The Beautiful Ones

The Beautiful Ones is an unfinished memoir by the musician Prince, edited by Dan Piepenbring and published posthumously. Assembled from Prince's handwritten pages, archival photographs, lyric drafts, and Piepenbring's account of their brief collaboration, the book traces Prince's origins from childhood through the creation of Purple Rain, the 1984 film and album that made him a global icon.

The book opens with an extended introduction by Piepenbring, an editor at the literary magazine The Paris Review, who recounts his final phone conversation with Prince on April 17, 2016, four days before Prince's death. Prince called to reassure Piepenbring that he was fine despite press reports; days earlier, his plane had made an emergency landing after a performance in Atlanta, part of a solo tour called Piano & A Microphone, and he had been hospitalized in Moline, Illinois. When Piepenbring expressed sympathy about the flu, Prince corrected him: He had "flu-like symptoms," a clarification Piepenbring would dwell on for months. Prince steered the conversation to the memoir, raising "cellular memory," the idea that bodies inherit parental memories. He explained that his father valued order while his mother craved spontaneity, and that their conflict lived within him, inspiring his creativity.

Piepenbring traces the project's origins to late 2014, when Prince's manager and attorney, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, sought a literary agent. Prince initially approved a book of annotated lyrics, but the deal stalled. By late 2015, the concept had expanded to include unpublished sketches, photos, and ephemera. The project coincided with a reflective turn in Prince's music: After touring with his band 3RDEYEGIRL, he elected to perform alone, envisioning intimate piano shows at Paisley Park, his sprawling private complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota. Friends falling ill made him conscious of mortality and determined to tell his story.

On January 11, 2016, Prince invited three competing editors to Paisley Park. Charming and self-deprecating, he declared he wanted to write a memoir titled The Beautiful Ones, after one of his most emotionally exposed songs. The story would focus on his mother, whose gaze was the first he ever saw. He explained that songwriting was fundamentally aspirational: He wrote music to imagine and reimagine himself, creating a persona through which he could become the person he envisioned. He then performed his first Piano & A Microphone show at Paisley Park, weaving childhood memories into his music. Within days, he chose Chris Jackson of Spiegel & Grau as his editor.

Piepenbring, a twenty-nine-year-old with no published books, submitted a personal statement about his relationship to Prince's music. Prince, who had rejected high-profile candidates in favor of an improvisational partner, invited Piepenbring to Paisley Park the next day. Their first meeting, on January 29, was initially frosty: Prince challenged Piepenbring's opening line about feeling like he was breaking the law listening to Prince's music, insisting his work was rooted in harmony. The conversation warmed, touching on race, creativity, and the music industry. Prince told Piepenbring bluntly that Piepenbring could not write the book because he needed to have felt racism. Yet when Piepenbring observed that the music industry had modeled itself on book publishing, Prince was galvanized. He drove Piepenbring to his hotel and invited him to a concert at Paisley Park that evening.

Prince never officially hired Piepenbring. Instead, Ellis-Lamkins wrote that Prince wanted Piepenbring to join the Piano & A Microphone tour in Melbourne, Australia. Piepenbring arrived on February 16. Prince called under the alias Peter Bravestrong with sad news: Denise Matthews, known as Vanity, a former lover who had fronted the group Vanity 6, had died at age fifty-seven. That evening, Prince dedicated the show to her. The next day, Piepenbring found roughly thirty pages of handwritten memoir in Prince's hotel suite, covering Prince's childhood beginning with his first memory: his mother winking at him. The pages were warm, funny, and well observed. In their most unguarded conversation, Prince declared the book's guiding principle: "Music is healing." He envisioned the book as "a handbook for the brilliant community," teaching Black artists and communities to own their work. He said the overarching theme was freedom.

Back in New York, tense contract negotiations proceeded. On March 18, Prince flew to New York and announced the memoir at a secret concert attended by Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee, and the cast of Hamilton. In their final conversation on April 17, Prince proposed dividing their voices between scientific and autobiographical material but set no firm date for intensive work. On April 21, Piepenbring learned from text messages on a commuter train that Prince was dead. It was later revealed that Prince died of an accidental overdose from counterfeit Vicodin pills laced with fentanyl, a far more potent opioid. Because Prince died without a will, a court appointed Bremer Trust to administer his estate. In June 2016, the publishing team visited Paisley Park, recovering the remaining memoir pages and a vast archive of notes, lyrics, and mementos. They included only objects Prince had kept, ensuring authenticity.

The resulting book is organized around four anchor points. The first is Piepenbring's introduction. The second is Prince's handwritten memoir, a love letter to his parents that begins with his mother's winks and his father's joyous piano playing. He recounts childhood epilepsy, his parents' fights and divorce, and life with his mother and stepfather. He writes about discovering music through the local celebrity DJ Jerry "Motormouth" Mac, who introduced him to amplifiers and glossies of R&B stars, and through Dee's Record Shop, where he taught himself to play by transcribing lyrics. When his mother remarried, Prince chose to live with his father, who bought him his first guitar. Prince writes about moving to live with his aunt Olivia, his romantic experiences, and an eleventh-grade crush named Petey who ambushed Prince at his locker with mistletoe before Christmas break, leaving him certain all his dreams would come true.

The third anchor is a photo book Prince created at age nineteen while recording his debut album, For You, at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California. Captioned in his own hand, the photos chronicle milestones including his first car, his first check from Warner Bros., and the surrogate family around him during recording. The Beautiful Ones also includes photographs, press materials, and handwritten lyrics spanning Prince's second through fifth albums, documenting his rising career and provocative visual identity. The fourth anchor is an eleven-page handwritten treatment for the film that became Purple Rain, written as early as spring 1982. In this fictionalized version, Prince watches his mother shoot his father dead; three doctors diagnose the fictional Prince with a split personality rooted in his parents' conflict. Accompanying the treatment are handwritten drafts of defining songs, including "Let's Go Crazy," originally conceived as a song about God; "Darling Nikki," whose explicit content prompted the founding of the Parents Music Resource Center, which advocated for warning labels on albums; "Purple Rain"; and "Kiss."

Piepenbring frames the book as an origin tale and acknowledges it represents only a sliver of what could have been. He calls it both an expression of grief and a celebration of life, ending with Prince's exhortation from Melbourne: "Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life."