Names and faces
■ Looking back at her time as an early Microsoft employee, Melinda Gates said the brash culture at the famously tough, revolutionary tech company made her want to quit, but that she didn’t discuss it with her boyfriend, and later her husband, Bill Gates, 63, the company CEO who embodied that culture. “That wasn’t my job to do that at the time,” Gates said in an interview, adding that she drew “bright lines” around the office and home in order to work there for nine years before she left to have children. Her new book, The Moment of Lift, to be released today, a memoir and manifesto on women and power from the former tech business executive, outspoken feminist and public supporter of the #MeToo movement. All book proceeds will be donated to charity. Missing from the memoir is how her relationship with Gates affected her experience at Microsoft. Melinda Gates, 54, won Bill Gates’ heart after meeting at a work dinner, sharing a mutual love of puzzles and beating him at a math game. And while not saying in the interview if she ever had doubts about starting a relationship with her company CEO, she said it’s difficult to look back to 30 years ago to say how things might be different today if he had made a move on an employee at work, back when the company was 1 percent of its current size.
■ The memoir Prince was working on at the time of his death is set to come out Oct. 29. Random House confirmed Monday that The Beautiful Ones will combine a Prince unfinished manuscript with rare photos, scrapbooks and lyrics. First announced just weeks before his 2016 death, the 288-page book will include an introduction by Dan Piepenbring, whom Prince had chosen as a collaborator. The memoir is an exclusive partnership with the Prince Estate. “The Beautiful Ones is the deeply personal account of how Prince Rogers Nelson became the Prince we know: the real-time story of a kid absorbing the world around him and creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and the fame that would come to define him,” Random House announced. Prince died three years ago, on April 21, from an accidental overdose of fentanyl at the age of 57. Piepenbring’s introduction will touch upon Prince’s final days, “a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated.”