Writing the Alcoholic’s Kid
Author Megan DeMatteo shares insights into writing the alcoholic’s kid, including tendencies and characteristics of these children.
I didn’t realize I was a grown-up alcoholic’s kid until I became a writer.
Of course, I knew I was one—the reality was undeniable—but I didn’t discover the writerly power of being one until I found myself tinkering on a novel in a writing workshop years ago.
Stream-of-consciously, I wrote the following passage in one of my early, still-unpublished drafts:
Headlights flashed through the kitchen windows, turning the glass-paneled room into a momentary lighthouse. I’d come to know this flicker as the end of my nightly solitude; the squeak of Pippa’s brakes and the clap of her closing car door signaling the completion of my duties. The crunch of dirt at her feet as she walked across the rugged parking pad, the jittery clink of the opening gate – all nightly rituals that had been lulling us into a rhythm of mutual dependence for months.
Observation was the souvenir I’d carried with me from my old world, a survival skill I’d honed with precision. The empathy of an alcoholic’s child would always be wasted on the details that never mattered: the sound of the silver handle rolling open the front door’s latch, the polite thuds of Pippa stomping the dirt from her Blundstone boots. The fuzzy static of the welcome mat below the coat hooks.
Before, I’d always gone to greet Pippa at the entryway when she got home, as though I was a puppy responding to her smell. But I’d learned to sit still through the tug of my instincts, quell the need to hover before her, sniffing her breath and checking her eyes for the tell-tale glossy film.
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You don’t need to know the backstory of this unpublished novel to understand what this workshop passage tells us about the character of the alcoholic’s kid, which my character happened to be in the story I was trying to write. Alcoholic’s kids are observers. They scan their environment constantly for hints of impending disaster. Every day, they absorb a sensory deluge of detail and imagery as they attune themselves to the needs of everyone around them, often while ignoring their own sensations.
These lines summarize it: “The empathy of an alcoholic’s child would always be wasted on the details that never mattered” and, “I’d learned to sit still through the tug of my instincts, quell the need to hover before her, sniffing her breath and checking her eyes for the tell-tale glossy film.”
Alcoholic’s kids are the Sally Drapers of the world. Through all seven seasons of Mad Men viewers watched Don Draper’s daughter living out the classic pattern of an alcoholic’s kid in America: waiting at the door for the first glimpse of her dad’s headlights, swallowing the chronic disappointment of ruined birthdays, drunken holidays, and sloppy pecks on the head as Don came home reeking of whiskey. We see the inadvertent gaslighting and questioning of one’s own reality as life becomes a blur. Sally doubts her own memory as she recalls the times her father disappeared for weeks at a time and called home from out-of-state pay phones and motel rooms, sad apologies spilling out through the phone receiver.
Alcoholic’s kids also tend to be profoundly out of touch with their emotions and desires, a phenomenon psychologist Tian Dayton describes as “emotional dyslexia.” In the 1999 romantic comedy, Runaway Bride, Julia Roberts plays Maggie Carpenter, a woman with an unfortunate reputation for fleeing on her wedding day and leaving her fiancés at the altar. With three unsuccessful wedding attempts under her belt, Maggie is preparing for her fourth in the film, when a cynical New York journalist portrayed by Richard Gere shows up to her small Maryland town and makes her the subject of his reporting.
The journalist notices a strange detail about Maggie’s behavior: She doesn’t know how she likes her eggs. He interviews Maggie’s ex-fiancés and learns she has a pattern of shape-shifting to take on the personal preferences of her love interests. So naturally, the men from her past all say she likes eggs the way they do. One says scrambled, one says fried, one says poached. With fiancé number four, Maggie orders omelets with egg whites only, just like her new man does.
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Later in the film, we find out Maggie is an adult child of an alcoholic. In one scene, we follow her as she hoists her slumped-over father up from his barstool, shuffles him out to the parking lot, and puts him in the truck to drive him home. All the while, he berates her, telling her she’s no fun and that “good daughters” let their fathers sleep at the bar in peace. Maggie then opens up to the journalist and explains that she dropped out of school to take care of her dad, putting her needs below the survival needs of the family unit.
With this information, the journalist’s prodding takes on new meaning. Of course Maggie is a shape-shifter. She is still stuck in a paradigm of false belonging, still subconsciously choosing the identity that the alcoholic’s kid thinks will earn them safety, acceptance, and stability.
Yet, herein lies the rite of passage and the transformational journey that children of addicted parents get to walk through. When we, too, embrace the recovery journey, full of its winding, unanswerable questions, we open ourselves up to knowing our true selves more fully than we might have possibly known otherwise.
Those who struggle with substance use face the question, “Who am I without my drug of choice?” Their offspring get to answer an even more subtle one, which is, “Who am I when I’m not worrying about someone else?”
And like all good literature, the journey to answering that question can be profoundly confronting and intense, but ultimately—hopefully—fruitful.
Edited pieces of this essay were reprinted with permission from Emotionally Sober and Unimaginably Good: The Adult Child’s Guide to Living a Happy Life by Megan DeMatteo. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books.
