In 1969, during a summer break from teaching in Ghana, I organized a trip for my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers to East Africa. About thirty of us flew to Kenya and spent a few weeks exploring the wildlife parks, the meerschaum pipe factory in Arusha, Tanzania, and the pygmies along the Uganda/Congo border. It was […]
Author Archive | Lawrence Grobel
My 20 Minutes with The Prince of Persia (American Way)
So I get an email from my editor asking if I’d like to write a feature story about Jake Gyllenhaal. “Has to be done fast,” he wrote, “but I think you’re the one who can do it.” I appreciated his confidence and contacted the actor’s publicist in New York to see about scheduling a time. […]
Nobu Matsuhisa: the World’s Most Celebrated Japanese Chef (World)
Who would have imagined that adding a few exotic ingredients like Peruvian chili paste, yuzu citrus juice and grape seed oil to the sushi standards–garlic and soy sauce—would make a struggling despondent suicidal sushi chef into the most successful and well known Japanese restaurateur in the world? It wasn’t just the ingredients, of course. Having […]
Interviewing Myself (The Art of the Interview)
After I finished interviewing James A. Michener for my book Talking with Michener, I asked if he would consider interviewing himself as the final chapter, to cover things on his mind that I might not have touched upon. He was reluctant, but then he read an interview that Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer did with […]
The Joys of Parenting
I just had a yelling match with my daughter over the phone. She’s 30, recently married, and just moved into their first home, a condominium on the West Side. “Stop screaming at me,” she said, using her therapist voice (that’s what she is). “I’m not screaming,” I screamed. “You just don’t get it. You have […]
Life Lessons from Near-Death Experiences
Whenever I’m around friends or family who complain about how tough things are, how nothing’s what it used to be, how the quality of life has diminished and life itself seems almost futile, I’m at times jolted to a higher standard of life appreciation by some immediate life-threatening event. Because no matter how bleak things […]
Dreaming of a Novel (American Way)
We all have dreams. Bobby Kennedy dreamed of things that never were and asked why not? Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of getting to that mountaintop, hoping to hear freedom ring. My daughter dreams of healing the sick and feeding the poor. All big, noble dreams. My dream, ever since I was old enough to […]
How Truman Capote Helped Me Get My Novel Published 24 Years After His Death
In December, 2009, I visited Poland, where I appeared on five television shows, one web cast, and was interviewed by 2 newspaper and 3 magazine journalists. I also gave a press conference at the Camerimage Film Festival in Lodz, and had two book signings at Empik bookstores in Warsaw and Krakow. The book I was […]
Breakfast with Sir Anthony Hopkins (American Way)
When Anthony Hopkins returned from England, where he had finished shooting Wolfman with Benicio del Toro, he called me to talk about another project he was interested in doing. I hadn’t expected to hear from him, but my experience with Hopkins over the years has always been mercurial, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. We […]
Remembering Dominick Dunne (Autograph)
“Dominick is very sick,” Larry Schiller told me months before Dominick Dunne died from bladder cancer on Aug. 26, 2009. “I know,” I said. I had been in touch with Dunne because I had a story I thought would interest Vanity Fair and I thought he might help steer it to the right person. But […]
