Prince Memoir Coming Out

The memoir that Prince was working on at the time of his death is coming out October 29, according to the Associated Press. Publisher Penguin Random House confirmed that The Beautiful Ones would combine Prince’s unfinished manuscript with rare photos, scrapbooks and lyrics.

Announced just weeks before his 2016 death, the 288-page book, issued in partnership with the late artist’s estate, will include an introduction by New Yorker writer Dan Piepenbring, whom Prince had chosen as a collaborator. In 2018, literary agent Esther Newberg told Variety that Prince had completed more than 50 handwritten pages.

Penguin Random House announced, “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 the time 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. Piepen bring’s introduction will touch upon Prince’s final days, “a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated,” according to the announcement. Prince died in April of 2016 of an accidental drug overdose.