By the time Prince died in 2016, he had completed 50 hand-written pages of his memoir, titled "The Beautiful Ones." The memoir, filled out with photos and other material, will be published by Random House on October 29. From the Associated Press:
″‘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,” Random House announced.
“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.’”
(Prince's collaborator on the book Dan) Piepenbring’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.” Piepenbring, whom Prince had called “my brother Dan” and “not a yes man at all,” is a Paris Review advisory editor who also contributes to The New Yorker.