Amy Schneider Reveals Why She’s Ready to Write a Book About ‘Jeopardy!’
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Amy Schneider‘s career as an author is just beginning. After releasing her memoir, In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, in 2023, the Jeopardy! champ published a “young readers” edition of the book called Who Is Amy Schneider?: Questions on Growing Up, Being Curious, and Winning It Big on Jeopardy! on March 4.
However, she already has plans to put pen to paper once again, and this time she’s ready to tap into the game show that made her a household name.
“What I want to do is write something that is a lot more Jeopardy!–focused, I guess,” Schneider tells TV Insider. “Really, to be honest, it’s kind of what my publishers would’ve liked me to do originally.”
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The reason she didn’t take that route right away, though, is because she was “feeling sort of a little bit lost” after finding Jeopardy! fame. “Like, the large parts of me that aren’t Jeopardy!, I felt the need to talk about them,” she continued. “But now that I’ve had some time and distance from that, I feel like, OK, now I can talk about Jeopardy! just as something that is an important part of my life and something that I do think is fascinating.”
So, what does she envision the book entailing? “Why is it such an institution?” Schneider teases. “And why is it that, in the course of becoming such a part of the Jeopardy! world, why is everyone in it so great, basically? That’s what I really want to explore.”
In her debut book, Schneider reflected on the journey that led her to “becoming an unlikely icon and hero to millions” after “blazing a trail for openly queer and transgender people around the world.” Schneider is a transgender woman who transitioned in 2017.
By adapting her novel for young readers, Schneider says she hopes to provide reading material that she didn’t have available to her when she was younger. “That was the main motivation,” she confirms.
“There’s a few things that I hope to be getting across,” the game show champion adds. “One of them is that trans rights are under attack right now, but that’s because we have rights to attack, which we didn’t always. I was raised in a time where trans people didn’t exist as far as basically anybody in my life knew. It wasn’t the best thing in the world, but I got through it and here I am having a great and happy life. So that’s part of it. I think it’s also just saying, ‘Hey, we’re out there, you’re not alone.’ It can be a very lonely experience being trans because there really aren’t that many of us, so it can be hard to [find] examples or people to look to to think about your life.”
