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While most celebrity memoirs are filled with bombshell revelations, Sam Neill’s appears to include the ultimate one. The Australian actor, 75, revealed he is “possibly dying” following a Stage-3 blood cancer diagnosis in his upcoming tome, Did I Ever Tell You This? The first chapter of the book, due out on Tuesday, March 21, includes the opener, “The thing is, I’m crook. Possibly dying, I may have to speed this up,” according to The Guardian.
The Jurassic Park actor shared with the outlet that he was diagnosed with the rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma after he discovered swollen glands last March while doing press for Jurassic World Dominion. After the standard chemotherapy proved unsuccessful, Sam tried a new chemotherapy drug, which he will likely take monthly for the rest of his life. And he had incredible luck with it: Sam is currently cancer free!
“I can’t pretend that the last year hasn’t had its dark moments,” he told The Guardian. “But those dark moments throw the light into sharp relief, you know, and have made me grateful for every day and immensely grateful for all my friends. Just pleased to be alive.”
The memoir proved a silver lining to the cancer diagnosis, as he started writing it to fill up all the extra time he had during his treatments. “I found myself with nothing to do,” Sam said in the interview. “And I’m used to working. I love working. I love going to work. I love being with people every day and enjoying human company and friendship and all these things. And suddenly I was deprived of that. And I thought, ‘what am I going to do?’
Sam went on to say that he never had “any intention” to write a memoir, even after living an incredible Hollywood life. “But as I went on and kept writing, I realized it was actually sort of giving me a reason to live and I would go to bed thinking, ‘I’ll write about that tomorrow … that will entertain me,’” he explained to The Guardian. “And so it was a lifesaver really, because I couldn’t have gone through that with nothing to do, you know.”
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