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Her “Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself,” a guide to shedding toxic relationships, has sold more than seven million copies.
Melody Beattie, whose experiences as a drug addict, a chemical dependency counselor and the wife of an alcoholic informed a best-selling book about codependence that has guided countless people to shed toxic relationships, died on Feb. 27 in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 76.
Her daughter, Nichole Beattie, said the cause was heart failure. She had been hospitalized from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, then evacuated from her home in Malibu because of a wildfire and moved into her daughter’s home, where she died.
By popularizing the concept of codependence, Ms. Beattie (pronounced BEE-tee) became a literary star in the self-help world with “Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Star Caring for Yourself” (1986), which has sold more than seven million copies worldwide.
“You could call her the mother of the self-help genre,” said Nicole Dewey, the publishing director of Spiegel & Grau, which has sold more than 400,000 copies of the book since taking over publication in 2022.
Trysh Travis, the author of “The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement From Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey” (2009), said in an interview that “Codependent No More” has succeeded because of Ms. Beattie’s common-sense approach and “vernacular charm.”
She added: “There had been other books and pamphlets published in the recovery space in the early 1980s. Melody made the same arguments, but her voice came across very clearly. It wasn’t clinical — and she had a set of ideas that could be applied to many if not all the problems one was having — and it hit the market at the right time.”