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Posthumous Memoir

Patton Oswalt’s Late Wife Reveals Post-Partum Depression

‘I was inconsolable for the first two weeks’ she wrote.

It’s been nearly two years since Patton Oswalt’s wife of 11 years, Michelle McNamara, died unexpectedly in her sleep.

Now, in her posthumous memoir, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, released Tuesday, the late crime hunter revealed a shocking portrayal of her experience dealing with postpartum depression.

McNamara explained she and Oswalt welcomed their daughter, Alice, two years after her own mother passed away from complications of diabetes.

“I was inconsolable for the first two weeks,” McNamara wrote about her daughter’s birth.

At the time, McNamara recalled Oswalt – now remarried to Meredith Salenger – telling friends she was suffering from “postpartum depression.”

But McNamara disagreed with her husband.

“It wasn’t new-mom blues,” she wrote. “It was old-mom blues. Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes.”

“At 39, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time,” McNamara continued in the novel.

McNamara’s memoir is mostly about her work as a crime writer. She was halfway through the book when she unexpectedly passed away in 2016.

Though it was reported she died in her sleep, Radar exclusively revealed after McNamara’s death that the 46-year-old writer possessed prescriptions of Bupropion, an antidepressant, Cefdinir, an antibiotic, and Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory drug.

More sinister findings at the death scene by officials pointed towards an alleged overdose. McNamara was found in possession of TFMP, a recreational drug often sold as an alternative to MDMA, or ecstasy.

Lab reports indicated that her blood tested presumed positive for benzodiazepines, fentanyl, and various kinds of opiates.

McNamara’s alleged drug use was not mentioned in her memoir.

Her actor husband contributed an afterword in the novel where he raves about his late wife.

“She made everything about me and everyone around her better,” Oswalt wrote. “And she did it by being quietly, effortlessly original.”

Oswalt wrote he even sees a resemblance of McNamara in their daughter, Alice, now 8. One Christmas, Oswalt wrote that Alice questioned why his handwriting resembled Santa Claus’.

“She left behind a little detective,” Oswalt said of his wife and daughter. “And a mystery.”