According to recent news reports, Sarah Paulson recently praised her friend Amanda Peet after the actress decided to write an essay regarding her cancer battle.Sarah Paulson took to Instagram on Saturday, March 21, and praised her friend Amanda for writing down an essay elaborating on the loss of her parents in the midst of battling breast cancer. The caption of her Instagram post, which captured the essay's cover, read, "My best friend, Amanda Peet—the weirdest thing in the world is to say her full name out loud, as I call her Bird—but that’s the name her parents gave her. Seems fitting to use here as she 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. "Sarah Paulson subsequently asked her followers to support Amanda Peet's essay."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. Link in my bio", View this post on Instagram Instagram PostAbout Amanda Peet's essayAmanda Peet got candid in her essay titled My Season of Ativan in The New Yorker, released on March 21, 2026. In the essay, Peet revealed that last fall, she was diagnosed with breast cancer while both her parents were in hospice care.She mentioned that on a Friday before Labour Day, she went for a regular scan. Her doctor (Dr.K) did not like the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy to be sure. The doctor found a small tumor and said that the severity of her disease could be determined only after an MRI."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", wrote Amanda in the essayPeet also revealed in her essay that while she was battling the disease, both her parents were on their deathbeds. She further mentioned that she informed her sisters in Philadelphia and her husband, David, who had taken two of their three children, Molly and Henry."We couldn’t tell the kids yet; there was nothing definitive to say. I braced myself to act plucky when Molly and Henry got home from their tournament, but in the end it didn’t matter. My sister called: our father was about to die. 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," wrote Amanda.When Peet got back to Los Angeles, she discovered that her cancer was "HER2-negative" and "hormone-receptor-positive." Just before her mother passed away in January, she had her first "clear scan."