STEVEN COJOCARU has previously talked to ET's MARY HART about the joy and despair he experienced as he underwent a life-saving kidney transplant. Now the ET correspondent sits down with Mary for a two-part gab session about his new book, Glamour, Interrupted: How I Became the Best-Dressed Patient in Hollywood, dropping Tuesday, Jan. 22, which is an in-depth chronicle of his experiences.

"There were moments where my spirit broke," he tells Mary in the first part of the interview airing tonight. "I didn't think that anything could fell me, could attack me that much. But it did. Dialysis sucked the life out of me. I was on a machine. It was harrowing. It was sad. I was flattened as a human being. I really didn't think that I would ever climb up. That was the darkest moment for me."

But somehow Cojo dug down inside and found strength. And even when the doctors told him, "Let's look at reality," he listened to an inner voice which told him: "It's just not my time; I'm not going anywhere."

It was 2004 when the fashion guru was diagnosed with Polycystic Kidney Disease. He admits to Mary that at that time, he hadn't been to a doctor in more than a decade.

"I was in complete denial and thought I was immortal," he says. "I was young, living the Hollywood dream, life in the fast lane. I thought I was untouchable. I was also secretly afraid, deep down inside. I didn't lead a healthy life. I was a chain smoker, I liked a cocktail now and then, I didn't sleep, I didn't eat. For me, a meal was guzzling diet soda."

At the time that he underwent his first surgery in 2005, he had already lost the function of one kidney, with the other soon to follow. He was lucky. He explains that many people in the United States have to wait as long as seven years for a replacement kidney, but he didn't have to. His best friend ABBEY donated one of hers.

Cojo thought he was out of the woods, but then that kidney got Polyoma Virus and had to be removed. It was replaced in October 2005 when his mother donated one of her kidneys.

"When you're just coming out of the transplant, they have to blast you with steroids," he explains. "This is a very serious matter that I don't think people understand. Besides ballooning and all the esteem issues there, mentally, I felt like I was jumping out of my skin. It was the closest I have ever felt to some kind of mental health issue."

Cojo recalls that time as being very dark, and in hindsight, he is ashamed of how he treated his parents: "The slightest thing would set me off."

Today, he is on a much smaller does of steroids, and he has undergone therapy to help him deal with his experience. There is joy back in his life.

"The lights are on," he tells Mary. "I don't feel like the lights were on before. I never asked to be a role model, I never asked to be thrust into this position, but I am. I want to bring awareness to kidney disease. The whole experience opened my eyes. I never thought in a million years that I would be actually satisfied with what I have, which are great teeth and good hair. And an amaaaaazzzzing wardrobe!"