The Oscar-winning actor Al Pacino’s memoir Sonny Boy is set to release this October.
The book, launched by Penguin Random House, is the “memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide”, according to a statement from the publisher. “All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels.”
“The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose,” the statement continued. “Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions – the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.”
The memoir will cover the 83-year-old actor’s childhood in New York, his upbringing with his “fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents”, his troop of young friends in the South Bronx and his time at New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts. It will then cover his work in New York’s avant garde theater scene in the 1960s and 70s before his major movie break in the early 70s with the Panic of Needle Park, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.
“I wrote Sonny Boy to express what I’ve seen and been through in my life,” Pacino said in a statement. “It has been an incredibly personal and revealing experience to reflect on this journey and what acting has allowed me to do and the worlds it has opened up. My whole life has been a moonshot, and I’ve been a pretty lucky guy so far.”
The memoir has been years in the making. A proposal of the to-be-completed book first garnered buzz at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2022. Penguin Random House acquired the rights from CAA, a major Hollywood talent agency, in a reported $5m deal. Reports at the time described the book as Pacino’s Born to Run, referring to Bruce Springsteen’s highly anticipated and celebrated 2016 memoir, and said it would wrestle with big ideas on life, art and mortality.
According to Page Six, Pacino’s memoir was handled by the same team behind Will Smith’s bestselling 2021 memoir Will, co-written with Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
Pacino has also discussed the memoir process in recent interviews. “You get to that age, you start to do things like that. I stayed away from it, but I think I’ve got to sort of talk about certain things,” he said during a public chat at New York’s 92nd Street Y in April 2023. “It’s fine, I have kids and all, it’d be a good idea, and I’m working on it,” he added, noting that his co-author was in the audience.
The actor has three adult children – a daughter, Julie, with his ex Jan Tarrant and twins Anton and Olivia with his ex Beverly D’Angelo – and a newborn son, Roman, born in June 2023 to his current girlfriend, 29-year-old Noor Alfallah.
While this is Pacino’s first memoir, it is not the Scarface star’s first book. In 2006, the actor participated in Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel, which detailed 25 years worth of conversations between Pacino and the journalist Grobel, who also penned similar books with Ava Gardner and the producer Robert Evans.
Pacino was most recently seen at the 96th Oscars on Sunday evening, where he presented the night’s final and most prestigious award, for best picture, to Oppenheimer, in a confusing and unsure manner.
