Jennifer Love Hewitt "needed time" before she could speak about her mother's death.

The 45-year-old actress lost her mom Patricia Mae in 2012 when she passed away following a battle with cancer and it has taken her more than a decade to address her grief publicly through her new book 'Inheriting Magic'.

She told UsWeekly: "I think I needed time to get past a certain amount of grief before I could write about [my mom's death]. Before I could kind of step outside of it enough to tell people about it. It was this sort of out-of-body experience of, 'Oh wow, I'm this person and I live in this world where people find out about these things,' you know? It was made public in the trenches of me figuring out, like, 'Is this real? Is she really not here? And what happens to my life now?' Because of that, I could never really find the words publicly to know what to say."

The 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' star tied the knot with Brian Hallisay the following year and went on to have Autumn, 10, Atticus, nine as well as three-year-old Aidan with him and noted that it is really since she became a mother herself has she been able to "get through the pain" of grief to be able to open up on her mother's death.

She said: "I think that in having my children and getting married and starting my family and starting to realize how much she was still here in these like magical little ways for me, I was like, 'Oh, that's what I wanna say about [my mom]! That's what I needed to say. But I think I just had to get through enough of the pain part of it to be ready.."