What to Know
Joe Manganiello has been quietly fighting a serious health battle for years, but he hasn’t opened up about it until now. Ahead of the release of his upcoming memoir, Bloodlines, the 49-year-old actor revealed his seven-year experience with life threatening health issues and how it sent him on a journey of discovering his own family roots and where he came from.
Joe’s health battle began with “a cascade of autoimmune-related illnesses.”
According to People, Joe’s new book will detail everything he went through over a seven year time period that included “chronic pain, a life-saving organ amputation, existential crisis and a prolonged fight for survival that left doctors with few answers and no clear explanation.”
After facing “multiple near-death experiences and medical crises,” Joe found himself on a “remarkable, globe-spanning quest that revealed answers about his ancestry, inherited trauma and the deeper histories we carry.”
By looking back through his own bloodlines, he discovered he was hardly the first in his family to struggle with chronic illness.
So far, Joe hasn’t shared many details about what his health battle entailed (or what organ was amputated in the process), but maybe he’s saving all of that for fans to read about in his book when it hits stores later this year.
He called the experience “brutally difficult.”
In a statement to People, Joe said even though he wouldn’t want even his “worst enemy” to experience what he has, at the same time, it has been his “greatest adventure.”
“I hope that what I went through on this journey can give readers hope that answers and healing may lie for them on the other side of whatever they are fighting through,” he said. “The process of writing this book gave me the gift of perspective that helped me to see that my suffering was a cocoon from which I would emerge forever changed.”
Joe does seem to have come out on the other side in a very positive place. Last year, he got engaged to Caitlin O’Connor, and this fall, he’ll be able to celebrate the release of his book, which is obviously very personal for him.
Bloodlines is out on October 13.
When Joe announced his upcoming memoir in a post on Instagram on June 23, he shared the book cover for the first time — a black and white close up photo of his face.
“BLOODLINES is my untold story of survival, documenting my near-decade long struggle with a mysterious illness,” he wrote in his caption. “My search for answers took me from death’s door, around the globe, and back through time, in the hopes of understanding why i suffered, and to find the strength to continue on.”
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