According to BuzzFeed, Klobuchar “demeaned and berated her staff almost daily, subjecting them to bouts of explosive rage and regular humiliation within the office.” The articles quote staffers alleging that in fits of anger, she threw things—including binders—in the direction of staff members, accidentally hitting an employee on at least one occasion. The accounts of her cruelty are astonishing. She once allegedly forced an employee to say to another senator’s staffer, “I’m supposed to tell you Senator Klobuchar is late today because I am bad at my job.” For Klobuchar, the dark night of the soul arrives right on schedule: She is known to fire off scathing emails to her staff between the hours of 1 and 3 o’clock in the morning. (“In a real dark night of the soul,” wrote another unstable Minnesotan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, “it is always three o’clock in the morning.”)

Graeme Wood: The two Amy Klobuchars

What could cause this burning rage in a woman who became popular among so many of us because of what had seemed to be her exemplary calm and high-mindedness? She has never addressed the question directly, but her 2015 autobiography, The Senator Next Door , offers plenty of clues. Her paternal grandfather was a hard drinker: “Sometimes he drank way too much and came home in a rage, yelling at my grandma about all kinds of grievances.” In turn, he raised an alcoholic.

Her father, Jim Klobuchar, a beloved regional newspaperman, was a serious alcoholic who spoiled family events; was charged with at least three DUIs and had to write an apology to readers of the Star Tribune; and once stopped with Amy on the way home from a Vikings game and ended up drinking in the upstairs room of a bar, while the child sat alone at the bar, nursing a 7 Up and wondering when her father would come back for her. He left his young family when Amy’s mother had just cashed out her teacher’s pension to build a new deck and an addition to the back of the house. (The dream of every woman in a bad marriage: Change the house and somehow the home will change too.) At his final DUI court date—after which he finally got sober in late midlife—Amy, by then a lawyer, accompanied him to a meeting with the court’s chemical-dependency counselor, which her father later wrote about: “She told of the damage my divorce had inflicted on her, her sister, and her mother … She spoke with fury and sorrow and in tears.”

In the classic fashion of children raised in deeply alcoholic families, the two Klobuchar daughters carved out very different identities for themselves. Amy the overachiever made her mark at Wayzata High School and went on to Yale and then to the University of Chicago Law School; Beth (who has since changed her name to Meagan) dropped out of high school, was gone from home for days at a time, and became an alcoholic before eventually seeking treatment for her disease, getting a GED, and going to college. The behavior that Klobuchar’s staff describes—the rage at minor imperfections; the middle-of-the-night rants; the development of a secret, shameful self—would not be out of character for someone with such a specifically brutal kind of upbringing.