Robert Webb 'predicted' his near-death experience in novel about man with undiagnosed condition

‘I thought at the time it was a work of fiction,’ author says

Robert Webb has suggested he may have subconsciously “predicted” his near-death experience in a novel he had finished writing months earlier.

In October last year, the actor and author was told by doctors that his heart has a prolapsed mitral valve, putting the 47-year-old at risk of a heart attack.

He had just finished editing Come Again, a novel which focuses on a forty-something man who has just died from a disease that was "lurking unseen for years".

“I wrote a book about someone getting a second chance and I thought at the time it was a work of fiction”, Webb writes in The Guardian.

To save his life the actor had to undergo open-heart surgery. Though the condition was caused by a birth defect, Webb mentions that he could have been more careful with his body over the years.

“Hijacked by addiction at some point in the late Noughties, my addled brain was on permanent lookout for the right 'watershed': no more cigarettes after this birthday, no more wine after this breakfast etc," he writes.

The Peep Show star also detailed the process he had to go through in order to get back onto his feet again: “Ahead of me: six nights in hospital, three weeks before I could lift a kettle, four months before I was fit for work, a year of beta blockers to give my heart time to heal… but it was done.”

Webb spoke about his addictions earlier this month in an interview with The Sunday Times, revealing that at one point he was "two days from death" because his alcoholism had exacerbated the undiagnosed heart murmur.

“The drinking crawled up so gradually that I was slow-killing myself. It was certainly an addiction at the end, a dependency,” Webb said.

“I drank a lot of beer, during the day, on my own. I was thinking of it at any given time of the day.”

In 2017, Webb released his critically acclaimed memoir How Not To Be A Boy, which focussed on growing up in working class Lincolnshire and losing his mother at the age of 17.

Come Again is published by Canongate.