The Book of Jose: A Memoir

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Even with this book, you can read it and root for me even when I was doing bad shit, because you know I have a good heart. I kept it all the way transparent, because I seen people pass away and other people tell their story, and tell it incorrect and it wasn't factual. After a morning visit to Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Red Table Talk, Joe met me for a seafood lunch at the rooftop of the Beverly Hills Waldorf Astoria on a beautiful LA Saturday afternoon: Pretty cool for a coupla New York City project kids.

Beyond his music-related endeavors, Joe has developed into a media personality, having launched “The Fat Joe Show,” a nightly Instagram Live talk-show where he has interviewed politicians, musicians, athletes, actors, entrepreneurs and personalities such as Dr. RASCOE: With a career spanning decades, Joe has been able to parlay his street credibility into massive hits that jealous ones still envy. Imagine you grab one of these kids and take a song where they said they robbed a bodega and you put them in jail for the rest of their life saying that that’s real what [they’re] rapping. Tony Yayo’s “So Seductive” was the closing performance and when they finished, 50 yells into the mic, “Fat Joe is pussy, man.If I use the N-word on any song - say "Lean Back" or whatever song - if I had to do a clean word for the radio, it would say brother instead of the N-word.

But as fate would have it, after the VMAs, we didn’t see each other again in person for almost a decade. What the audience at home didn’t see was that during the commercial break beforehand, 50 Cent got out of his seat and started walking the house.Remy Ma had been incarcerated for six years [2008-2014], and then we get together and come back from nothing? I wanted you to know about my darkest times, depressions, suicidal thoughts, triumphs, and just let everybody know that you could go through dark times, but just know you could smile again one day.

From infancy his life is threatened by violence, and by the time he starts middle school, he is forced to make a life-shaping choice: to be prey or predator.MH: So, you talked about how you had to revisit a lot of sad and traumatic events in your life, losing friends to gun violence, bullying that you experienced, police brutality, the loss of very close loved ones, coping with depression, even. While I initially picked this book up to read about Big Punisher, I found myself engrossed by Fat Joe's stories of the streets and his family, as well as his rapping exploits, and his first person accounts of growing up in the epicenter of Hip Hop at its birth. Whatever you read in the book or listened to in the audio, you're going to get that visually like nothing else.

The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents.There’s been many times people have come on [my show] and start[ed] talking about something and I’ll be like “Yo, yo, yo, chill. I thought he was too, too much and I also had a problem, as a Black British Jamaican, with his constant use of the N word. One of the oldest rules in the hood is that you don’t get points for picking on somebody who can’t defend themselves. I want to get lost with [DJ] Khaled on a Jet Ski somewhere in Miami and interview him on a dune or something. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work.