Sarah Paulson has praised Amanda Peet for her “profoundly gorgeous” essay about her breast cancer diagnosis.
Sarah Paulson has praised Amanda Peet
The American Horror Story actress is very proud of her friend after she opened up about juggling her own health struggles with caring for her dying parents, and urged as many people as possible to familiarise themselves with Amanda’s story.
Sarah wrote on Instagram: “My best friend, Amanda Peet … has written the most profoundly gorgeous essay about the loss of her parents, while dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis.
“@newyorkermag has published it today, and I’m screaming from the rooftops with joy. I hope you all take the time to read it.
“If you are running around and doing other stuff, I did the audio recording and you can listen to me try to do the piece justice. My friend is a @newyorkermag essayist. How outrageously groovy is that? Bird, I love you beyond.(sic)”.
In her essay, Amanda explained she had undergone regular six-monthly checkups due to having “dense” and “busy” breasts but she was sent for an ultrasound and biopsy following one of her routine appointments in August 2025.
The following morning, Amanda received a text from her doctor, who told her she had a tumour that “appeared” small, but would need a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan to determine “the extent of disease”.
She added in her New Yorker piece: “On Tuesday, we would also learn my receptor status, which indicates how tough your strain of cancer is. ‘It’s like dogs,’ she explained. ‘You have poodles on one end and, on the other, pit bulls.’
Amanda told her “two oldest friends” and her husband David Benioff but initially held off on telling their kids, Frances, 18, Molly, 15, and Henry, 11, because there was “nothing definitive to say”.
During this time, Amanda’s divorced parents Penny and Charles were in hospice care, and that same weekend, her dad died.
Referring to her sister, who is a doctor, she said: “Our parents, long divorced, were both in hospice, on opposite coasts. Our mother’s had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first.
“I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment.
“As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again.”
The Your Friends and Neighbors cast member and her sister – who privately told their stepmom about Amanda’s breast cancer diagnosis – returned to Los Angeles to care for their mom, Penny.
The siblings decided not to tell Penny about Charles’ death or Amanda’s breast cancer because she was in the final stages of her battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Amanda took anxiety medication as she awaited her results,
She recalled: “I sucked on little chips of Ativan all day, but my blood pressure was so jacked they didn’t even register.”
The Saving Silverman actress was told the cancer would be treatable: “Dr K texted, ‘All poodle features!’
Amanda then learnt that she was “hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative”.
She remembered: “You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy. I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer.”
But “after about 10 minutes”, Amanda reverted back to “baseline terror” after it clicked that she still needed an MRI scan.
The radiologist found a “second mass in the same breast” and “ordered an MRI-guided biopsy, which is when a tumour sample is extracted while you’re inside the big white imaging doughnut”.
Following the procedure, the doctor told Amanda that “it was fifty-fifty whether or not there was more cancer”.
The star breathed a sigh of relief two days later when they “found out that the second mass was benign, and that I would only need a lumpectomy and radiation, not a double mastectomy or chemo”, and Amanda told her children about her health ordeal.
But a fortnight after Amanda’s “first clear scan” in January, she had to make funeral arrangements as the hospice nurse told her that Penny “was going to die in a matter of days”.
