Former Vice President Kamala D. Harris will publish a memoir about her 2024 campaign for the presidency, her publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced on Thursday.
The memoir, titled “107 Days,” will be released on Sept. 23, and will give Harris’s inside account of her breakneck campaign for the White House after former President Joe Biden withdrew amid questions about his age and mental and physical fitness for office.
Harris announced the book in a video posted on social media where she described how, in the wake of losing the 2024 election to Donald Trump, she consulted her family, friends and team about what happened during “the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.” She recorded her thoughts and recollections in a journal that became the basis for the memoir.
“Since leaving office, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those days,” she said. “I believe there’s value in sharing what I saw, what I learned and what I know it will take to move forward.”
Jonathan Karp, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said Harris’s memoir “is not a typical political tome,” just as Harris — the first woman to serve as vice president and the first woman of color to run to be nominated as a major party’s presidential nominee — was not a typical candidate.
“It’s closer in spirit to ‘The West Wing’ or ‘Rocky,’” Karp said. “It reads like a suspense novel.”
To give the memoir a novelistic feel, Harris worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, an unusual choice for a collaborator on a political book.
The memoir announcement comes shortly after Harris revealed that she will not run for governor of California next year after months of speculation — news that reanimated questions about what Harris will do in the coming years and if she will run for president or seek public office again.
The book will be focused on the campaign, not her time as vice president. Harris has written previously about her upbringing and her early political career as a U.S. senator and attorney general of California in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”
Harris is scheduled to appear on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Thursday, in her first interview since the 2024 election.
Harris’s book deal announcement comes on the heels of news that Biden sold his memoir to Little, Brown for a reported $10 million. Simon & Schuster — which has published a number of memoirs by prominent politicians from across the political spectrum, including Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Mike Pence — did not reveal the financial terms for Harris’s memoir, which was represented by Creative Artists Agency.
The memoir was coedited by Karp and Dawn Davis, senior vice president of Simon & Schuster and publisher of 37 Ink, a Simon & Schuster imprint.
The project came together in a matter of months, with Harris and Brooks meeting in person and over Zoom to flesh out the narrative.
“Geraldine is a former journalist and also a novelist, so she knows how to ask those discerning questions, and she also knows how to carry a narrative,” Davis said. “Even though I knew how it ended, I was turning the pages as if it were a mystery.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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