My First New York

The rich & famous on their arrivals to the city, in their own words

[Ecco Publishing, 23 March 2010]

For the cover story of the April 20, 2009, issue of New York magazine, I was part of a team of reporters interviewing famous people about their moment of arrival in the city for a huge, beautiful, first-person package. For that issue, I interviewed Aziz Ansari, David Dinkins, Keith Hernandez, Michael Lucas, and David Rosenblatt.

 Later — joyfully — the cover story was expanded into this book, for which the bulk of the interviews were conducted by me and Tim Murphy. For the book, I added interviews with Suzanne Bartsch, Yogi Berra, Ashley Dupre, Daniel Libeskind, Jonas Mekas, Liza Minnelli, and Dan Rather. I tried my damnedest to interview Barack Obama, too, only to find out months later that he detailed his first night in the city in one of his biographies: locked out of his apartment, he slept in an alley after reading a letter from his estranged father. 

 This book is — and I think forever will be — the work I've done that is dearest to me.