They Went Another Way

A darkly comic memoir about being a working creative person in a world that is growing ever more dysfunctional, by acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and television writer Bruce Eric Kaplan

In January 2022, Bruce Eric Kaplan found himself confused and upset by the state of the world and the state of his life as a television writer in Los Angeles. He started a journal to keep from going mad, which eventually became They Went Another Way.

The book’s through line traces his attempt to get a television project set up in the increasingly Byzantine world of Hollywood. But as he details the project’s ups and downs, Kaplan finds himself ruminating not only on show business but also on today’s political and social issues, on old movies and TV shows and music, on his family, on his friends, on his past, on his failing heating system, and on all the dead birds that keep showing up in his backyard.

This hilarious and surprisingly moving book is about life—about art, about love, about alienation, about connection, about ugliness and beauty, about disappointment, wonder, and hope. In short, it is about everything.

"It's the kind of mordant show-business diary you wish [Dorothy] Parker had been together enough to keep...Bruce Eric Kaplan manages to find the mordant laughs in today's industry foibles... Beautifully brutal about the absurdities of his industry... unusually [for] a timid town, it names names." --New York Times

"Bruce Eric Kaplan has long been one of our foremost humorists--in cartoons, on TV--but his prose is him at his best. His impressions of life are both dagger-sharp and comforting and he engages with the challenge of everyday--everyday parenthood, everyday politics, everyday madness-- to create something of philosophical depth and comic precision. This book doesn't shy away from the challenges of being a person, yet does no less than remind me of the magic in the quotidian, of all there is to love about being human." --Lena Dunham

"A funny, melancholy and poignant journal of Kaplan's personal plague year... a comic primer on how good ideas are slowly strangled by an unwieldy and inefficient streamocracy whose lingua franca is an artfully evasive lie." --LA Times

"It's the best book I've read about waiting for something to happen. It's beautiful. I love it so much." --Gary Janetti, New York Times bestselling author of Do You Mind If I Cancel? and Start Without Me

"Bruce Eric Kaplan has written a funny, riveting, honest, and shocking memoir about hope and heartbreak. Essential reading for anyone aspiring to, contemplating, or dreaming of the Hollywood life." --Delia Ephron, New York Times bestselling author of Left on Tenth

"In other hands, the book might have read like an extended exercise in sour grapes. Instead, it's an idiosyncratic meditation on creativity, success and failure, self discovery via frustration--and, because Kaplan includes dispatches on his home life, it's about the ecosystem of a family, too." --Vanity Fair

"Bruce Eric Kaplan's hilarious, harrowing memoir captures the Sisyphean slog of Hollywood screenwriting better than any work of art I've ever seen. Brutal, devastating, and also somehow inspiring, it made me laugh, scream and sigh with recognition. I absolutely loved it." --Simon Rich, author of Glory Days

"I don't know anyone funnier than Bruce Eric Kaplan and I don't know anyone who suffers more than Bruce Eric Kaplan. Both of these truths bring me great joy." --Judd Apatow

"Screenwriter and cartoonist Kaplan captures the agonizing uncertainty of trying to get a TV series greenlit in this plangently funny memoir. . . With a balance of sharpness and pathos, the results offer a revealing look at the demoralizing effects of gig work. This mordantly entertaining account buffs the shine off Tinseltown." --Publishers Weekly

"A humorous and deeply introspective memoir." --Library Journal

"Kaplan, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons, writes with the candor of one of his put-upon characters. In fact, many of his blunt, woeful sentences would work perfectly well as captions ("Is there any way my life could be turned into a musical about nothing ever happening and nothing ever getting fixed?"). His observational humor may conjure Seinfeld--no surprise, as Kaplan wrote for that show's final season--but he also evinces a devotion to his family that turns They Went Another Way into something more than a book about nothing. And yes, it would make a good television show." --Shelf Awareness

"A good read for anyone seeking a truly frank look at what the life and career of a working television writer looks like." --Booklist

"Hollywood dealmaking as seen from the inside out... Kaplan's journal entries have the same snappy rhythm and pace as cartoon captions." --Kirkus

Bruce Eric Kaplan was born in New Jersey and moved to Los Angeles when he was twenty-one. He had a million bad jobs until finally, he became a television writer and producer. Over the years, he worked on such shows as Seinfeld, Six Feet Under, and Girls. Currently, he is a writer/producer on two Netflix shows, No Good Deed and Too Much, both currently scheduled to premiere at the end of 2024. Kaplan is also a cartoonist. He first appeared in The New Yorker over thirty years ago and he has been a regular contributor ever since. He has done over a thousand cartoons as well as over a dozen covers for the magazine. After his children were born, he started writing and illustrating picture books. The first was called Monsters Eat Whiney Children, and he subsequently wrote four other picture books. In addition, he has three collections of cartoons published, written and illustrated four picture books for adults, and wrote and illustrated a memoir, I Was a Child.

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