Prince’s memoir, documenting his rise from his humble Minneapolis beginnings to international stardom in the 1980s behind mega-hits like “Purple Rain” and “Sign o’ the Times,” is set to come out on Oct. 29.
The memoir will include never-been-seen photos, lyric sheets in Prince’s handwriting, and the pages Prince had started writing before his accidental death from fentanyl in April 2016, according to Random House. The publisher said in a press release Monday morning that it has entered into an “exclusive” partnership with the Prince Estate to handle the book.
The New Yorker’s Dan Piepenbring will write the memoir’s introduction, after he was “handpicked” by Prince to help him on the project, according to Random House.
“The memoir will be framed by Piepenbring’s riveting, moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his 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 — and by annotations that provide context to the book’s images,” Random House said on Monday.
The book should have plenty to cover: Not only did Prince release some of the biggest hit singles of the ’80s, including “Raspberry Beret” and “Kiss,” he was also the writer behind several other chart toppers, including “Manic Monday” from The Bangles and “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinead O’Connor.
“Prince is a towering figure in global culture and his music has been the soundtrack for untold numbers of people — including me — for more than a generation; his creative genius has provided the musical landscape of our lives,” Chris Jackson, the memoir’s editor, said in a statement. “His death was an unfathomable loss, but this book — full of writing from his own hand and images that he carefully preserved at Paisley Park — is a beautiful tribute to his life.”