Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider has a memoir coming out this fall, and in it she’ll deal with how she gained all the knowledge that resulted in her stellar performance, plus her personal life, including her transgender identity.
Schneider is the top-winning woman and top-winning trans contestant in Jeopardy! history, and she won last fall’s Tournament of Champions. She had already announced that had quit her job as a software engineer and was writing a book, but now she’s divulged more details about it.
In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life will be out from Simon & Schuster October 3. “I shared dozens of 20-second anecdotes about myself on Jeopardy!, but there’s much more to my story, and I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity to share it with the world,” Schneider recently told Today.com.
Related: 7 Times Amy Schneider Made Jeopardy! History
Schneider will go into the value of curiosity, as people always ask her how she knew everything that enabled her to be a record-breaking Jeopardy! champ. “When I thought about it, I realized that one of the main reasons I know all that stuff is that I am curious, that I enjoy learning new things, and so I seek them out, not for any practical value they might turn out to have, but simply for the pleasure of learning them,” she said in the interview.
She intends to satisfy some curiosity about trans people too, and she’ll go into controversies over restroom use and other topics. She already made progress for trans representation with her Jeopardy! appearance.
“I knew before the episodes aired that for many viewers, this would be the first time they had seen a trans person, particularly in this kind of context, and I certainly hoped to represent my community well,” she said. “But I never imagined that I would hear from so many people that someone in their lives had completely changed their beliefs about trans people, just from seeing me on Jeopardy!”
“Real-life trans people aren’t scary or mentally ill or any of the other things people try to paint us as,” she added. “We’re just, well, people, and I’ll forever be proud and grateful that I enabled so many people to learn that for themselves.”
“I want to share the life-changing benefits that come from being curious about the most important subject in the world: yourself,” she concluded.
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