A.J. Jacobs, "The Year of Living Biblically" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
A.J. Jacobs must have the best magazine job in America. As editor-at-large for Esquire, here are a few examples of recent stories appearing under his byline:

• “My Outsourced Life,” detailing his effort to send his writing assignments to India,

• “Googling A.J. Jacobs’s Brain,” about his proposed effort to catalogue his thoughts, dreams, and desires

“The Sexiest Woman Alive 2005” and “2006,” in which he spent five months teasing readers as to the identities of Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johansson. And, yes, he was required by law to spend time with each of them, passing off flirtation as research.

And then there was his equally painful interview with Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives” in which he described each of her body parts in languorous detail.

Oh, I could go on and on about the women in his professional life. They also include Mary Louise Parker and Rosario Dawson. But then we’d never get to the reason for this interview, which is to celebrate his hysterical, yet thought-provoking new book, The Year of Living Biblically.




BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I have to start by saying I think you’re a friggin’ genius. Not only do you have an inventive new book and a magazine publisher prompting it and promoting it online and in print, but you’ve also found ways within its own text to subtly plug your last book, The Know-It-All. At least -- I counted -- 13 times directly.

A.J. JACOBS: Really? Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I was that good.

ANDELMAN: Well, it’s easy. Anyone can figure it out. You actually have an index. There’s an index, and you can go through, and you can count. So directly or indirectly, thirteen plugs, and that, to me, as a guy who’s written a few books, I have to say, I think it’s as brilliant as Nick Tosches thanking himself in the acknowledgements to one of his books because, without him, his books wouldn’t have been possible.

JACOBS: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, well, that’s nice. Maybe I should have a coupon for the first book in The Year of Living Biblically.

ANDELMAN: I think that’s the only thing that’s missing. I think it’s great. I think it’s brilliant. How did The Year of Living Biblically come about?

JACOBS: It came about because I grew up in an incredibly secular home. As I say in the book, I am Jewish but in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. So not very Jewish at all. And I actually thought that religion was gonna wither away, and we’d all live in this sort of scientific world. But, of course, that didn’t happen, and so I became fascinated with was I missing something by not having a spiritual life? But was I missing something essential to being human like someone who’s never heard Beethoven? Or was half the world deluded? So I decided to dive in head first cause that’s what I like to do. So I dive in head first to try to understand the Bible, this most influential book in the world. And I thought the best way to do it would be try to actually get inside the minds of the ancient people and get in the sandals of my forefathers.




ANDELMAN: And you did this how?

JACOBS: Well, I read the Bible, and I compiled a list of every suggestion, every rule, every commandment in the Bible. And by the end, my list was 72 pages, over 700 rules. Everything from the Ten Commandments we all know, all the famous ones, no lying, no coveting, but it also had dozens, hundreds of obscure rules like don’t wear clothes with mixed fibers and don’t, well, stone adulterers, for instance. So I wanted to try to follow every single one of those. So just commit myself completely to this project. So that’s what I did.

ANDELMAN: Now, I’m definitely, I’m about as close to agnostic as you are, as you were at least. Moses had 613 rules that he brought down, didn’t he?

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But you actually got over 700.

JACOBS: Well, I included sections of the Bible including the Proverbs, which have a lot to say about, for instance, laziness. So I couldn’t be lazy anymore. The Proverbs don’t like naps very much so it was unfortunate I couldn’t take naps all year. So I included other sections of the Bible in addition to the five books of Moses.

ANDELMAN: The thing that struck me reading was that this research must have affected a lot more people than just you. Particularly, your wife comes to mind.

JACOBS: My wife is a saint. That is true. I won’t deny it. Yeah, it was the most extreme makeover of my life. It affected every single part so the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I dressed, and the way I touched my wife. So she was very patient. I’m glad that we’re still married.

ANDELMAN: And you literally did change the way that you touched your wife. There were times where she was considered impure by the Bible.

JACOBS: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: Which meant not just not touching her, you couldn’t sit where she sat.

