Amanda Peet's Journey through Breast Cancer and Family Loss

American actress and producer Amanda Peet opened up about the difficulties and hardships she had faced in her life in an emotional post in The New Yorker. The essay, titled My Season of Ativan, follows the 54 year-old actress’s journey as she navigates a cancer diagnosis while both her parents were in hospice.

The Your Friends and Neighbours star shared in her essay, published on March 21, that she had been going for regular check-ups as she had dense breasts which required close monitoring. During one of her routine scans, her doctor noticed something odd. The preliminary report from a subsequent biopsy confirmed the presence of a small tumor.

The loss of her father

While anxiously waiting for her final biopsy results, she received news of her father’s passing. Peet’s parents, divorced, were both in hospice on opposite coasts at that time. Upon hearing the news, she immediately flew to New York to visit him.

“I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment. My sister, who is a doctor and usually the stoic one, wept. I just stood there in a state of morbid fascination,” she wrote.

Peet also shared that she felt guilty as she “tried to stop thinking about myself” but she struggled with processing her cancer diagnosis. “As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again. In a few minutes, he would be carted away forever. My mind should’ve been flooded with memories,” she added.

Test results

A few days later, Peet received her biopsy results. Her results returned favourable as she found out that she was hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative. This meant that her cancer was more treatable.

“You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy. I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer. But after about ten minutes I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror,” she wrote. She added that her cancer was in the early stages and was likely to be stage 1 breast cancer.

Following the preliminary report, Peet had to undergo an MRI scan to determine the extent of the disease. While the scan did not indicate any lymph node spread, her radiologist discovered a second mass on the same breast. As a result, she had to delay undergoing a lumpectomy. Fortunately, the mass turned out to be benign, which meant that her treatment involved undergoing a lumpectomy and radiation therapy instead of a double mastectomy or chemotherapy.

She shared that her experience with radiation therapy “wasn’t bad”, adding that the last stretch was the worst “when my nipple became charred and blistered, like an over-roasted marshmallow”. Peet is now in recovery as she had her first “clear scan” at the end of 2025.

The loss of her mother

Two weeks after her first clear scan, Peet received news that her mother “was going to die in a matter of days”. Her mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease prior to entering hospice care.

“When she entered hospice, we stopped all twenty-three of her medications. She became emaciated and paralyzed. She could move her face and swallow, but nothing more,” Peet wrote.

Peet spent time with her mother in her final days. She wrote emotionally about the final moments with her mother.

“I wasn’t sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting, disembodied shapes. I said ‘howdy doodle’—that’s how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything.”