Last year, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, despite being in her early 50s and having an undistinguished career before her affirmative action appointment, published a memoir.
You might be forgiven for having missed it when “Lovely One” came out. As the media politely notes, it was “briefly” on the New York Times bestseller list and is now going for half price on Amazon. That is mostly to be expected of the ghostwritten memoir of an obscure judge.
Except that Jackson received a $893,750 advance for her memoir and is now reporting $2 million in profits last year. These would be record numbers for a Supreme Court Justice’s biography from a book that hardly anyone had noticed when it came out. And while books can become unexpected successes once released, there was little sign of that happening.
The actual sales figures have not been made public and perhaps ‘Lovely One’ sold millions of copies even while hardly anyone noticed before ending up in the remainder bin a year later. Certainly no one in the same media that pursued every living member of the Thomas family to find if anyone had ever done them a favor actually bothered obtaining the sales figure.
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