*Joe Manganiello is opening up about the darkest chapter of his life, and his ex-wife, Sofía Vergara, doesn’t come off well.
In his upcoming memoir, “Bloodlines,” the “True Blood” star alleges Vergara mocked the tiny dog that helped him through a suicidal crisis. He also claims she wouldn’t embrace him, no matter how much he pleaded. By then, he writes, their marriage had “become devoid of any emotionality whatsoever,” according to excerpts PEOPLE obtained.
Manganiello also uses the book to challenge Vergara’s public account of their split. As Page Six noted, she has blamed the breakup on his wish to start a family.
“My marriage broke up because my husband was younger, he wanted to have kids, and I didn’t want to be an old mom,” Vergara previously said, adding, “I feel it’s not fair to the baby.”
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Manganiello tells a different story. His near-fatal autoimmune disease had already pushed fatherhood off the table. When IVF failed and the couple considered egg donors, he feared dying and leaving Vergara with a child “who wasn’t biologically hers.”
“There were things said and printed about me that were false,” he said.
The illness took hold during the marriage. “I was getting sicker and sicker,” he recalled. In 2016, an emergency operation cost him part of his intestines and left him using an ostomy bag.
Manganiello credits Vergara with authorizing that procedure while he was on the operating table. Over the next seven years, he lost 60 pounds and endured repeated colonoscopies. Bubbles came into his life in 2019, when he was contemplating suicide. The five-pound Chihuahua gave him someone to care for.
“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 told PEOPLE.
Today, Manganiello says he is symptom-free and no longer on medication. He credits his remission to a Santa Monica shaman, who told him generational trauma was the root cause.
He insists the divorce is not the heart of the memoir. “I tell the truth in the book, even when it’s super painful,” he told People. “It is [also] nuanced, and it’s not something that fits into a sound bite.”
“Bloodlines” hits shelves October 13.
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