Tariq Trotter — aka the Roots’ co-founder and rapper better known as Black Thought — will be releasing a memoir titled “The Upcycled Self,” out Nov. 14 on One World.
While Trotter, who has won four Grammy Awards and three NAACP Image Awards, has been a deeply successful and influential artist for nearly four decades, the announcement notes that Trotter’s story “begins with a tragedy: as a child, Trotter burned down his family’s home,” it says. “‘The Upcycled Self’ doesn’t just narrate a riveting and moving portrait of the artist as a young man, but gives readers a courageous model of what it means to live an examined life. In vivid vignettes, he tells the dramatic stories of the four powerful relationships that shaped him — community, friends, art, and family — each a complex weave of love, discovery, trauma, and loss.”
In it, “Trotter explores the vital questions we all have to confront about our formative years: How can we see the story of our young lives clearly? How do we use that story to understand who we’ve become? How do we forgive the people who loved and hurt us? How do we rediscover and honor our first dreams? And finally, what do we take forward, what do we pass on, what do we leave behind? This is the beautifully bluesy story of a boy genius’s coming of age that illuminates the redemptive power of the upcycle,” which it defines as “to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item,” and “to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value).”
The book was sold to Chris Jackson at One World by Eve Attermann and Sam Birmingham at WME. TV/film, U.K., and translation rights are retained by WME.