Prince’s unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones, is finally set to be released, three years after his death.
Publisher Random House confirmed to the Associated Press on Monday that The Beautiful Ones will be released in October. Spanning from his childhood to his final days as one of the most successful musical acts of all time, the long-awaited memoir will contain Prince’s unfinished manuscript alongside photos from his personal collection, scrapbooks and lyrics, including his original handwritten treatment for his 1984 hit Purple Rain.
When first announcing the book in 2016, just weeks before his death at the age of 57 from an accidental overdose of the painkiller fentanyl, Prince told an audience in New York City that Random House had made him “an offer I can’t refuse” and that it would start with his first memory.
“This is my first [book]. My brother Dan is helping me with it. He’s a good critic and that’s what I need. He’s not a ‘yes’ man at all and he’s really helping me get through this,” he said. “We’re starting from the beginning from my first memory and hopefully we can go all the way up to the Super Bowl.”
In 2018, literary agent Esther Newberg told Variety that Prince had left more than 50 handwritten pages behind.
Random House described The Beautiful Ones as “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 memoir will also include an introduction by New Yorker writer Dan Piepenbring, who had originally been chosen as a collaborator by Prince. Piepenbring’s essay 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”.
The book’s editor, Chris Jackson, called it “a beautiful tribute to his life … It’s a treasure not just for Prince fans but for anyone who wants to see one of our greatest creative artists and original minds at work on his greatest creation: himself.”
