The concept of codependency was just psychology jargon when Melody Beattie, an addiction-recovery counselor, began writing the manuscript for her first book, Codependent No More. This was long before The Let Them Theory, or Set Boundaries, Find Peace, or the easy way so many millennials and Gen-Zers invoke the idea at the first whiff of a dysfunctional coupling today. At 36, Beattie’s whole life to that point had been steeped in unhealthy relationships: with her mother, with her first and second husbands, in her work within the drug and alcohol recovery community.
By the early 1980s, sitting in the windowless concrete basement of her home in Stillwater, Minnesota, she felt a maniacal calling to write a book about codependency in an effort to help others identify their own destructive relationship patterns — and maybe even resolve them.
“She was possessed,” her daughter Nichole, 48, recalls today. “She said she didn’t write the book, the book wrote itself through her.” Codependent No More was published in 1986 and, over 7 million sold copies and four decades later, is still selling reliably.
In February, Beattie died of heart failure at age 76 at Nichole’s home in Malibu. Despite her status as a groundbreaking thinker and writer on relationships and grief, her death seems to have gone mostly unnoticed in the recovery and professional mental-health industries. Still, Nichole recalls her mother saying on her deathbed, “‘I feel like I came here to do what I was meant to do.’”
The concept of codependency first became an obsession for Beattie when she, herself a drug and alcohol addict in recovery, was working as a recovery counselor in Minneapolis in the 1970s. People raised in the 1950s were starting to interrogate the concept of alcoholism and its destructive effects on the people around them. Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs were booming, and historically repressed individual and familial dysfunction was suddenly safe to discuss — in certain spaces.
Beattie was two years sober at that point and wanted to help people escape the dark place she’d been in. When Beattie got a job at a recovery center in 1976, she was tasked with an assignment no one else wanted: working with the wives of alcoholics rather than the alcoholics themselves.
“I wasn’t excited,” Beattie wrote in Codependent No More. “I wanted to work with the substance abusers, the people with the real problem. Not the ‘significant others’ who weren’t significant — not to themselves or anyone else.” As researchers and counselors searched for a reason “why” people — namely, men — drank in excess, a convenient theory had formed: Their crazy wives were driving them toward the bottle. The job had been handed to Beattie in part because the men who ran the recovery program had no idea what to do with these women and their supposed dangerous hysteria.
But as Beattie began meeting with these women, hearing their stories, and running Al-Anon, the 12-step program for the families of alcoholics, she realized the prevailing theory was insufficient and wrong. And she realized that she was one of them.
“When I started looking inside myself and following my curiosity,” Beattie wrote. “I began to find answers — though slowly at first.”
It was not the women who were driving their husbands to drink. It was also not as simple as the husbands making their wives “crazy” by their erratic and often abusive behavior. There was something peculiar about the way these people interacted with one another — the dysfunction was symbiotic, and Beattie needed to understand why.
While today “codependency” has become a buzzword thrown around by TikTok psychologists and self-help podcasts, a catchall term for all sorts of unhealthy intimate relationships, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was an emerging theory without a firm definition. Beattie gave it one in the early pages of Codependent No More: “A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect them and who is obsessed with controlling that other person’s behavior.”
The term describes a specific dynamic that often exists between people who carry unprocessed emotional trauma or substance-abuse issues with them into a relationship. In a codependent dynamic, two people in a close relationship — be it a parent and child, platonic friends, or romantic partners — reflexively focus on the other person’s emotions rather than their own. Their emotions and behaviors are directly influenced by how the other person is thinking or behaving, which ultimately creates a dysfunctional emotional knot that ties them together.
Beattie received only a $500 advance to write the self-help guide, but she made it her sole obsession for at least two years — trusting her children, Nichole and her brother, Shane, to fend for themselves while she threw herself into a manuscript in their tiny Stillwater home. Beattie’s mother had purchased the home for her daughter, who had very little money to her name and was in the process of finally ending her marriage to her husband, who was a relapsed alcoholic.
“The day she finished her manuscript is one of the formative moments of my life,” Nichole says, recalling how she heard her mother screaming from in front of the Kaypro computer that sat in the basement, her writing cave. “We dug out change from under the couch cushions and went to Burger King. We didn’t have enough money for three full meals, but we bought two burgers, two fries, and three sodas. When we got home, she spread newspapers on the floor and we ate our celebratory meal. She was beaming.”
Life changed drastically for their family, sending them from poverty to abundance as Codependent No More gained a cult following. It reached the New York Times best-seller list for the first time in 1988, ranking behind L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics in the “Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous” section. It went on to appear on the best-seller list for at least 129 weeks between 1988 and 1991.
