Patton Oswalt’s daughter saved him from being a “shut-in alcoholic”

Mededith Salenger and Patton Oswalt; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO(NEW YORK) — Patton Oswalt’s daughter Alice saved him from the grips of depression following the sudden death of his wife Michelle McNamara a little over a year ago, he tells Playboy magazine in a new interview.

“If I hadn’t had a daughter and my wife died, we wouldn’t be talking right now. I’m not saying I would be dead, but I would be a shut-in alcoholic,” the 48-year-old comic and actor says.

“Everything would have shut down,” he adds. “I wouldn’t have been about anything. But with Alice, it was and is ‘You got to get up.’”

At the same time, Oswalt was also concerned with making sure Alice, then 7, was OK. He says his daughter, who attends a children’s grief group, is a “really happy little kid,” although there were times when he worried that she was “putting on a show for me, trying to be brave but inside she’s dying.”

“There were times when I had to get her to play a game on her iPad or start a little project,” Oswalt continues, “and then I would say, ‘Oh, let me go upstairs,’ and I would go put my head in a pillow and just scream and cry because I didn’t want to break down in front of her.”

Oswalt is currently engaged to actress Meredith Salenger, 47. The two met through mutual friends back in February.

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