Eric Dane will continue to speak in his own words long after his death, and his posthumous memoirs will be published later this year, a book he set out to finish after he was diagnosed with ALS in 2023.
Penguin Random House announced on Thursday that My book of days: a memory in moments will be released on November 3rd via Maria Shriver’s imprint, The Open Field.
Dane died on February 19 at the age of 53, after a ten-month battle with the neurodegenerative disease.
The editor confirmed that he “was working on the manuscript until the end” and that publishing it as planned would allow him “to continue speaking, in his own voice, with the clarity and courage that defined him.”
Shriver, 70, said she was honored to have been chosen for the project.
“He told me he wanted his family to know how much he loved them and he wanted to leave them a story they could be proud of,” he said.
In his own words, recorded before his death, Dane explained simply and powerfully why he continued to write.
“I wake up every morning and immediately remember that this is real, this disease, this challenge, and that’s exactly why I’m writing this book,” he said.
“I want to capture the moments that shaped me, the beautiful days, the difficult ones, the ones I never took for granted, so that at least the people who read it remember what it means to live from the heart. If sharing this helps someone find meaning in their own days, then my story is worth telling.”
The memoir covers the entire arc of her life, from the early years making her way in Hollywood and finding her footing in sobriety, to the profound shift in perspective that came with her diagnosis.
As he himself said: “Our days are all we really have.”
Much of the book is written with his two daughters, Billie, 15, and Georgia, 14, in mind.
The girls’ mother, actress Rebecca Gayheart, supported Dane during his illness.
The couple had married in 2004 before Gayheart filed for divorce in 2018, but she called it off last March, explaining that she wanted to show her daughters how to show up for family “when times are worst,” while noting that she and Dane had not lived together for eight years.
