NEW YORK • Reality television star Caitlyn Jenner will publish a memoir about her highly public transformation from Olympic track star Bruce Jenner into a woman.

She will write the memoir with Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist and author of Friday Night Lights, the 1990 non-fiction book about a Texas high-school football team that inspired a 2004 film and a television series. Grand Central Publishing is tentatively scheduled to release the Jenner book in the spring of next year.

Rumours have swirled about a possible book deal for Jenner since last April, when she announced that she was becoming a woman during an interview with journalist Diane Sawyer that drew nearly 17 million viewers.

The interview was followed by a Vanity Fair cover story, written by Bissinger, in which Jenner revealed her new identity as Caitlyn and described her decades-long struggle with gender dysphoria.

The flurry of publicity culminated in the premiere of a documentary series on E!, I Am Cait, which will begin its second season in March, about Jenner's new public life as a woman.

A book seemed like an inevitable extension of her brand and publishing executives have speculated that her memoir could fetch a high seven-figure or low eight-figure sum. Grand Central declined to disclose the amount of the contract.

Her highly choreographed debut was criticised by some as an elaborate publicity blitz, but praised by others, who said the coverage helped to shed light on the challenges that transgender men and women face.

Bissinger was a natural choice for a collaborator. For the Vanity Fair article, he spent hundreds of hours over three months with Jenner before her transition and countless hours with her after she reintroduced herself as Caitlyn.

As a self-described "cross- dresser with a big-time fetish for women's leather", Bissinger said he could relate to some aspects of Jenner's experience.

He said Jenner approached him about collaborating on her memoir a few months after the Vanity Fair article appeared. "I made it clear to her before I agreed that everything has to be on the table, nothing can be left out, and I'm going to be interviewing dozens of other people," he said. "It's her book, but it's going to be reported to keep her honest. She's been incredibly open."

The book will cover Jenner's childhood and rise to fame as a gold medal-winning Olympic decathlete; her first two marriages and her troubled relationship with her children; her marriage to Kris Kardashian, matriarch of the Kardashian reality TV brood; her transition and experience as the world's most famous transgender woman.

Jenner said in a statement that she hoped the book would help her to process all that has happened to her in the past year and in the decades leading up to her transition.

"Things have been moving so quickly that it will be nice to... take the proper time to reflect on this journey," she said.

NEW YORK TIMES