Amanda Peet's intimate essay revealing cancer is 'way to cope a little'

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Amanda Peet is giving insight into what inspired her recent revelatory essay for The New Yorker.

In the piece published on March 21, the 54-year-old actress chronicles her previously undisclosed breast cancer diagnosis, which coincided with both of her parents dying in hospice care.

“The truth is, I really didn't have an agenda that I can point to,” Peet tells USA TODAY in an interview ahead of the return of Apple TV+’s “Your Friends & Neighbors” on April 3. “I don't really know exactly why I started writing. I tried to write over the last 15 years or so. But I'm sure it was some kind of way to cope a little bit and to try to make sense of something that I couldn't make sense of.”

Amanda Peet: The actress says she battled breast cancer as both of her parents died

Peet explains in the essay that on Aug. 29, 2025, she went in for “a routine scan,” as she has every six months to monitor her “ ‘dense’ and ‘busy’ breasts.” At the appointment, her physician discovered a small tumor on an ultrasound. Peet’s dad, Charles D. Peet Jr., died just days later in his New York home. Meanwhile Peet’s mom, Penny (née Levy), who lived with Peet on the West Coast, “was in the final stage of Parkinson’s disease,” Peet writes.