'A Promised Land': Oprah and Gayle King Will Get First Dibs on Barack Obama's Presidential Tea

It’s Lit!It’s Lit!Where all things literary live at The Root

Former President Barack Obama will sit down with two very familiar faces as his long-awaited new memoir, A Promised Land, launches next week.

Gayle King will be first on the docket to chat with Mr. 44 on Nov. 15 for CBS Sunday Morning. While the timing of the interview coincides with the release of Obama’s new book, the interview will also be the former president’s first since his close friend and vice president, Joe Biden, won the 2020 election. So you can probably expect him to talk at least a little about Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ victory, as well as Donald Trump’s attempts to illegally hold on to the White House. Does he take fears of a GOP coup seriously? Or is he swapping memes in the Illuminati group chat with Beyoncé and Oprah?

Speaking of Ms. Winfrey, Oprah will be doing her own formal sit-down with Obama on the day his book launches, Nov. 17, for a “candid conversation” with the nation’s first Black president, according to a press release.

“This book was worth the wait,” said Oprah. “Everybody who reads it is going to be on this journey from the grueling and monotonous grind of the campaign, to taking us inside the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room and the Situation Room and sometimes, even the bedroom. This book has both the intimacy and the grandeur coming through in this memoir, and I have so been looking forward to speaking with him about all of it.”

Oprah will be far from the only one. There is massive demand for the 768-page tome, of which 3 million copies have already been printed. It will be published in 24 languages, CBS News reports, including Chinese, Greek and Vietnamese. Obama described the book as an “honest accounting” of his ascent to the presidency.

“I’ve spent the last few years reflecting on my presidency…the key events and people who shaped [my presidency], my take on what I got right and the mistakes I made, and the political, economic, and cultural forces that my team and I had to confront then—and that as a nation we are grappling with still,” Obama said in an earlier press release.

We’ll also soon see how Obama’s book stacks against Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which as of March of last year, was one of the bestselling books of the decade and on pace to become the bestselling memoir ever.

The pre-recorded episode of “The Oprah Conversation” will premiere at 9 a.m. on Tuesday and be available to watch for free through December 1.