Joe Manganiello’s Bloodlines illuminates his brutal health battle and journey to become Mt. Lebanon’s Dungeon Master

Joe Manganiello wants you to judge his new book, Bloodlines, by its cover. Manganiello told photographer Lee Jeffries, who shot the cover photo, “I’ve been through a life-changing experience, and I need you to take a picture of the real me, and show me who I am after I’ve gone through all of this.”  The True Blood actor and Pittsburgh native met Jeffries in Helsinki on a trip to see Metallica perform. Jeffries was shooting the heavy metal band’s concert there. “You could see into their souls through their eyes and the lives that they had lived, every line on their face, and there’s no makeup and no lighting,” Manganiello tells Pittsburgh City Paper of Jeffries’ photos. Jeffries has also shot portraits of unhoused people in similar fashion. Manganiello subsequently hired Jeffries to shoot the cover of Bloodlines , a memoir that illuminates his nearly decade-long battle with severe autoimmune diseases that attacked multiple parts of his body — and his search for answers. “So, I would say to people, you can judge me by this book,” Manganiello says. Manganiello kept his health issues to himself for years, privately suffering from multiple skin conditions and mouth ulcers, and even had his large intestine amputated, causing him to wear an ostomy bag for a period. Some of the descriptions in the book of what happened to him are The Pitt levels of graphic, which concerned book editors at first. They suggested removing some of the body horror (at one point, Manganiello was suffering from a racquetball-sized fistula in his rectum), but he refused.  “It’s there for a reason, I had to live through that,” he says. “I don’t think you get the full catharsis at the end unless you understand what I went through.” Credit: Courtesy of Simon & Schuster Bloodlines takes readers on an intimate journey with Manganiello as he battles illness while also navigating the end of his marriage to actress Sofía