Amanda Peet: ‘There’s No Algorithm For Grief’
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is Amanda Peet. She's an actress, a producer, and a writer. She's been in films like The Whole Nine Yards and Something's Gotta Give. She's currently starring in Your Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV+. Amanda grew up here in New York City with her sister, Alyssa, who's a doctor, her mom, Penny, who's a psychotherapist, social worker, and her dad, Charles, who was a lawyer. Amanda has three kids now with her husband, David Benioff, who's probably best known for co-creating the TV series Game of Thrones. In late August of 2025, Amanda was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following day, her father died and her mom died some four months later.
I read a moving essay that Amanda wrote in The New Yorker about what happened called My Season of Ativan. We reached out to her and she kindly agreed to talk with me about it. Thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you so much for having me.
Can you talk a little bit about the diagnosis that you got?
I was just blindsided. I mean, it was just one of those things. It was the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and I guess they were watching a spot. I didn't really realize that somehow. And I said, if you were a bedding woman, what would you, what do you think? And she said, I think you have cancer. My doctor was able to call on the Saturday morning to say that, indeed, The quick biopsy had come back and that I had breast cancer, and it was lobular breast cancer. And then that evening, my sister called to tell me that our stepmother had said that my dad was failing. And so I got on the plane, and it was too late. The next morning, he passed away at 6 in the morning.
How long had your dad been sick for?
He had a hard time in the last two years, but he didn't get really sick until he had a fall about six months before this. And then it was pretty quick. The end was really awful. He was very agitated and stuff. But I saw him two weeks before he died, and he was able to talk to me. We went to a restaurant. He was in a wheelchair, but he was able to talk a little bit and eat a little bit.
By the time you got to your dad's place, he had died.
What challenges did Amanda Peet face with her parents' health and her own diagnosis?
Yeah. Yeah. And she was very emotional.
Your sister was, who's a doctor.
How did Amanda cope with her father's death shortly after her cancer diagnosis?
Yeah, but then once we left the apartment, she was more able to be like, his body is just his body. And I was much more like panicked about where his body was going and how it was so impersonal. This was just so impersonal, how they were just taking his body. It's so weird.
These people showed up.
Yes, it's so insane.
You described them as like the Blues Brothers dressed in dark suits and with a body bag.
Yeah. There was something just so rushed about it and so impersonal about it that really was torturous for me, even though I knew he was dead and it was just his body. It was, I think, much easier to... for my sister to be more clinical about it once his body left the building. And I felt this weird sense of like wanting to go save him. Like, who are these people? Like, it was a weird sense of being possessive of him.
Had you felt that before?
No, and definitely not about him. I was much, much closer with my mom. In fact, I feel like now looking back, now that it's been a few months, like I feel like my dad definitely got the short end of the stick in terms of my attentiveness. He was less sensitive and he was more unfazed. So if I couldn't make it to something, I always thought he was kind of like, yeah, whatever. Whereas my mom was more like, well, that'll hurt my feelings if you don't come to that.
I want to ask you about a couple of specific things you wrote about. You talked about your sister weeping, seeing your father's body, and you didn't. You said, I just stood there in a state of morbid fascination. I had never seen a dead body up close before, let alone someone so familiar to me. I felt guilty for not crying, but at least I got a reprieve from guessing how much longer I had to live.
I was really at a remove. Like I was watching it from some kind of altitude.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–2:16
2
What challenges did Amanda Peet face with her parents' health and her own diagnosis?
2:16–2:22
3
How did Amanda cope with her father's death shortly after her cancer diagnosis?
2:22–5:08
4
What reflections does Amanda have on the emotional impact of caregiving?
5:08–7:51
5
How did Amanda's relationship with her mother influence her understanding of grief?
7:51–13:24
6
What insights does Amanda share about the process of dying and grief?
13:24–17:15
7
How does Amanda describe the experience of being untethered after losing her parents?
17:15–22:43
8
What lessons about grief does Amanda believe can help others?
22:43–35:30