Eric Dane will continue to speak in his own words long after his death, with his posthumous memoir released later this year, a book he made a point of completing after being diagnosed with ALS in 2023.
This was announced by Penguin Random House on Thursday My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments will be released on November 3 through Maria Shriver’s publisher, The Open Field.
Dane died on February 19 at the age of 53 after a ten-month battle with the neurodegenerative disease.
The publisher confirmed that he “worked on the script right to the end” and that publishing it as planned would allow him to “continue to speak in his own voice with the clarity and courage that defined him.”
Shriver, 70, said she felt 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,” she said.
In his own words, recorded before his death, Dane explained simply and powerfully why he kept writing.
“I wake up every morning and I’m immediately reminded 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 hard ones, the ones I never took for granted, so that if nothing else, people who read it will remember what it means to live with 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 his life, from the early years painting his way through Hollywood and finding his footing in sobriety, to the profound shift in perspective that came with his diagnosis.
As he put it, “Our days are all we really have.”
Much of the book was written with his two daughters, Billie, 15, and Georgia, 14, in mind.
The girls’ mother, the actress Rebecca Gayheart, stood by Dane throughout his illness.
The couple had married in 2004 before Gayheart filed for divorce in 2018, but she called things off last March, explaining that she wanted to show their daughters how to stand up for family “when times are worst”, while noting that she and Dane had not lived together for eight years.
