On the night of December 12–13, 1994, McGovern's daughter Teresa fell into a snowbank in Madison, Wisconsin, while heavily intoxicated and died of hypothermia. Heavy press attention followed, and McGovern revealed his daughter had battled her alcoholism for years and had been in and out of many treatment programs while having had one extended period of sobriety. He authored an account of her life, "Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism"; published in 1996, it presented a harrowing, unsparing view of the depths to which she had descended, the torment that he and the rest of his family had experienced in trying unsuccessfully to help her, and his ongoing thoughts and guilt about whether the demands of his political career and the time he had spent away from the family had made things worse for her. The book was a modest best-seller, and with the proceeds, he founded the Teresa McGovern Center in Madison to help others suffering from the combination of alcoholism and mental health problems. He would later say that Terry's death was by far the most painful event in his life: "You never get over it, I'm sure of that. You get so you can live with it, that's all."