Jennifer Love Hewitt found out some personal news regarding her late mother, Patricia, in a very jarring way.
The “I Know What You Did Last Summer” alum is currently promoting her new book, “Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical” — the title of which refers to her mom’s ability to make everybody she met feel special.
“I would be on a very successful television show, we would walk into a restaurant, and people couldn’t care less about me; that was my mother,” she said during a recent event at a Los Angeles bookstore, per the Hollywood Reporter.
“They wanted to know who was the woman that I was standing next to because she was light, she was joy. She made friends with everyone, there was no stranger in the world to her whatsoever.”
During the event, Hewitt shared an anecdote about the strange way she learned of her mom’s death from cancer in 2012.
“The part that I didn’t put in the book is that actually the press knew that my mom had passed before I did,” Hewitt said, according to THR.
Hewitt explained that she had been in Monaco for a TV festival, and was on a flight home when her mother died.
“The flight time with me getting back was so long,” Hewitt said. “It was, like, a 10-and-a-half-hour flight, so by the time I arrived, everybody knew, and it was such a weird thing for me.”
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But the “Heartbreakers” star also jokingly admitted that she learned about a lot of other big surprises in her life through media reports — even her love life.
“Even breakups, people have been like: ‘He was cheating on you already.’ Really, people? Like, why didn’t you tell me?!”
Last year, Hewitt honored her mother on the anniversary of her death with a post on Instagram.
“11 years ago my life changed in a moment,” Hewitt wrote at the time. “We didn’t get to say goodbye but I think it’s because we wouldn’t have known how.”