You Show Me Yours: A Writer’s Journey From Brooklyn to Hollywood via 5 continents, 30 years, and the incomparable sixties

Lawrence Grobel’s energetic memoir begins with him growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, where he was nearly kidnapped as an infant, and the suburbs of Long Island, where his sex education began at a very early age. By the age of 15, he was competing with his best friend over a modern day Lolita. At 18 he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Mississippi under a hail of bullets, and came of age under the guidance of an enlightened Mexican Don Juan. After graduating from UCLA, he joined the Peace Cops, which afforded him the chance to communicate with a fetish high priestess in Ghana, pygmies in Uganda, and stoned-out hippies on the island of Lamu. In the ‘70s he became a New Journalist, covering stories like the Demolition Derby, Transcendental Meditation, Sky Diving, Sailplane Gliding, Archery, Karate and Performance Art. When he left New York for California he turned his skills to celebrity interviews. Starting with Mae West, Linus Pauling, Ray Bradbury and Jane Fonda for Newsday, he moved on to conducting over 50 interviews for Playboy, being named their “Interviewer’s Interviewer” after his encounters with Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino. It’s a journey through the Looking Glass of American Culture from the post-War ‘50s, the sexually liberated ‘60s, the Civil Rights movement, and the “Me Decade.” Diane Keaton calls this book “Profoundly entertaining and totally insane!” We leave him on a weeklong interview assignment in Tetioroa, Tahiti with Marlon Brando, with a promise of things to come.