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From legendary character actor Stephen Tobolowsky—who appears on The Goldbergs and HBO’s Silicon Valley, and Norman Lear’s new One Day at a Time, author of The Dangerous Animals Club and host of the podcast The Tobolowsky Files—a funny, introspective collection about love, triumph, and catastrophe, all told through the lens of his evolving relationship with the mystery that is “God.”
As Tobolowsky explains, “everyone believes in something. As much as we love certainty, we are often shaped by the invisible, the unexplainable—something we call faith.” That’s the reason Stephen Tobolowsky still has two pairs of pants in his closet with a thirty-two-inch waist.
My Adventures with God is a series of short stories exploring the idea that most people’s lives seem to fit into the template of the Old Testament. There are, of course, the powerful creation myths: tales of childhood, our first battles won and lost. It is our Genesis. Then, like in the Book of Exodus, we go into slavery. But instead of building pyramids, we lose ourselves in fear and ambition—in first loves, first jobs, too many dreams, too much beer. We eventually proclaim to the universe who we really are—our Leviticus moment. Soon, we are wandering the wilderness for another thirty-nine years. We are shaped by mortality as in the Book of Numbers. We search for reason and find redemption in a place we call the Promised Land. Finally, we retell our stories to our children, hoping to make sense of our journey, as Moses did in Deuteronomy.
Tobolowsky’s stories tell of a boy growing up in the wilds of Texas, finding and losing love, losing and finding himself—all told through the prism of the Jewish Torah and Talmud, mixed with a touch of quantum physics and refined through a child’s sense of wonder. My Adventures with God not only shines a light into the life of one of America’s most beloved actors, but provides a structure from which to evaluate our own lives and relationship with God.
