are saying they don’t love themselves.”

Beattie left David and in 1984 moved with their two children to Stillwater. Beattie was to marry two more times, but all four of her marriages ended in divorce.

As she settled into her life in Stillwater, Beattie pitched a codependency book to a dozen publishers, getting rejections from all but the Hazelden Foundation, which gave her a $500 advance. She went on welfare for four months to complete the book, writing in a windowless room in her basement.

When she finished on Valentine’s Day 1986, Beattie screamed with joy in her writing room, said Nichole. Soon the family was scrounging change from couch cushions for a celebratory takeout meal from Burger King, which they ate on newspaper spread over the living room floor.

“Codependent No More” was a smash hit, its message resonating far beyond drug counseling circles. Beattie found herself being whisked to Chicago for an audience with Oprah Winfrey and featured in a Time magazine profile. Audiences filled lecture halls to hear her speak.

For a time, Nichole said, the three lived in a pocket of happiness, buying furniture and new clothes and taking vacations. They kept a 42-foot houseboat on the St. Croix River.

In February 1991, Shane, a sixth-grader at Lily Lake Elementary School in Stillwater, was skiing with Nichole at Afton Alps when he died in a freak accident. In a 2009 interview, Beattie said her son’s death put her in a place of “unending pain.” The odd thing, she said, was that people expected her to fix herself since she had written an international bestseller on self-help.

“As one friend said, ‘You’re Melody Beattie,’” she said.

She went on to publish “Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Life When It All Seems Too Hard to Take” in 1994. Other bestselling titles include “The Language of Letting Go,” “Playing it By Heart,” “The Grief Club,” “Beyond Codependency” and “The Codependent No More Workbook.”

Beattie extensively revised “Codependent No More” in 2022, updating the book’s language and revealing that she had been writing about herself in the opening chapter that told the story of a woman she called “Jessica.”

For all her fame, Beattie stayed grounded, said Julie Grau, co-founder of Beattie’s publisher since 2022, Spiegel & Grau.

“She wore it so lightly,” Grau said. “She was just the most wonderful, engaging, funny, brilliant, funny person.”

Nichole said her mother sometimes didn’t remember things she had written, telling her later that she had “just sort of channeled that.”

“I really feel that my mom came here to do the work that she did and she answered a calling,” Nichole said. “I think the reason why her work resonated so deeply with people was because she was speaking from her heart and she was able to access something that was bigger than her.”

Beattie continued writing and updating her books, doing interviews and appearing on social media to tell her story and talk about addiction and recovery.

She also stayed passionate about life and living it in a big way. She said her icon was gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. She went skydiving; she said she loved the community of people who thrilled themselves by jumping out of airplanes.

“I didn’t have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both,” Beattie wrote in “Lessons of Love.”

Besides her daughter Nichole and son John, Beattie is survived by four grandchildren and three great grandchildren. Services at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis have been held.