Eric Dane spent part of his final memoir writing about Rebecca Gayheart. My Book of Days was published posthumously on Tuesday, November 3. Us Weekly reports the book traces the couple’s history, from the night he first saw her to the years after their divorce filing.
Eric Dane’s Memoir Released Posthumously on November 3
Eric Dane died earlier this year at age 53. The book arrived months later, and Gayheart runs through it from start to finish.
Us Weekly reported that Dane described the arc in plain terms. Fourteen years of marriage. A slow drift apart. A divorce filing. Papers that never got signed. He wrote that the two of them stayed close afterward, coparenting, taking family vacations and eventually talking every day.
Gayheart filed in 2018. Dane wrote that the papers never got signed.
The Couple’s 14-Year Marriage and Ongoing Connection
Dane and Gayheart married in 2004 and went on to have two daughters. Gayheart filed for divorce in 2018. According to Dane’s account, they then lived separate lives, but the divorce was never finalized.
The memoir also goes back to the beginning. Dane recalled seeing Gayheart at a party in 1999 and telling a friend he was going to marry her. The friend pointed out that the party was for Gayheart’s fiancé at the time. Nearly four years later, the two ran into each other at a coffee shop. Dane wrote that he checked her finger and saw no ring.
Separate lives and daily phone calls rarely fit in the same sentence. Most couples who file for divorce do not finalize it. Dane and Gayheart did the opposite. The legal marriage stalled while the family kept functioning, with vacations, shared parenting and a phone line that stayed open.
Plenty of former couples manage polite. Few manage daily.
Should exes write openly about each other in memoirs?
Support During ALS: ‘I’m Here, We’ll Fight This Together’
Dane was diagnosed with ALS in 2024. Us Weekly reported that Gayheart was one of the first people he called.
He wrote that he told her it was what they had feared, and that he could not remember anything he said after that. What he did remember was Gayheart crying on the other end of the line and then telling him, “I’m here, we’ll fight this together, I’m not going anywhere.”
According to Us Weekly, she supported Dane and their daughters through his illness until his death. In the book, Dane called her his rock and his champion, and wrote that she went beyond keeping her word.
Six years after a divorce filing, she was one of the first people he called. Paperwork says one thing about a relationship. Who picks up the phone on the worst day says another. Dane’s version of the story treats those as two separate questions, and he answered the second one without hesitation.
Dane Expresses Gratitude to Gayheart in Final Acknowledgements
Gayheart appears one last time at the back of the book. In the acknowledgements, Dane addressed her directly: “I can’t thank you enough.”
Five words at the end of a memoir about a marriage that was technically still in effect and practically something else entirely. Eric Dane did not try to label it. He described two people who stopped being a couple and never stopped being a family.
Gayheart has not publicly responded to the memoir’s publication in anything reported by Us Weekly.
Sources: Us Weekly
