Jim Moret On His ‘Wake-Up Call’: ‘My Attitude Toward Life Is Totally Different’

By Alissa Krinsky 

“In television news, there are ups and downs,” says former CNNer Jim Moret, now Inside Edition‘s chief correspondent and a frequent Larry King Live fill-in host.

Moret writes intimately about life’s highs and lows in his first book, The Last Day of My Life, out yesterday. He takes readers back to 2001, when, having spent nearly a decade at CNN, the Los Angeles-based Moret was told that to stay with the network, he’d need to move to Atlanta to anchor mornings.

Moret was separated from his wife at the time, and decided to stay put to work on the marriage. He and his wife reunited, but Moret’s departure from CNN brought financial consequences. “After I left CNN, there were a couple of years where I didn’t work as much as I thought I would.”

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Moret took out a subprime mortgage on his home to stay afloat — which came back to haunt him a few years later, even after landing his Inside Edition job. Moret became depressed, and contemplated suicide. One day in 2008, his thoughts turned “dark” as he drove along the cliffs of Malibu. “And I thought, you know what, I’m worth more dead than alive,” Moret tells TVNewser, referring to a life insurance policy. “Maybe I should go right over the cliff, it’ll look like an accident.”

But he didn’t. Instead, he saw the moment as “a wake-up call”, and decided to take stock of his life using a new perspective: how would you live if you had only one day left?


“I looked at it in terms of friendship, and love, and passion, and apology,” Moret says. “Who would you apologize to? Forgiveness — who would you forgive? I tried to examine my life from a completely non-financial standpoint, and look at what was really important.”

And so even though his financial problems “aren’t gone”, Moret says his “attitude toward life is totally different, and what I view as important is totally different.”

The book, Moret says, was “a complete labor of love.” It is “really a memoir, but I’m hoping that people will find it uplifting and inspirational…I really look at it as a book of hope.”

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