November 11, 2022, 11:17am
I guess if you’re a publisher whose stated mission is to disrupt the publishing industry, you have to move fast and break things, no matter how ghoulish that makes you. Such is apparently the case for “hybrid publisher” Ballast Books (“More Than A Publisher, A Brand Builder”), who is capitalizing on Aaron Carter’s death on last week to publish his unfinished memoir… next week.
Carter’s co-writer Andy Symonds is also the President and Publisher of Ballast Books, and announced the book—My Father’s Son): Aaron Carter: An Incomplete Story Of An Incomplete Life—in a press release. Symonds spent three years interviewing Carter for the memoir. “Aaron was an open book during the writing process. It’s a tragic irony that his autobiography will never include all his stories, thoughts, hopes, and dreams as he intended.”
The New York Post (obviously) reported that the book contains details about Carter and Hilary Duff’s sexual experiences with one another as young teenagers. Asked for comment by ET, Duff summed the situation up nicely:
It’s really sad that within a week of Aaron’s death, there’s a publisher that seems to be recklessly pushing a book out to capitalize on this tragedy without taking appropriate time or care to fact check the validity of his work. To water down Aaron’s life story to what seems to be unverified click-bait for profit is disgusting. In no way do I condone shedding any light on what is so obviously an uninformed, heartless, money grab.
Aaron Carter’s reps thanked Duff in a statement, adding “This is a time for mourning and reflection not heartless money grabs and attention seeking.”
[h/t NME]