Mary Trump’s tell-all memoir sells 1.35 million copies in blockbuster first week

A tell-all memoir by President Donald Trump’s niece — who claims he has world-endangering emotional problems stemming from childhood trauma inflicted by his parents — has sold 1.35 million copies in its first week, according to publisher Simon Schuster.

Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” is in its 17th printing, the publisher said Wednesday. It has been sold in five languages. The sales figure, which includes all formats, puts the book on track to being one of the most popular books of the year. 

“Mary Trump’s memoir has transcended the usual ceiling for political books to reach a larger audience of people who want to read stories about unusual families,” Simon Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp said in a statement. 

The publisher said the book was ranked No. 1 in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and No. 2 in Australia.

The memoir was published ahead of schedule after litigation brought by the president’s brother Robert failed to halt its release. Simon Schuster said it published the book early because of extraordinary demand.

In the memoir, Mary Trump, trained as a clinical psychologist, writes that the president’s father, Fred, “perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.”

Mary Trump also accused Trump of paying someone else to take his SATs while in high school. 

“Lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was,” she writes. 

The White House has said the allegations in the book are false. A spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the book’s sales. 

Mary Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the president’s older brother, who died of a heart attack in the 1980s that the family has said was related to alcoholism. Robert Trump claims that publication of the book violates a nondisclosure agreement that bound members of the family from publicly discussing their relationships to each other following a dispute over Fred Trump Sr.’s will. President Trump has also said that Mary Trump was forbidden from publishing the book.

Books written by those critical of the president have effectively spawned their own genre, with many coming from former members of his administration. But Mary Trump’s book is unique in that it was written by a family member. It also appears to have outdone many of the previous books’ sales figures. 

Earlier this month, Simon Schuster said a book by former national security advisor John Bolton, “The Room Where it Happened,” sold 780,000 copies in all formats in its first week on sale. 

Former FBI director James Comey’s book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” sold about 600,000 copies in its first week on sale in 2018. 

Both of those books were relative blockbusters for political memoirs.

For instance, Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened,” which detailed her loss to Trump in 2016, was considered a success after selling about 300,000 copies in its first week in all formats.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/23/mary-trump-tell-all-memoir-sells-1point35-million-copies-in-first-week.html