Eric Dane named the long list of drugs he abused in his 20s in a posthumous memoir, while also recalling how his young daughter pulled him from the water after his ALS diagnosis.
Page Six reported that the “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Euphoria” actor laid out the addiction he fought during what he called his “dark period” in “My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments,” set for release Nov. 3.
Dane died Feb. 19 at 53, less than a year after announcing his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis diagnosis in 2025. His death certificate listed respiratory failure, with ALS as the underlying cause.
ALS is a progressive nervous system disease that attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Dane is survived by his wife, Rebecca Gayheart, and their daughters, Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14.
An excerpt obtained by People shows Dane did not soften the record of those years.
He wrote that the decade was defined less by work than by getting high.
"I call that my dark period. I auditioned for a few roles, got cast in some, but mainly I did drugs,"
He went further, listing the substances without apology or gloss.
"I got high, I got stoned, I got wasted, I shot up, I freebased, I did every drug imaginable,"
The partial inventory covered nearly every category then available.
"Here’s a partial list: Booze, pot, acid. Heroin. Cocaine. Mushrooms. Mescaline. Crystal meth. Crack. Painkillers. Fistfuls of painkillers. Buckets of painkillers. Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin, you name it, everything on the market,"
He added the benzodiazepines, muscle relaxers, and stimulants, Xanax, Valium, Adderall, Ritalin, and closed the accounting with a blunt line: he did not think there was a drug he had not tried.
Elsewhere in the memoir, Dane described a family vacation to Antigua after the 2025 ALS diagnosis. In the water, he lost the ability to swim. His youngest daughter, Georgia, then 14, saved him from drowning.
The moment sits beside the drug chapters as a plain record of what the disease had already taken from him, and what his family still had to give.
Dane’s career had run from “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Last Ship” to “Euphoria.” The memoir now arrives after his death as his own account of the years before fame steadied him and the illness that ended it.
Readers looking for tidy redemption arcs will not find one forced onto the page. Dane put the list in print, named the daughter who kept him alive that day in Antigua, and left the rest for the record he would not live to promote.
A man who once tried every drug on the market still owed the plain truth to the people who pulled him back, and to the readers who will meet him only after he is gone.
