Eric Dane will continue to speak in his own words long after his death, with his posthumous memoir set for release later this year, a book he made a point of finishing after being diagnosed with ALS in 2023.
Penguin Random House announced on Thursday that My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments will be published on 3rd November through Maria Shriver’s imprint, The Open Field.
Dane died on 19th February at the age of 53, following a ten-month battle with the neurodegenerative disease.
The publisher confirmed he “was working on the manuscript right up to the end,” and that releasing 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 felt honoured 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 illness, 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 heart. If sharing this helps someone find meaning in their own days, then my story is worth telling.”
The memoir covers the full arc of his life, from the early years grinding 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 truly have.”
Much of the book is written with his two daughters, Billie, 15, and Georgia, 14, in mind.
The girls’ mother, actress Rebecca Gayheart, stood by Dane throughout his illness.
The pair had married in 2004 before Gayheart filed for divorce in 2018, but she called off the proceedings last March, explaining that she wanted to show their daughters how to show up for family “when times are at their worst,” while noting that she and Dane had not lived together for eight years.
