Joe Manganiello’s New Memoir Details the End of His Marriage to Sofia Vergara but ‘That’s Not the Point of the Book’

Manganiello tells PEOPLE he wrote his new memoir ‘Bloodlines’ (out Oct. 13) “because I want people to know who I am, and I had to hide who I was for a very long time”

Joe Manganiello is revealing that he battled a near-fatal autoimmune disease for seven of the last ten years in his new memoir Bloodlines, out Oct. 13.

In the book, Manganiello also chronicles the end of his seven-year marriage to Modern Family star Sofía Vergara, first noting that symptoms of his illness began shortly after the pair wed in 2015.

The downward spiral of his health started with excruciating abdominal pain that left him unable to walk as his digestive tract ulcerated, along with fevers, blistering rashes, headaches and fatigue. He even began bleeding from his rectum while he was still a newlywed.

“I was getting sicker and sicker,” he tells PEOPLE, likening the cascade of illness to a “gremlin in the control room of my body flipping switches.”

Over the course of the next seven years, Manganiello lost 60 lbs., underwent countless colonoscopies, and in one emergency surgery in 2016, had part of his intestines removed, leaving him unable to go to the bathroom normally and relying on an ostomy bag.

Vergara was by his bedside then, and Manganiello explains in an excerpt from Bloodlines that she was even the one to make the life-saving call to amputate part of his intestines while he was in surgery.

As Manganiello continued to cycle through hospitals searching for answers, his illness took an increasing toll on his marriage, which he writes had eventually “become devoid of any emotionality whatsoever.”

He claims in the book that Vergara refused to hug him even when he begged and that she ridiculed him for his 5-lb. chihuahua Bubbles, a then-sickly pup Manganiello had adopted in 2019 when he was considering suicide. “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,” he says of how Bubbles helped him find renewed purpose.

The couple’s dream of having a child together had also been dashed in the face of Manganiello’s illness. Vergara would later tell a Spanish newspaper that their marriage “broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids, and I didn’t want to be an old mom.”

But Manganiello says he had given up on fatherhood because of his illness. After failed IVF attempts led the couple to consider egg donors, he didn’t want to die and leave Vergara with a child “who wasn’t biologically hers.” Writing this book was his way of correcting the record: “There were things said and printed about me that were false,” Manganiello says.

He maintains that writing about his split in Bloodlines was “not the point of the book,” but rather necessary to illustrate his path to eventual healing both physically and mentally. “I tell the truth in the book, even when it’s super painful,” he tells PEOPLE. “It is [also] nuanced, and it’s not something that fits into a sound bite. This book was written because I want people to know who I am, and I had to hide who I was for a very long time.”

Reps for Vergara have not responded to request for comment.

Manganiello, who believes he eventually found remission through a Santa Monica shaman who told him generational trauma was to blame, says he’s now off medication and symptom-free. He’s also gearing up for a milestone 50th birthday in December, and he’s engaged to fiancée Caitlin O’Connor, 37, whom he met after he filed for divorce in 2023.

“Caitlin came into my life at this point where it was obvious to me that [she] was the direction to go,” Manganiello says. Together the couple are navigating a future—possibly one with children. “If that’s meant for me,” Manganiello adds. “For seven years I thought I was going to be dead the next week. The world has opened back up to me.”

Via: People