A.J. Jacobs, "The Year of Living Biblically" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What are you especially glad to be done with from that year?

A.J. JACOBS: Well, it was a very intense year so it was hard to, for instance, completely cut out lying, to be totally honest, all the time. It’s a radical life change. And I think it’s good not to. I think I learned that I should lie less. But there were times where it was just exhausting because I have a three-year-old kid, and you can’t tell him, “Uh, sorry, the TV’s broken”. You have to say, “No, you can’t watch TV because I don’t want you to,” and so there’s screaming, there’s crying, and he gets upset too.

ANDELMAN: I think at one point he wanted a bagel, and you tried to convince him it was an English muffin. No, your wife convinced him it was an English muffin, and you just couldn’t do that.

JACOBS: Right. He wanted a bagel. We didn’t have bagels. We only had an English muffin. So she wanted me to say, “Hey, here’s a bagel,” and give him the muffin, but I felt I had to tell him the truth. And it backfired in a massive way.



ANDELMAN: Has your year of living biblically changed the way that you will raise him?

JACOBS: It has. It has. One of the interesting things is the Bible talks a lot about how the God of the Bible has mercy, but also He has sternness. So I was a pushover dad. I was no backbone, say yes to everything. But I’m trying to be a little more like the God of the Bible where I have a balance between the mercy and the toughness.

ANDELMAN: I have to tell you that, of all the things in the book, the one that stopped me dead and made me scratch my head a little bit, I hope you laugh about this, but it was that your son could only watch TV while he was eating. That just really stuck with me.

JACOBS: You like that?

ANDELMAN: I thought that was interesting. It was the thing that we used to do. We used to let my daughter watch TV while she was eating, but then we noticed that eating was taking an hour to 90 minutes.

JACOBS: That is exactly the problem I have. I know. He turns it into like a five-course French meal.

ANDELMAN: I know that’s kind of off-topic, but that was the thing that really… I’ll remember that for a while.

JACOBS: I wish the Bible had more specific commands about television and when kids should watch it.

ANDELMAN: Since you mention that, you did keep working on your Powerbook, which I don’t recall seeing mentioned in any versions of the Bible or even the Torah.

JACOBS: Some of the time I actually tried to live like they lived 3,000, 2,000 years ago with the robe, or I wrote a lot by olive oil lamp. But, much of the time, I found if I could just follow the rules strictly then I could do some modern things. There’s no commandment, “Thou shalt not use a Macbook Pro.” So that’s sort of the loophole I found for that.

ANDELMAN: Now, one of the unnerving aspects of reading your book, as a writer, again, was the thought of massaging and merging so many versions of the Bible and related texts with so many purported authorities on its content. You have this whole council of people. And then, somehow, you come out of that with expertise yourself, all in less than a year, whereas some of these people have obviously committed their whole lifetimes to this. How did you do that?

JACOBS: Well, I’m certainly not the world’s greatest expert on the Bible, but I think I’ve got a unique point of view on it. And, as you say, I had a spiritual advisory board. I had rabbis, ministers, priests, some very liberal, some extremely conservative, and they helped me navigate. But, in the end, one of the goals was to see if I could strip away all the interpretations and get back to what the Bible actually said, what it meant back then, get back to the Biblical bedrock. And I realized that this was Mission: Impossible. I could not do that. The Biblical bedrock is too slippery. You can’t find out what it meant, the original intent was. But it was a fascinating journey, and I learned thousands of things along the way. So I’m glad I did it even if I’ll never know what Moses actually meant with a certain passage.



ANDELMAN: Would I be wrong in guessing that the proofreading and copy-editing process might have been a bit of a nightmare?

JACOBS: That is true. There were a lot of names that…Methuselah and things. I thank God for the copy editors.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you if you encountered any editors along the process who did not appreciate the point of view in the book or the interpretation of certain things in the book.

JACOBS: Well, I actually thought I would get a lot more flak than I did, and I’m not really sure why I didn’t. Definitely, there are people who don’t approve of my project, but far more people have been accepting of it. And I think that that is because I went in there with an open mind, really trying to understand this incredibly influential book as opposed to going in with an agenda.

