Read Online The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs - Free Book Online

to offend people, because then they’d write on their blogs what an asshole I am, and it would turn up in every Google search for the rest of my life .”
    He writes back: “ Normally, I don’t really like meeting editors anyway. Makes me ill to think about it, because I’m afraid of coming off like the idiot that, deep down, I suspect I am .”
    That’s one thing I’ve noticed: when I am radically honest, people become radically honest themselves. I feel my resentment fade away. I like this guy. We have a good meeting.
    In fact, all my relationships can take a whole lot more truth than I expected. Consider this one: For years, I’ve had a chronic problem where I refer to my wife, Julie, by my sister’s name, Beryl. I always catch myself midway through and pretend it didn’t happen. I’ve never confessed to Julie. Why should I? It either means that I’m sexually attracted to my sister, which is not good, or that I think of my wife as my sister, also not good.
    But today, in the kitchen, when I have my standard mental sister-wife mix-up, I decide to tell Julie about it.
    “That’s strange,” she says.
    We talk about it. I feel unburdened, closer to my wife now that we share this quirky, slightly disturbing knowledge. I realize that by keeping it secret, I had given it way too much weight. I hope she feels the same way.
    I call up Blanton one last time, to get his honest opinion about how I’ve done.
    “I’m finishing my experiment,” I say.
    “You going to start lying again?” he asks.
    “Hell yeah.”
    “Oh, shit. It didn’t work.”
    “But I’m going to lie less than I did before.”
    I tell him about my confession to Julie that I sometimes want to call her Beryl. “No big deal,” says Blanton. “People in other cultures have sex with their sisters all the time.”
    I bring up the episode about telling the editor from Rachael Ray’s magazine that I tried to look down her shirt, but he sounds disappointed. “Did you tell your wife?” he asks. “That’s the good part.”
    I confess I didn’t tell Julie about the cleavage incident, but I did tell my wife that I was bored and didn’t want to hear the end of her story about fixing her computer. Blanton asks how she responded.
    “She said, ‘Fuck you.’”
    “That’s good!” Blanton says. “I like that. That’s communicating.”
    CODA
    Here’s my radically honest opinion of my piece on Radical Honesty: I like some parts—especially the outrageous quotes from Blanton. And I think the intro works—though, frankly, I borrowed the idea (okay, swiped it) from Blanton himself. His book has a section called “The Truth About Why I Am Writing This Book,” where he says “I want to become famous. . . . I want to get rich. . . . I want to be like Jesus.”
    But overall, my attempts at Radical Honesty could have been more hard-core. If I’d removed my filter in every single situation—instead of 90 percent of the time—I probably would have gotten beaten up, fired, and divorced. Then Blanton could never accuse me of “a superficial dipshit job.” Then again, I might not have lived to write this piece.
    I will say this: When you write an essay about Radical Honesty, you’re asking for trouble. This came out in
Esquire
in 2007. Most of the feedback was positive (that’s the truth), but I also got plenty of e-mails that said I suck. Or more precisely, I “ suuuuuck .” And my friends wrote me notes with subject lines like “ Try standing up straight once in a while .”
    I had to do some apologizing post-piece, as you might imagine. I apologized to the woman whose cleavage I checked out. And to Julie’s parents. And to the poor
Esquire
intern who transcribed the tapes—not just because of Brad Blanton’s obscenities, but because I forgot to turn off my tape recorder when I went to pee. Three times. Sorry again, Meryl.
    I knew I’d have to apologize. Since I’m laying it all out there, I’ll confess that my motive for doing the