Chelsea Manning will reveal the details of how and why she decided to send hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks, in a memoir due early next year.
The as-yet unnamed book will see Manning write about what publisher The Bodley Head described as her “challenging childhood” and her “struggles as an adolescent”. It will also delve into why she decided to join the army, as well as how, when she was working as an intelligence analyst for US forces in Iraq in 2010, she smuggled out 720,000 classified military documents on the memory card of her digital camera and sent them to WikiLeaks.
Manning was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in military prison in 2011. The day after her conviction, she declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition. Her memoir will set out “how her plea for increased institutional transparency and government accountability take place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman,” according to her publisher.
Manning spent seven years behind bars, some of it in solitary confinement as punishment for trying to take her own life, before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. She was recently released from a Virginia jail after spending 62 days there for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, saying that “grand juries are simply outdated tools used by the federal government to harass and disrupt political opponents and activists in fishing expeditions”.
On Monday, she told the New York Times that the book was a “coming-of-age story”, and a “personal narrative” about “what led to the leaks, what led to prison, and how this whole ordeal has really shaped me and changed me”.
She said she and her publishers are “trying our best” to avoid having to submit the manuscript to the government for a classified information review. Manning is still under obligation not to disclose closed court-martial testimony or verify evidence used in those proceedings. “There is a lot of stuff that is not going to be in the book that people would expect to be in there, but rules are rules and we can’t get around it,” Manning said.
“This is less a book about the case and more a book about trials, tribunals, struggles, difficulties, and overcoming them and surviving. If people are expecting to learn a lot more about the court martial and a lot more about the case, then they probably shouldn’t be interested in this book,” she told the paper. “But if they want to know more about what it’s like to be me and survive, then there are reams of information in here. It’s much more autobiographical than it is a narrative thriller or crime story or anything like that.”
She compared her memoir to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, about the author’s 1,100 mile hike along the Pacific Crest trail. “I’m really opening myself up to some really intimate things in this book, some really very personal moments and much more intimate points of my life that I’ve never disclosed before. You’re probably going to learn more about my love life than about the disclosures,” she said.
The book, which will be published in early 2020, was acquired by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Deputy publishing director Will Hammond said the memoir would “reveal for the first time the full drama and complexity of Manning’s story”.