ANDELMAN: Now, as we’re talking, the book hasn’t officially gone on sale yet.

JACOBS: True.

ANDELMAN: There’re a few things ahead of us that you don’t know what’s going to happen. But what would surprise you in the months to come as far as the acceptance of the book goes? Would it be, if this hasn’t already happened, would it be if someone wanted to option the book as a movie, would that surprise you? Before you answer that, I’m thinking also you write about going into a Bible bookstore in Manhattan where there was a guy there who was real mellow and real calm. Would it surprise you to walk by there one day in the coming months and see the book in the window, for example?

JACOBS: As for the first question, it actually was already optioned as a screenplay by Paramount.

ANDELMAN: Good for you.

JACOBS: It was actually quite a bizarre process because we optioned the idea, and they wrote the screenplay simultaneously as I was writing the book. And the guy who wrote the screenplay actually finished his screenplay before I finished my book. So I want us to get a hold of the screenplay and see how my year ended. But it’s in development, and things are looking good, but you never know with Hollywood. And as for the bookstore, it is interesting. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback so far from evangelical Christians who, I don’t agree with a lot of what they say, but I did try to explore their point of view, and they seem to be interested. So I’m hoping the book will appeal to everyone from the Christopher Hitchens-type atheists to the Orthodox Jews, but we’ll see.

ANDELMAN: Are you now or do you see yourself becoming a regular at either temple or church at some point?

JACOBS: Well, I started the year as an agnostic and, by the end of the year, I don’t want to give away the ending. By the end of the year, I’m still agnostic, but I call myself a reverent agnostic. It’s actually a term a minister friend of mine came up with because, whether or not there’s a God, I do believe there’s something to the idea of sacredness and that rituals can be sacred and the Sabbath can be sacred, and there’s an importance to that, whether or not God exists.

ANDELMAN: So you didn’t come back and decide that you wanted to be Jewish, something you had not been really beforehand.

JACOBS: Well, I actually am a little more committed than I was. My kid is going to a Jewish school for the first couple of years. I don’t think he’ll continue in a Jewish school the whole way, but it happens to be a block away from our house so that helps. And I like some of the rituals, the Seder, and other things which I just didn’t have when I was growing up.

ANDELMAN: A.J., how did this book, the research and preparation for this book, compare to The Know-It-All in which you read the entire encyclopedia?

JACOBS: The Know-It-All was definitely an intellectual Everest because I had to read 33,000 pages and 44 million words. And not every single word was fascinating. So, nothing against the Portuguese, but the 25 pages on Portuguese literature, I could’ve done without. So it was a very challenging year, but I think that the Bible was more of a challenge because it affected every single part of my life. So it affected the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I thought, the way I touched my wife. It was a full immersion experiment.



ANDELMAN: How do you follow this? To the magazine, of course, you’ve set yourself up as the go-to guy for interviewing the hottest actresses and, with the books, you’re the go-to guy for time intensive big projects. What do you do next?

JACOBS: I know. I’m trying to think. My wife thinks I should try eating at every restaurant in New York City. My brother-in-law thinks I should become a eunuch for a year, but I don’t know if that can be a year long project. It’s sort of a lifetime commitment.

ANDELMAN: That’s the brother-in-law?

JACOBS: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, that figures, doesn’t it?

JACOBS: Yeah. He thinks that would be a good idea. He thinks I have enough kids. I have some ideas, but I haven’t settled on one yet. But I do love the genre, the immersion genre or whatever you want to call it. I just love living these things, and I love reading other people’s books about it cause I think it’s like a memoir with added value. You get to look at someone’s life, but you also get a peek at this fascinating topic.

ANDELMAN: Well, it seems like you have a pretty good gig in balancing the occasional book with the magazine visibility and obviously the hot babes. So I have to say I’m sure I’m not the only guy in the business who’s very envious of what you do. But I really enjoyed the book. I’m really glad we had time to talk today.

JACOBS: Oh, I had a great time. Thanks, Bob. And envying is a sin, of course.

ANDELMAN: Yes, but I’m not keeping to the Good Book.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.