Actress Amanda Peet Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Actress Amanda Peet revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in a new essay she wrote about the death of her parents.

In “My Season of Ativan,” published in The New Yorker on Saturday, Peet says she received her diagnosis before Labor Day last year, amid a time when both of her parents were in hospice care on opposite coasts.

“For many years, I’ve been told that I have ‘dense’ and ‘busy’ breasts — not as a compliment but as a warning that they require extra monitoring,” Peet wrote. “I had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups. The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan. Dr. K. usually chatted me up while she examined me, but this time she went silent. She told me that she didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy. After the procedure, she said that she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it to Pathology. That’s when I knew.”

Peet wrote that a preliminary test found a small tumor, requiring MRI and further testing to determine her receptor status. Test results found that the Your Friends & Neighbors actress was hormone-receptor-positive and ‘HER2-negative,’” both of which are more favorable for treatment. 

“You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy,” Peet wrote. “I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer. But after about ten minutes I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror … It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”

The subsequent MRI uncovered a second mass in the same breast, resulting in an “excruciating” biopsy procedure. “As I left, the doctor told me it was 50-50 whether or not there was more cancer,” Peet wrote.
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Fortunately, “Two days later, we found out that the second mass was benign, and that I would only need a lumpectomy and radiation, not a double mastectomy or chemo,” Peet wrote, adding that she had Stage I breast cancer. 

After her radiation treatment, Peet returned a clear scan in January of this year, and soon after began making funeral arrangements for her mother; Peet’s father died in 2025 amid the cancer ordeal. “As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again,” Peet wrote.