Bozoma Saint John, the chief marketing officer of streaming service Netflix, announced she has officially joined the author family at Penguin Random House.
In an Instagram post, she shared a snapshot of an email from the publisher welcoming her to the author portal, where she will access information such as her sales and royalties. She revealed her book, The Urgent Life, is coming out next year courtesy of Viking Books, a Penguin imprint.
“I’m really writing y’all,” she wrote Wednesday. “And then one day, you’ll see my vulnerable words in print 🤯 This is truly one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.”
On a recent podcast episode with broadcast journalist Catt Sadler, Bozoma says the book will focus on her journey of grief after losing her husband to lymphoma within six months of his diagnosis in 2013. She tells Catt that she used social media to share the journey with loved ones until they told her she should piece the content together for a book after her husband’s death. But she wasn’t ready.
“He’s been gone for seven years, and I feel like the time is right now,” Bozoma says. “I’m in a really great place spiritually, where the mantra that I live my life with now is to live life urgently, so the book is called The Urgent Life, which is really about the pace at which he lived his last months and we lived it together… It’s not about speed, it was about the intention, the intentionality of how we did it.”
The book does not have a public title page yet on the Penguin website, but comparative titles include actress Tembi Locke’s From Scratch, also a forthcoming Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana, and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B.