Actor Patton Oswalt is opening up about moving forward after his wife passed away in 2016, saying if it weren't for his daughter he would've spiraled into drinking, binge-eating and a state of utter despair.
The 50-year-old comedian, best known for his roles in Young Adult, Veep and King of Queens, says his world shattered when his true-crime writer wife Michelle McNamara died in 2016 at the age of 46.
She passed away in her sleep and an autopsy determined she had an undiagnosed heart condition and had taken a mix of prescription drugs including Adderall, fentanyl and the anti-anxiety drug Xanax.
He says caring for his now 10-year-old daughter Alice is what held him together as he reeled from his wife's sudden passing.
'I can say with a pretty good amount of confidence that if I hadn’t had Alice, if I didn’t have a daughter, I think I’d be alive right now, but I don’t think I’d be functioning very well,' he said in an interview with The Guardian.
Patton Oswalt, 50, says caring for his daughter, now 10, helped him cope with his wife Michelle McNamara's sudden death in 2016. The comedian and McNamara pictured above in 2011
'I can say with a pretty good amount of confidence that if I hadn’t had Alice, if I didn’t have a daughter, I think I’d be alive right now, but I don’t think I’d be functioning very well,' he said
'Drinking would have been a problem. Binge-eating would have been a problem. And then, I think, old-fashioned, almost Victorian melancholy.
'I would have merely existed. I would have just eaten to live and then would have drunk so that I didn’t feel anything any more and then would have repeated it every single day,' he added.
Speaking on telling Alice the heartbreaking news he said: 'I looked at my daughter and destroyed her world. I had to look at this little girl that was everything to me and take everything from her.'
'Having Alice was like: "I’ve got to get up, I’ve got to make breakfast, I got to take care of this little life." So, it’s almost like I had freedom from choice because I had our daughter,' he added.
His late wife McNamara was so obsessed with unsolved crimes she ran the website True Crime Diary that covered breaking stories and cold cases - and she even coined the nickname for the notorious Golden State Killer, who committed more than a dozen murders and at least 50 rapes in California between 1976 and 1986.
'Drinking would have been a problem. Binge-eating would have been a problem. And then, I think, old-fashioned, almost Victorian melancholy,' he said on how grief would have sent him into a spiral, were it not for his daughter Alice, now 10. Pictured above in 2015
Daddy duty: Oswalt pictured at Legoland with Alice in 2016
McNamara was a true-crime writer who posthumously published a book on the Golden State Killer that sparked renewed interest in the case and may have helped lead to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo in the notorious, cold case.
