Emily Ratajkowski sold MOTHER F*CKER to Penguin Press after a 12-way bidding war, turning a viral essay into a seven-figure book deal. The purchase puts one of the year’s most closely watched celebrity memoir pitches in the hands of a house that already publishes Zadie Smith, Ottessa Moshfegh and Ron Chernow.
After the viral essay
The deal traces back to Ratajkowski’s essay for The Cut, which carried the title “MOTHER F*CKER: After becoming a single mom, I spent several years compulsively dating. I was trying to figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be.” She posted “Read what I discovered about power, men, sex and most importantly: myself” to her nearly 28 million followers on Instagram before the essay blew up online.
Ratajkowski had already published My Body in 2021, so this is not a first swing at the market. But a seven-figure advance after 12 publishers entered the bidding changes the scale: this is no niche follow-up, it is a book that drew competitive interest before a page was even on sale.
What the essay left out
The Cut piece said that after her 2022 split from Sebastian Bear-McClard and what had become a sexless marriage, she went into a period of “compulsive dating.” Ratajkowski wrote that she “decided to f–k my way into a new kind of woman,” and also said, “Before my separation, I’d never had a one-night stand.”
She added, “I’d never slept with someone the same day I met them. In fact, I’d only slept with eight people: four of whom had been live-in boyfriends, and one of whom was my male best friend in high school.” That is the part likely to keep the book moving before publication: the essay does not name names, yet the public record around her dating life has already linked her to Brad Pitt, Pete Davidson, Eric Andre, Harry Styles, Shaboozey and Austin Butler.
Penguin Press buys the next chapter
Penguin Press now has the kind of title publishers usually chase when a personal essay becomes a broader cultural conversation. The house’s list, which includes Will Smith, Alice Waters, Aziz Ansari and Phil Jackson, suggests it is comfortable selling personality as business, not just prose as literature.
For readers, the immediate question is simple: when will MOTHER F*CKER be published? That date has not been set in the facts available here, so the real takeaway is the deal itself — Ratajkowski has already turned a tightly framed essay about sex, power and identity into a book sale that forced 12 publishers to compete on price.
