Sofía Vergara blamed their divorce on Joe Manganiello wanting kids — his memoir says he refused
Joe Manganiello's reason has nothing to do with age, and the book even credits Sofía Vergara with signing off on the surgery that saved his life. The only word from her side so far is a chart in her son's Instagram Stories that never names him.
Joe Manganiello's memoir Bloodlines came out on 13 October 2026 through Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Officially, it is a book about a seven-year autoimmune illness that doctors could not pin down, which cost him 60 pounds (about 27kg) and part of his intestines. In practice, the excerpts that ran the week before publication were mostly about his marriage to Sofía Vergara, and one of them rewrites the reason it ended.
The version everyone already knew
The couple married in November 2015 and announced their divorce in July 2023. Vergara gave her explanation six months later, in a January 2024 interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, and it has been the official story ever since.
"My marriage broke up because my husband was younger, he wanted to have kids, and I didn't want to be an old mom."
— Sofía Vergara, El País, January 2024
She added that she had a son at 19 and was ready to be a grandmother, not a mother. It was a tidy explanation with no villain in it: two people wanting different things, nobody to blame.
For nearly three years, every article about either of them repeated it. Manganiello, to be fair, mostly said nothing.
What the book says instead
According to the excerpts, the couple did try for a baby, and the order of events Manganiello describes runs the other way:
- IVF: several attempts, none successful.
- An egg donor: the next option, and one the couple discussed.
- His decision: Manganiello says he dropped it. He was getting sicker, feared he would die, and did not want to leave Vergara raising a child "who wasn't biologically hers".
Not because he had gone off the idea of fatherhood, but because he did not expect to be around for it. That is a very different story from a younger husband desperate for children.
In his version, the husband who supposedly wanted children is the one who said no to the last chance of having them.
The rest of the excerpts are less generous. He writes that the marriage became "devoid of any emotionality", that Vergara refused to hug him, and that she mocked the Chihuahua he adopted during the worst of the illness. He also credits her with approving, as his next of kin, the surgery that saved his life. Vergara has not addressed any of it, and her representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Read more: Amanda Seyfried stripped at 19 to keep her job: now a whole series isn't worth it
The reply came from her son
The first public response did not come from Vergara at all. On 8 October, the day after the first excerpts landed, her son Manolo, 35, posted a chart to his Instagram Stories comparing a "good man" with a "narcissistic man". The next day Vergara reposted it. Neither of them named Manganiello.
On 12 October, the day before publication, Gayle King put it to him on CBS Mornings: "Her son posted a thing about, 'This is what happens when you deal with a narcissistic man,' and she has liked that post." Manganiello's answer was that anyone who said that "should read the book first and understand what the book is actually about because it's not about that. It's about the suffering I went through."
Not everyone was convinced. The top comment on the r/entertainment thread went straight for it: "'it's about the suffering I went through' is the kind of thing a narcissist would say." Another popular reply reckons the whole spat is a publicity exercise for the book, which is a bit of a stretch, though a memoir about a gut disease does not usually get a morning-show grilling.
The book is out now, and Vergara has nearly three years of interviews built on the "old mom" line. So far, the only rebuttal on the record is a chart in her son's Instagram Stories. Those disappear after 24 hours.