The book is comprised of anonymized stories about people who find themselves in codependent relationships and what they learned about getting out, but it was also a deeply personal work for Beattie. Her own story about codependency with the father of her children is the first story told. In the original printing, she gave herself a pseudonym: “Jessica.” In the 2022 updated version, she reveals the truth, turning the cautionary tale into a confessional.
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“I remember very clearly what it was like to live in a house where my dad would disappear to drink, and my mom would be up listening to Patsy Cline and crying while trying to find him,” Nichole tells me.
Nichole, a television screenwriter, calls her mother “Mel” and describes herself as being “obsessed” with her for her entire life. She found her mother captivating and inspiring, while also seeing — and supporting — her at her lowest. “I really watched her bottoming out,” Nichole says. “These concepts were at play in my house. Then I watched her do this incredible thing.”
Like many people who experience codependency, Beattie found this dynamic repeating time and time again throughout her life. In her book, she writes about her painful upbringing. “She was an aggrieved, demanding, controlling woman,” Beattie wrote of her mother. “Hurt people hurt people, even sometimes their kids.”
To cope with her emotionally turbulent upbringing, Beattie first turned to alcohol and drugs before she could even drive on her own. In her first marriage, she gave birth to a son, John, but lost and eventually relinquished custody of him because she knew she wasn’t healthy enough to raise a child. By the time she met Nichole and her brother Shane’s father in the recovery community, she thought she was done with dysfunction. “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.
Five years after Codependent No More had made Beattie a millionaire, Shane died in a skiing accident in Minnesota. She fled to Malibu, looking to get as far from grief as she could. As Nichole puts it, “This fantastic story had the life sucked out of it almost immediately after it started.”
Beattie began traveling obsessively, going to Algeria, Tibet, and Paris by herself. She tried two more marriages — one was an alcoholic and the other she met in a recovery program.
“She would date people that were just horrible, and I’d say to her: ‘You wrote all of these books, what are you doing?’” recalls television producer Scott Steindorff, one of her few close friends. “She said: ‘Listen, Steindorff. I wrote books about how to get out of bad relationships. I didn’t say anything about getting into relationships.’” Vulnerability was never a state that Beattie could handle, dooming her relationships from the start. “She had an intellectual idea of wanting to be married, but deep down she really didn’t want to share her life with anyone,” Nichole says.
Eventually, sometime around her early 50s, Beattie found a situation that worked for her. She briefly dated a younger man who taught her how to skydive. She went on to become a middle-aged adrenaline junkie and became obsessed with skydiving in the way that she had been obsessed with the men in her marriages.
But in 2005, a botched back surgery ended her life of travel and jumping out of airplanes. She spent most of the rest of her life as a recluse, sitting on the balcony of her waterfront condo, chainsmoking and watching the waves rise and fall. Nichole describes the condo as being regularly hit by strong, crashing waves that scared her, but not her mother. It’s allegorical, she says. Her mother chose a home that both exposed her to turbulence and kept her safe from it. Steindorff would occasionally get Beattie to attend Hollywood events with him, where he says A-list celebrities would leap to thank her for writing Codependent No More.
“She would listen to them, but it wasn’t important to her,” Steindorff recalled. “I think what was important for her was that she had so much pain and trauma and suffering, she didn’t wish that on anybody. So she wanted to create whatever tools were necessary to help.”
Beattie spent the final months of her life living with Nichole in Los Angeles. She knew she was going to die and hosted friends and family, giving them her earnest good-byes.
Now Nichole, who recently found the floppy disks that contain the original manuscript, is finally ready for her own sort of closure: reading Codependent No More for the first time. “No one’s really ever said to me, ‘You need to read this book,’” Nichole tells me. “It would be weird, but I do need to read that book. If it weren’t written by my mother, I think there are like 50 people in my life who would recommend that I read that book.”
It makes sense though. Before, she had the privilege of going straight to the source. “I would call my mom and talk to her about the ways in which I was suffering, and ask her, ‘What do I do?’” Nichole said. “She just had a language that I could believe. So yes, she was my mom. But she was my mom with a message that I could really hear.”
Her mother recorded her own audiobook, and Nichole plans to listen to it now on walks around Elysian Park — blending grief with guidance and relief.
When Nichole reaches the end of the book — the words that preceded that glorious trip to Burger King — she’ll find the guidance her mother has imparted on millions of people just like her. “Getting our balance and keeping it once we’ve found it is what recovery is all about,” Beattie wrote. “If that sounds like a big order, don’t worry. We can do it. We can learn to live again.”
