Inside the Neurotic Mind Of Bruce Eric Kaplan

Bruce Eric Kaplan lets us know in his intoxicating and irreverent book, They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir, that he began writing this book to stop himself from going mad. And we believe him. He wrote the book n in the form of journal entries over the course of a year beginning in 2022. Kaplan has an anxiousness and hyper-awareness of time coupled with high expectations of himself that could drive anyone crazy.

He’s a successful television writer and producer, working on Seinfeld, Girls, and Six Feet Under, for which he wrote several episodes. His narrative voice puts you in a chokehold whether he is talking about matters of consequence or trivial things; he has a way of getting under your skin without annoying you. He seems both blessed and cursed with an extreme sensitivity to all that surrounds him, which fuels his writing. He seems to constantly be measuring the meaning or meaninglessness of whatever endeavor he engages in. In short, he hooks us; we can’t get enough of him.

Kaplan cares about his wife and children but is honest enough to show us that the thoughts that flow through his consciousness on any given day often doesn’t include them.  They are usually about himself. Sometimes he’s trying to think about nothing at all or considering why he finds Mia Farrow so attractive and Loni Anderson unappealing. He is waiting for a few big deals to come through and focuses much of his attention on his emails, texts, and phone messages, hoping for a response from some key player.

There’s a show he’s collaborating on with Glenn Close and Pete Davidson that they hope to sell to HBO, and a possible Gilligan’s Island reboot, and a few other ideas his agent has run by him, but time seems to have stopped, despite the marvels of Zoom. Covid has added an extra layer of darkness that seems to touch everything, and he must concentrate to distract himself from the gardener outside, who has political opinions that Kaplan finds unsavory.

Although he tries to convince himself he is playing it cool, the Glenn Close project and the meetings that keep getting rescheduled obsess him. Kaplan writes: “The reason I say I am supposedly going to have a meeting, is that three days ago, my agent’s assistant asked me if I could Zoom with them on January eighteenth or twentieth. I said either would work. And now I’m waiting for Glenn to confirm one of those days. I assume nothing at this point. If you told me today that this meeting would never happen, I would believe you.”  We can feel how angry he is at the entire process and how much he hates the powerlessness he feels. His contempt for Glenn Close is visceral.

Kaplan is not a confessional writer, and we get to know him best by reading in-between the lines. He finds thinking about his Jewishness, a preoccupation of so many Jews, an utter waste of time, laughing at Jews obsessed with tracing their lineage hoping to find an esteemed rabbi in the mix. Kaplan couldn’t care less what country his relatives came from or who did or didn’t make it. He does share with us how growing up in a middle-class Jewish home in New Jersey was an unhappy experience.

He escaped by watching a ridiculous amount of television, recalling how at times he wished he could crawl inside the television set and live there. It wasn’t that anything so heinous was going on in his family home, but his parent’s marriage seemed stale to him, almost like an arranged marriage. It saddens him that he was unable to grow close with either parent.  He had ridiculously banal conversations with his father which continued into adulthood, and his mother always appeared to him so fragile, she might break. His mother found taking care of him and his two older brothers overwhelming.

Kaplan has little praise for most people, except his son Henry, with whom he is hopelessly smitten.  Henry seems to be charmingly precocious and possesses an enormous amount of empathy for his father. When they’re in traffic jams and his father continues to stupidly honk the horn, his son sheepishly asks him why he keeps doing that.  Kaplan apologizes to him and explains how he has trouble staying calm sometimes. His son tells him it will be all right, and Kaplan thinks about how extraordinary Henry is; how lucky he is to have him. Henry already knows he wants to be a playwright and father and son share a certain sensibility; even about music. They both hate Bruce Springsteen.   And when they accidentally hear “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac on a drive together, they are ecstatic.

Kaplan may be known to many readers for his clever cartoons which have appeared in The New Yorker for decades under the moniker BEK.  As the days pass, and times stretches out before him, he begins scribbling again and realizes when he sits alone and draws his cartoons, he feels closest to his longed-for happiness.  But there are endless distractions that take him away from this.

It’s clear for reasons that he never specifies that he is the house manager, and this job requires an endless array of chores. Like with most things, Kaplan becomes obsessive about the things that he needs to do. There are daily trips to the supermarket where he usually forgets the main item he needs and must return to get it.  The dishwasher keeps breaking, and the air conditioning unit too, and he is continually dealing with repairman who always need to return on another day to complete the repair. But they forget to come back as they promised they would do, and he must call them back and start again.  This leaves him doing dishes by hand and staring at his leaky air-conditioning unit that is ruining the flooring.

He’s a perfectionist in the kitchen, cooking vegan soups with homemade croutons and broccoli souffles and goes so far as to provide us with the recipes he uses.  He makes sure he cleans, folds, and puts away everyone’s clothes in the proper places. There are dead birds lying in the backyard he must pick up and discard, as well as a lizard lying around on the front entrance to their home.

He suddenly tells us that the Glenn Close deal is still in the air, as is the Gilligan project, and a few others he thought would be wrapped up by now. But there’s still too much darn time and although he relays his angst to us with a comic, almost Albert Brooks-like schtick, we know he’s hurting.  He hasn’t had a full-time job in over a year. He starts to realize that “not only does the world seem not to want what I want to write, but it also seems not to want what I would like to see.”

 Still, sometimes his lack of self-awareness surprises you.  He almost never speaks about the dynamics within his own family. Except once. His wife takes him into the backyard to quietly tell him both she and the children aren’t feeling sufficiently loved by him and need him to be more present for them. He doesn’t ask her any questions and we can hear him bristling as he relives this encounter to write about it.

He recalls telling her he was doing the best he could. That is the only time we stop dead in our tracks, perhaps taking note of aspects of himself he doesn’t see clearly. He once told Terri Gross in an interview that he had countless hours of therapy with various therapists and found therapy to be extremely helpful. But he didn’t elaborate with her about what he learned from it, and we wonder if some of his blind spots we see prevent him from finding the harmony he seeks. We feel he is trying.  As he told Terri Gross, “As anyone in their right mind knows, we are our problems.”

 Near the end of the book, he has a realization “Maybe this journal is about learning to stop hitting my head against the wall.  Maybe it is about me finding a new life doing something completely different that I love…”  But before he lets us get too excited, the doorbell is ringing, and the repairmen are back. A text has come in offering some confidence that one of his projects will materialize into a television series. He only has a few minutes before going to pick up Henry from school and he wonders what new song Henry will have found to share with him.

 Kaplan feels busy again. We sense he is tired of trying to work everything out.  The family has decided to move to New York, and everyone is thrilled, except his wife who seems a bit hesitant but willing. He seems to have figured out something but we’re not sure exactly what. Somehow the very act of writing this journal has discharged some of the demons that taunt him. Kaplan is ready to say his farewell to us. We find ourselves surprised to miss him. He’s become embedded in our heads, a welcome visitor.

Kaplan may not be thinking of us anymore, but we are thinking about him. We wonder why we care, and it occurs to us we relate more to his endless preoccupations with our helplessness than perhaps we care to admit. And by listening to him complain, we’ve learned about ourselves. And maybe a little bit about how to feel better.