#82 Melody Beattie wrote 18 books without social media
The refusal of celebrity by a self-help legend is one of her bigger legacies
This week, I found out that Melody Beattie, author of the iconic and still—forty years post-publication—bestselling book Codependent No More1, died in February of this year. I had no idea until I read about it in The Cut, and something about her dying and no one I know of in recovery world2—including myself, who scans the news nearly every day for this kind of thing—noticing or discussing or paying tribute to her and her legacy felt something I’m not sure I can name.
According to the article, Beattie published 18 books, three of which I read, and one of which changed my life—not the one she’s known for and that continues to reverberate and influence our current understanding of addictions and relationships—but her book on a subversive gratitude practice that I wrote about here and that Ann Dowsett Johnston also wrote about. This is an important fact because Ann and I are friends with a similar kind of edge to us, we found this obscure book separately, and I think it was only someone as complicated as Beattie who could have gotten either of us into practicing a proper kind of gratitude that includes being grateful for all the shit you don’t want. I think I mean, it was only someone who so clearly knew the dark that I trusted to lead me to the light. I think Ann would say the same.
I didn’t know her at all, but I felt in that book and the two others I read, along with the very little I knew of how she lived her life in the last few decades, and interviews I listened to this week, that she had a kind of resistance to a certain type of bullshit; I think I would have liked her, even though I probably would have also disagreed with her.
According to the article in The Cut, Melody Beattie struggled throughout her life despite her massive success and her continued presence as a self-help author—she wrote six books in the 2000s alone. It mentions her young son Shane died tragically in 1991 and his death’s haunting impact on her, which is something I knew because the first book of hers I read was The Lessons of Love, about confronting a grief so profound it threatens to consume you. Her daughter Nichole, interviewed for the article, said Beattie continued to grapple with many of the same struggles she had helped others escape up until her death.
“My mother’s life was so hard, and it never stopped being hard, Nichole told me. “She did have this beautiful way of feeling like she was here in this world to have these experiences that she could turn into helping other people.” After writing the groundbreaking guidebook to escaping that cycle, codependency and addiction issues continued to surround Beattie for the rest of her life. And, tragically, grief as well.
I think it’s that part that gets me about her life and death, probably because some of it feels so familiar: How you can be the catalyst for massive healing, as well as a lightning rod for what you end up popularizing that perhaps you didn’t intend; how you can be the target of so many different people’s projections; that you can write a book that frees so many and helps them ascend to a healing you yourself might have sacrificed by being the one who wrote the book.
My friend Ann, author of the book Drink, whom I mentioned above, is the only human I know who spent time with Beattie. She interviewed her a handful of years ago, something Ann recounted to me at a lunch we had in 2022, when my life had cratered after my own massive success as a self-help author and while I was deep in the middle of an unfathomable pain perpetuated by that very success.
I don’t remember the fine details Ann gave in her retelling of the visit, but I have a vision of Beattie from that story that leaves her permanently impressed in my memory as someone almost too big for what she created for us, which was fucking mammoth. I sent Ann this article and asked her to comment on whether any of what I just wrote is true, or if I’m retrofitting it all to fit my current world view. Ann said:
Beattie invited me to her very humble spot in the California desert, coming to the door in flip flops and a simple sundress. Knowing I was there to discuss her book, she said flat-out how much she loathed the title Making Miracles in Forty Days, but fervently believed in the practice of thanking for the negatives. “A monkey can count his blessings,” she said. "You must befriend what is, setting your intention for what you want," she told me. For close to four hours, she poured tea, and poured her heart out, telling me how much she wanted to write for television and how tough it was. She of the many life transformations radiated a deep sense of dignified humility. She lived with health challenges, and profound grief, and she carried it with grace.
Melody Beattie wrote Codependent No More for a $500 advance and with a feverish obsession. Melody Beattie traveled widely after she had some success. Melody Beattie wrote 18 books and had four divorces. Melody Beattie did not use social media to launch or expand her career, and as far as I know, never did an IG Live, or posted a selfie. Melody Beattie sat alone on her porch, looking at the ocean and chain-smoking cigarettes at the end of her life. Melody Beattie wrote a book that helped me understand gratitude in a way that only a woman who suffered deeply and genuinely could have. Melody Beattie helped hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, if not tens of millions. Melody Beattie freed me in certain ways she likely intended, and in other ways she likely did not.
When Ann told me about Melody at lunch in 2022, I was at my lowest; crushed under the weight of my own success, terrified I would never live up to the image attached to my creations. Melody served as a kind of warning to the person I was then; I saw her as someone who hadn’t done what she was supposed to do, who had failed at being Melody Beattie in a sense (and I don’t know why I thought that because she continued to write and appear on podcasts like We Can Do Hard Things and Goop so it wasn’t even the full truth). There was a haunting image burned into my memory of a recluse, of something she’d become that wasn’t what I expected in a world where we equate the quality of someone’s work to their ability to film short bursts of wisdom and look good doing it, and post it to the internet regularly.
But she is the ultimate model to the woman I became since that meeting.
Her legacy, to me, as someone who perhaps understands fractionally some of the hell she might have faced as a consequence of what she created, is not defined by her massive massive massive success, or even how many people she touched and helped (Millions? Tens of millions? Hundreds of millions?), but how she lived despite all of that. Maybe/probably I’m projecting, but what I see in Melody, projection or truth, is the refusal of the terms of a success so few will ever achieve, and the refusal of what it asked her to become for us. And that is so fucking rare.
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11 Things Right Now
Going on Chrissy Teigen’s podcast with a comb over; a new book about the 90s that’s super fucking depressing; what I’m binging; what I'm humming; what I’m watching even though I don’t want to; sheep snacks.
My friend Greta’s book coming out this Tuesday, and the party we’re having for her that you can come to with special music guests (RSVP required)
Jagadishwar by Alice Coltrane, on repeat
Sending 10% of a recent income I made to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund; aid is currently being blocked, and Palestinians are counting lentils, and this is what it looks like