Oscar-nominated actor Jeremy Renner was as close to death as one can get after his 2023 snowplow accident in Tahoe, as he describes in his new memoir My Next Breath — and he may have, in fact, briefly died.

Jeremy Renner was severely, almost fatally injured on New Year's Day in the Tahoe area in 2023 when he was run over by a 14,000-pound PistenBully snowplow that he owns. At the time, he was attempting to save his then-27-year-old nephew Alex Fries from getting crushed by the plow, and was trying to climb into it to keep it from rolling or sliding when the accident occurred.

He broke over 30 bones, but ultimately recovered from the accident and has recently gotten back to acting, and his memoir about the accident and his recovery, My Next Breath, has just been released.

"I didn't want to write it," Renner says of the new book, speaking on CBS Mornings this morning. "I just don't think it was valuable in my life because I lived it. It was a private incident that happened in my driveway. Why does anybody care about it?"

But, he adds, "Getting out of your own way is important to achieving, getting anything you want in your life. That's the lesson I had to learn. It was silly of me not to share it."

Renner's description of nearly dying, or maybe briefly dying, while waiting 45 minutes for paramedics to arrive, is both psychedelic and dramatic.

"As I lay on the ice, my heart rate slowed, and right there, on that New Year’s Day, unknown to my daughter, my sisters, my friends, my father, my mother, I just got tired," he writes. "After about thirty minutes on the ice of breathing manually for so long, an effort akin to doing ten or twenty push-­ups per minute for half an hour ... that’s when I died."

He says he learned from EMTs that his "heart rate had bottomed out at 18," which means he was, "basically dead," and he writes, "I know I died — in fact, I’m sure of it."

And he provides a description familiar to the near-death-experience genre: "When I died, what I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy. There was no time, place, or space, and nothing to see, except a kind of electric, two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy. I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once. In death there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever."

Then, he says, when he "didn't fucking die," "the celebration of New Year [became] a recognition of the depth of the love in our family."

He said on CBS Mornings today that the experience gave him a new perspective on everything.

"I think it's a way of zooming out and focusing," he says. "What do I give value to? It's changed since the accident. There's a lot of white noise I've released. I oversimplify life because it is just that simple. Living in that space is quite peaceful, [a] joyful, clean life."

Renner is a two-time Oscar nominee, for 2010's The Hurt Locker and 2011's The Town. He appears in the Paramount+ series The Mayor of Kingstown, now in its fourth season, and he will be appearing in the upcoming third installment of Knives Out.

Top image: Jeremy Renner poses in the portrait studio during the Red Sea International Film Festival 2024 on December 10, 2024 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for The Red Sea International Film Festival)