Prince's memoir 'The Beautiful Ones' will finally be published this fall

The memoir that Prince started writing before his death in April 2016 will finally be published on Oct. 29.

"The Beautiful Ones" was originally announced in March 2016, at an ad hoc news conference in New York City where Prince plugged the book, took no questions from the media and performed a half-hour concert.

Prince picked writer Dan Piepenbring of The Paris Review as his collaborator. The two had come up with about 50 pages of text, enough to convince Random House to buy the book for an undisclosed sum. The book was to arrive by fall 2017.

In spring of last year, two years after Prince's death, his representative Esther Newberg, one of the publishing world's most powerful literary agents, announced that the book would be available by holiday time.

That promise, like so many things in the posthumous Prince world, proved not to be true.

Random House has supplemented Prince's text with all kinds of material from his storied, mysterious vault, including handwritten lyrics, personal photos and his handwritten treatment for his 1984 movie "Purple Rain."

Piepenbring, who wrote a 2010 essay about Prince, has penned an introduction and added information about photos and other scrapbook items.

Newberg represents John Feinstein, Patricia Cornwell, Carl Hiaasen and two Minnesota-connected authors, John Sandford and Thomas Friedman.

Random House is publishing the memoir in partnership with the Prince Estate.

At the press conference to announce the book in 2016, Prince said, "We wanna thank Random House. Ain't nothing random about this book."