Bruce Eric Kaplan wrote for “Seinfeld” and wrote for and was an executive producer of both “Six Feet Under” and “Girls.” He also has been a longtime contributing cartoonist to the New Yorker.
Despite all these successes, Kaplan is still plagued by doubts about his work and his career, so in 2022 he decided to put those feelings down in a journal, which is now being published as “They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir.”
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Much of the book is Kaplan in limbo, writing each day about waiting for meetings with actors and producers and networks or waiting on the notes from those meetings. He also drives his children around Los Angeles and makes multiple trips to the supermarket. (He always forgets to buy what he initially set out for.)
Among the projects he is hoping to get off the ground is a series with Glenn Close (that comes to include Pete Davidson) and a revival of “Gilligan’s Island”; he also weighs an offer from Amy Schumer’s “Life & Beth,” a show he doesn’t like.
Kaplan spoke about the book recently by video from New York, where he and his family moved; he is currently executive producer on Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. When you set out, did you know you wanted to publish this journal or was it more of a diary for yourself?
It was both. I was doing it for myself for the mental health aspect of journaling, but I was also conscious of what I put in it and designed it to be a book. I had never thought before, I’m going to write a journal about my work life and how it goes up and down or just down. It was like I just was told to start doing it and I received it and it was like, “I guess I’m writing a book about this experience, whatever that this experience is.”
Q. There’s so much waiting around and so much about meetings and notes from executives. Do you imagine your reader as someone interested in the industry?
Absolutely. But whenever I write something, I hope it’s for everyone, no matter what the specificity is. To me, the book is about my family, my friends, my memories, my whole life or things I witnessed just going to the supermarket. To me, the book is about someone learning the things that he needs to learn, which, for me, is about being more present and living for the things that are important and letting go of the things that aren’t important.
Q. Did you worry about how you come across in the book?
I just didn’t feel like I had a choice. I felt like I had been picked to illustrate the torturous fever dream that is my brain. It’s always the goal that you expose yourself so that others can identify with aspects of oneself. So I’m a person trying my best. I don’t achieve my best a lot of the time, but I am trying.
Q. And is that why you include those trips to the supermarket, meals you made and even recipes?
I’m so sorry to keep coming back to this, but it was like someone was telling me what to do. I didn’t have a conscious understanding of it in the moment, but I believe the book just really wanted to be a document. So I put every part of my day in – it’s this, but it’s also that— because that’s what the day looked like. If I removed that stuff, it would feel weird.
Q. You mention stars by name, like Glenn Close and Amy Schumer. Were you concerned about the consequences of that?
It was a conscious decision, and along the way, various people said, Do you want to change this to disguise people? But again, the book came to me. I didn’t choose to write this. And the book came to me as a document of me in 2022. I needed the book to be literal. This is who I’m meeting with, this is what I’m seeing on the news. So I felt like I had no choice in the matter.
My thoughts are just my thoughts. They’re not really portraits of anyone else. I don’t really know these people.
All the people who are really in my life, have read it and I adjusted things for those people. Candidly, my favorite line in the book is gone. It’s something someone else said, and that person didn’t want that included in the book. And I respect that. I mean, I understand. I’ve put people in a strange position with this book because it’s not the norm for this kind of book to happen from conversations and texts and emails anyhow.
Q. How did your kids feel about it?
My son is 19 and my daughter is 17 and they’re both supportive of the book, so that was very meaningful to me.
One of my agents had concerns about the book, but my lawyer said — to comfort me — “It doesn’t matter. No one’s going to read it.” And I think my kids feel that way, too.