Buzz Bissinger to Collaborate With Caitlyn Jenner on Memoir
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Buzz Bissinger will be collaborating with Olympic athlete Caitlyn Jenner on her new memoir, The New York Times reports.
Bissinger, whose book about high-school football in small-town Texas, Friday Night Lights, became a successful TV series and who chronicled the challenges Mayor Ed Rendell faced trying to reverse the downward spiral of city government in A Prayer for the City, also wrote the Vanity Fair cover story in which Jenner came out as female and described her struggles with gender identity.
Bissinger, who wrote candidly about his own experiences as a cross-dresser with a fetish for women’s leather in a widely discussed article in GQ, told the Times his own openness about his gender fluidity “created a bond” between him and Jenner. The journalist was almost a live-in companion of the athlete while he worked on the Vanity Fair profile, spending more than 300 hours with her before her transition and many more after she announced her new identity.
The book will cover all aspects of Jenner’s life from her childhood and rise to fame as Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, her three marriages, including one with Kardashian clan matriarch Kris Kardashian, and her transition.
According to the report, Jenner approached Bissinger about collaborating on her memoir a few months after the article appeared. Bissinger told her that while it would be her book, he would also be doing interviews and reporting to keep her honest: “I made it clear to her before I agreed that everything has to be on the table, nothing can be left out, and I’m going to be interviewing dozens of other people,” he told the Times, adding, “She’s been incredibly open, and I think it has the potential to be a really important book.”
The book is tentatively scheduled for release in the spring of 2017 from Grand Central Publishing, which declined to disclose the size of the contract it negotiated with Jenner’s agents.
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