JACOBS: Right. There’s a section of the Bible, if you take it literally, that says you cannot sit where an impure woman has sat, which ruled out pretty much every chair, and in New York, you’ve got the subways, the buses. And my wife, as revenge, she didn’t like that rule so she sat on every chair in our apartment so I was reduced to doing a lot of standing.

ANDELMAN: And then you actually found a portable chair, right?

JACOBS: I did. I carried around a chair, a little pure chair for the subways.




ANDELMAN: Now, who else was affected by this project? People you work with, perhaps? Your son?

JACOBS: Yeah, people I work with. You mentioned Rosario Dawson. There was a little conflict between my work life where I work for Esquire, a men’s magazine. I like to think it’s a high-brow men’s magazine, but it’s still a men’s magazine. So interviewing Rosario Dawson while trying to obey the Bible’s rules about lusting, that was not an easy one. I had to do the interview without looking at her.

ANDELMAN: You were in the same room, though.

JACOBS: Oh, yeah. I just avoided eye contact.

ANDELMAN: Uh-huh. And how did Rosario feel about this?

JACOBS: Rosario was actually very understanding. I had a huge beard like this hedgehog on my face, and she actually said that, she was one of the few people who said she actually liked the beard.

ANDELMAN: Well, of course, at that point, wasn’t she just coming off working with Kevin Smith?

JACOBS: That’s right. Yeah. So she was used to it.

ANDELMAN: Were there other assignments that were affected by the beard and the whole practice?

JACOBS: Well, I did an assignment on the Bible for Esquire so that was one. But, yeah, it was the clash between the way we live now in the 21st century and the way they lived then. It’s all I see now. I was walking around Manhattan in a white robe and sandals carrying a staff. I didn’t have sheep with me most of the time.

ANDELMAN: Most of the time.

JACOBS: Most of the time. Well, I did go on a number of adventures because I wanted to immerse myself with people who live biblically or took the Bible literally in some way. So I did go to Israel, and I did spend the day shepherding sheep, which was one of the most, the greatest experiences of my book.

ANDELMAN: Now, there was also Uncle Gil.

JACOBS: Right. My family has an interesting religious background because most of us are very secular, but my ex-uncle, a man formerly married to my aunt, is probably the most religious person in the world. He’s been through every major religion. He was a born-again Christian. He was a Buddhist. He was a Hindu cult leader. And now he’s an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem.

ANDELMAN: In any of that time, I kept wondering, did he do Amway?

JACOBS: I didn’t see that in his autobiography, but he’d be good.




ANDELMAN: It’s a really interesting book to read, partly because it’s funny, but it’s also very thought provoking, as I said earlier. Myself, I’ve always been much less of a religious person and more of a Ten Commandments guy. I always thought, if you needed guiding principles in life, the Ten Commandments seemed to boil down pretty well to the basics of being a good person.

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But, I wondered, now that you’ve finished the book, what elements of your year continue with you?

JACOBS: Well, it’s interesting because the book did change me in a hundred different ways, big and small. There is humor in the book, I hope, but that’s only part of it. I really was fascinated with religion, and I wanted to see what, if anything, I was missing. So there are things that I found about religion that I’ve kept even after my year. I don’t stone adulterers anymore, but I…

ANDELMAN: Thank God.

JACOBS: Yeah, thank God. I definitely, the Bible gave me a sense of gratefulness because there’s a lot of talk about thanking in the Bible, which I think it’s really important to remember the hundred things that go right in a day instead of focusing on the three or four things that go wrong. So it really helped me in that. And one of the other lessons I learned is that by acting with almost a “fake it till you make it” approach because I was acting like a moral person. I was not coveting. I was not lying. I was trying not to gossip. And, if you do that, you slowly become a slightly better person. I’m not Angelina Jolie or Gandhi, but I feel that by committing yourself to acting, pretending that you’re a good person, you actually become a better person.

ANDELMAN: Now, have you had that confirmed by other people?

JACOBS: That I’m a better person?

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

JACOBS: Well, my wife thinks I’m a better person now that I shaved my beard.


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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: A.J. Jacobs, Angelina Jolie, Esquire Magazine, Eva Longoria, Jessica Biel, Nick Tosches, Rosario Dawson, Scarlett Johansson, The Bible, The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically

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