Prince Memoir To Be Released on October 29

Only a few weeks before his death in 2016, Prince announced during a performance in Manhattan that he was working on a memoir. At that time very little else was known. When he passed away, the feeling was that the memoir would never be released, because as far as anyone knew it was no where near completed. Random House confirmed yesterday however that the book was indeed coming, and that it would be released on October 29.

The memoir, called The Beautiful Ones, may not be complete, but it is still 288 pages, and will contain rare photos, scrapbooks and lyrics. Dan Piepenbring will write the introduction, who Prince had chosen to be his collaborator, and it has the full backing of the Prince Estate. Prince’s literary agent had stated in 2018 that Prince had completed more than 50 handwritten pages before his death.

In the announcement, Random House stated that “’The Beautiful Ones’ is the deeply personal account of how Prince Rogers Nelson became the Prince we know: the real-time story of a kid absorbing the world around him and creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and the fame that would come to define him. The book will span from Prince’s childhood to his early years as a musician to the cusp of international stardom, using Prince’s own writings, a scrapbook of his personal photos, and the original handwritten lyric sheets for many of his most iconic songs, which he kept at Paisley Park. The book depicts Prince’s evolution through deeply revealing, never-before-shared images and memories and culminates with his original handwritten treatment for his masterwork, ’Purple Rain.”’ Random House also released the cover image seem above.

Prince died on April 21, 2016, at the age of 57, almost three years before Random House made the announcement.