Yearbook

Seth Rogen's Yearbook is a collection of autobiographical essays that moves roughly chronologically through his childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, his teenage years as an aspiring stand-up comic, and his adult career as an actor, writer, and producer in Hollywood. The book blends coming-of-age stories, drug misadventures, celebrity encounters, and reflections on Jewish identity into a loosely connected memoir.

Rogen opens with his grandparents, Bubby (Faye) and Zaidy (Kelly) Belogus, who become the subject of his first stand-up material. At 12, he enrolled in a comedy workshop where the instructor taught that comedy comes from frustration rather than fun. Rogen wrote jokes about his eccentric, mostly deaf grandparents and the loud arguments that filled Friday evenings at their apartment, then performed the material at a local bar to his first laughs. Over time, his grandparents became a genuine source of connection. Before Rogen moved to Los Angeles at 16 to appear on Freaks and Geeks, Bubby offered her parting advice: "You give those sons of bitches hell" (11).

Rogen's parents are equally unconventional. His father, Mark, has OCD and Tourette's syndrome and once disrupted a public menorah-lighting ceremony to protest a conservative politician, making the lead story on local news while the family pretended not to know him. His mother, Sandy, a social worker and yoga instructor, packs obsessive quantities of snacks and once traveled with Rogen to Israel, where an innkeeper mistook the pair for a romantic couple. Instead of medicating Rogen's ADHD, his parents placed him on a strict elimination diet from ages 5 to 11, banning dairy, wheat, and sugar. The family frequented one affordable restaurant at a time; when they trekked through a severe 1990 snowstorm to reach their beloved buffet, Bonanza, they found it had permanently closed.

Bar and Bat Mitzvah season, the period when Jewish 13-year-olds celebrate their coming of age, defined Rogen's social life heading into high school. Hoping to find a girlfriend as social armor, he dressed in thrift-store vests inspired by the film Tombstone but failed to connect with anyone at dances. At one party, he noticed two boys, Sammy Fogell and Evan Goldberg, cutting open glow sticks and smearing the contents on themselves rather than participating. Rogen joined them, and the three bonded over shared outsider status, forming a core friendship that would shape his personal life and career.

High school at Point Grey Secondary was a jarring transition. The 7-Eleven loading dock served as the central social hub for fights, drug deals, and friendships. Rogen began smoking weed at 13 with friends in a ravine and drank at house parties. At one party, police arrived but got their cruiser stuck in the snow and struck a deal to leave if the teenagers pushed the car free. His attempt at drug dealing with friend Brian Baumshtick went worse: They tried to buy 60 grams of weed through a classmate named Billy Yang, but the transaction was a setup, and older teens robbed them at knifepoint. Rogen refused to hand over his money and ran, but Baumshtick lost his cash and his grandfather's Holocaust necklace. Fifteen years later, Yang confessed he had orchestrated the robbery because Rogen and Baumshtick had been unkind to him.

Rogen's comedy career advanced in parallel. At 14, a mohel, the practitioner who performs ritual Jewish circumcisions, hired him to write jokes for ceremonies at $50 each. The experience of being paid to write gave him professional hope. After bombing at the Improv in Los Angeles following an unannounced drop-in set by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, fellow comic Darryl Lenox gave Rogen pivotal advice: Stop telling generic jokes and write about his actual life. Rogen began turning personal anguish into material. At 19, he and a childhood friend traveled to Amsterdam, where a catastrophic miscalculation of mushroom dosage led to projectile vomiting on pedestrians and an impulsive overnight train ride to Paris.

After Freaks and Geeks and its follow-up Undeclared were both canceled, Rogen spent years unemployed in Los Angeles. His fortunes changed when he and Goldberg were hired to write for the second season of Da Ali G Show, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's HBO series. Through Will Reiser, a young producer on the show who was soon diagnosed with a cancerous tumor on his spine, Rogen met Lauren Miller, a friend of Reiser's girlfriend and Rogen's future wife. Their first date, mini golf followed by dessert, ended when a car slammed into the back of Rogen's vehicle on the freeway, totaling it. Neither was hurt, and the crash produced their first physical contact: a hug.

The book's professional anecdotes grow increasingly surreal. A meeting at DreamWorks with filmmaker Steven Spielberg was hijacked by fellow filmmaker George Lucas, who insisted the world would end in 2012 and implied he owned a spaceship. During the casting of The Green Hornet, the studio pushed actor Nicolas Cage for the villain role; at a dinner at studio head Amy Pascal's house, Cage performed an improvised scene as a "white Bahamian" in a Jamaican-sounding accent, and the room responded with silence. A five-hour visit to actor Tom Cruise's home began with Rogen urinating in a Snapple bottle on Cruise's driveway and ended with Cruise defending Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and offering to explain Scientology in an hour.

The book's longest narrative concerns The Interview, Rogen and Goldberg's 2014 comedy about a talk-show host recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. After the trailer's release, North Korea's UN representative called the film an "act of war." A consultant from the RAND Corporation, a policy think tank, warned Sony that hackers had likely already breached their servers. On November 21, hackers breached Sony's systems, and internal emails were published across media outlets. The studio pressured Rogen to obscure the film's climactic death scene and publicly claim the change was his idea; he refused. On December 17, threats of violence against theaters prompted Sony to pull the film. President Obama called the decision "a mistake," and Sony reversed course, releasing the film digitally. Reviews were largely negative, and mockery from comedians Rogen admired proved more painful than the geopolitical fallout.

Rogen addresses anti-Semitism directly, tracing it from his father's early warning that "People hate Jews" through an anti-Semitic tirade from comedian Eddie Griffin in a Las Vegas elevator to sustained harassment from verified white-supremacist accounts on Twitter. He describes confronting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the platform's amplification of hate speech, arguing that verification functions as endorsement. In October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting occurred three miles from where Rogen was living in Pittsburgh while filming An American Pickle. He connects the attack to the unchecked spread of conspiracy theories on social media.

The book closes with Rogen's years at Camp Miriam, a Jewish summer camp in British Columbia modeled after a kibbutz, a communal settlement where residents share labor and resources. The final chapter builds to a 1997 camping trip on Vancouver Island's Juan de Fuca Trail, during which a camper sprained her ankle on a cliffside path and passed out. With hypothermia spreading and a signal flare that fizzled into the ocean, two members of the group left to seek help and were absent for hours. Rogen and a friend chopped down trees to build a stretcher until four off-duty firemen appeared and completed the rescue, which was officially deemed a "provincial emergency." Years later, the counselor who led the trip told Rogen the experience genuinely traumatized him, contradicting Rogen's memory of it as a manageable adventure.