Look at Me

A deeply entertaining and intimate memoir by Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman, one of the most acclaimed actors of our time, whose work across Hollywood, film, and theater has reflected the changing zeitgeist of America over the past sixty years. For nearly six decades, Dustin Hoffman has been one of the most compelling and unpredictable figures in American culture. From his breakthrough performance in The Graduate to his unforgettable roles in Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, Rain Man, and beyond, he has spent a lifetime inhabiting extraordinary characters and redefining what a Hollywood leading man could be. Now, in Look at Me, Hoffman turns his remarkable powers of observation on himself. Warm, candid, hilarious, and deeply moving, Look at Me is an intimate memoir about art, ambition, family, friendship, love, aging, and the mysteries of a creative life. Written with acclaimed author Ariel Levy, the book traces Hoffman’s journey from a young actor searching for purpose to a two-time Academy Award winner reflecting on what matters most as he enters his ninth decade. Along the way, Hoffman shares stories that are by turns outrageous, poignant, and unforgettable: an unexpected clash with Steve McQueen, adventures in Greenwich Village during the turbulent 1960s, encounters with legends including Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Mike Nichols, Robert Duvall, Arthur Miller, and Gene Hackman, and the personal experiences that shaped some of his most celebrated performances. But Look at Me is more than a chronicle of a storied Hollywood career. It is a meditation on mortality, identity, and the enduring need to create. With the wit, vulnerability, and emotional honesty that have defined his finest work, Hoffman invites readers into the private world behind the public icon. The result is a memoir as distinctive as the man himself: funny, searching, wise, and impossible to forget.

A two-time Academy Award winner and seven-time nominee whose arrival in Hollywood helped usher in a new and revitalized approach to filmmaking, Dustin Hoffman continues to add singular performances to a career rich with characters that have obliterated the line previously dividing the archetypes of "character actor" and "leading man." He plans to live to be at least a hundred years of age, and he does not plan to retire. Ever. Ariel Levy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008 and received the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 2014. She is the host and cocreator of the podcast The Just Enough Family and the author, most recently, of The Rules Do Not Apply.