For seven years, Joe Manganiello was quietly fighting for his life. His new memoir tells the full story: the disease, the marriage he says grew cold, and the dog that arrived just when he needed a reason.
The Magic Mike and True Blood star, 49, lays it all out in his upcoming memoir Bloodlines, revealing a mysterious autoimmune condition that nearly killed him across seven years, per excerpts obtained by People, and claiming his then-wife Sofía Vergara refused to hug him while he was sick. Their marriage, he writes, had “become devoid of any emotionality whatsoever” during his health crisis.
The illness arrived almost immediately after the fairy tale. Not long after their lavish 2015 wedding, he writes, the symptoms began piling up: abdominal pain, digestive-tract ulcers, fevers, rashes, headaches, and crushing fatigue. Emergency surgery followed in 2016, and over seven years he lost 60 pounds and had part of his intestines removed. Treatments for Crohn’s and colitis failed, leaving him managing pain with hydrocodone, fentanyl patches, and marijuana.
The memoir’s hardest, most hopeful passage is about survival itself. At his lowest, he writes, “I had to give my gun away because I kept thinking about it, and then the dog came. I went from being the patient to the caretaker.” The puppy, he says, is the one Vergara allegedly ridiculed him over.
The marriage claims are entirely his telling, and Vergara has not responded to the excerpts. Her documented account of the 2023 split has long been on record: they parted, she has said, because he wanted children and she did not want to be an “old mom.“
His memoir counters that timeline: he writes he had abandoned the idea of kids while sick, after failed IVF rounds had the couple considering egg donors, because he did not want to die and leave Vergara raising a child “who wasn’t biologically hers.“
The title is the thesis. When medications “only made matters worse,” per his telling, his search took him “from death’s door, around the globe, and back through time,” including guidance from shamans, and into his own ancestry: the memoir traces his bloodline to great-grandmother Terviz Darakjian, a survivor of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, exploring whether generational trauma shaped his health. He calls the ordeal “my greatest adventure.“
The story lands somewhere good. Surgery eventually reconnected his digestive tract, and Manganiello says he is now symptom-free and off his meds entirely, writing from the other side of a war almost nobody knew he was fighting.
The Patient Who Became the Caretaker
The replies ran ugly, heavy on gender-war content and worse; the printable minority was small. “I’m Colombian and I believe him,” offered one deadpan, while another made it relatable: “I was married twice. Both wives would get mad whenever I got sick.“
Seven years, 60 pounds, one marriage, and a disease that took nearly everything but his life. The werewolf of Sunday-night television turned out to be hardest to kill in real life.
The dog came. He stayed. Both of them did.
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