Jennifer Love Hewitt Turning Grief Into Growth

It's been 12 years since the actress lost her adored mom, but with a new book and TV movie, she faces up to the pain and reveals how tiny gestures and good intentions have brought magic back into her life

- KAT PETTIBONE

Jennifer Love Hewitt believes in magic and no, not the bunny and top-hat kind. "It's just love and goodness, so much that you feel, like, little stars in your heart," the actress, 45, shares in an exclusive interview with Us. "It's setting the intention that you're going to try to make ordinary things just the tiniest bit more special."

Her upcoming book, Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical (out Dec. 10), shares that philosophy as it relates to her family: husband of 11 years Brian Hallisay and their three children, Autumn, 10, Atticus 9, and Aidan, 3, and especially her late mother, Patricia Hewitt, who died in 2012 at age 67 due to complications from cancer. Both the memoir and a new Lifetime movie, The Holiday Junkie (Dec. 14, 8 P.M.) which her character finds a way to keep moving forward in through grief-serve as touching tributes. It took Hewitt more than a decade to speak so candidly, but she's ready to tell her story.