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While most celebrity memoirs are filled with explosive revelations, by Sam Neill seems to include the ultimate. The 75-year-old Australian actor has revealed he’s ‘may be dying’ after being diagnosed with stage 3 blood cancer in his upcoming tome, Have I told you this before? The first chapter of the book, due out on Tuesday, March 21, includes the opening, “The thing is, I’m a crook. Maybe dying, maybe I should speed things up,” according to The Guardian.
THE jurassic park the actor shared with the outlet that he was diagnosed with the rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after discovering swollen lymph nodes last March while doing press for Jurassic World Dominion. After standard chemotherapy failed, Sam tried a new chemotherapy drug, which he will likely take every month for the rest of his life. And he was incredibly lucky with that: Sam is currently cancer-free!
“I can’t pretend that last year didn’t have its dark moments,” he said. The Guardian. “But those dark times bring out the light, you know, and made me grateful for every day and immensely grateful for all my friends. I’m just glad to be alive.
The memoirs proved a silver lining for the cancer diagnosis, as he began writing them to fill in 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 like to work. I love going to work. I like to be with people every day and enjoy human company and friendship and all those things. And suddenly I was deprived of it. And I thought, ‘what am I going to do?’
Sam went on to say that he never had “any intention” of writing memoirs, even after living an incredible life in Hollywood. “But as I continued to write I realized that it actually gave me a reason to live and I would go to bed thinking, ‘I’ll write about this tomorrow…it’ll entertain me'” , he explained to The Guardian. “And so it really saved my life, because I couldn’t have gone through that without doing anything, you know.”
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