I Was a Child

March 2, 2015
New Yorker cartoonist Kaplan (Everything Is Going to Be Okay) recalls the somewhat stifling years of his conventional childhood in Maplewood, N.J., in his first nonfiction endeavor. The young Kaplan finds solace in television’s “clarity of emotions,” empathizing with I Love Lucy, idealizing the Newhart’s marriage, and treating the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz with profound reverence. Kaplan’s distinct imagery captures the vaguely suffocating aura of the family home: the giant cabinet record player, everything “repaired with Scotch tape,” and the TV antenna assisted by tin foil. Further, ’60s and ’70s nostalgia abounds, as Kaplan lovingly recalls baseball card packages with stale gum, Jonny Quest, and S&H Green Stamps rewards from the grocery store. The memoir is, of course, peppered with Kaplan’s famously simple illustrations depicting subjects like Lucille Ball, a childhood friend’s unhinged mother, Barbara Streisand’s nose, and Superman pushing a manual lawnmower. Fans of Kaplan’s art will find a similar style in his prose: quick, humorous sketches of the everyday, with the occasional moment of pure poetry. Agent: Erin Malone, William Morris Endeavor.

February 1, 2015
Dry, droll observations from the author's childhood, with an undercurrent of understated sadness.This could have been titled "Portrait of the Humorist as a Young Child," though New Yorker cartoonist Kaplan (I Love You, I Hate You, I'm Hungry, 2010, etc.) doesn't try too hard to be too funny. It also doesn't fit the conventions of the graphic memoir, since it has a textual format with frequent, generally small, drawings rather than cartoon panels with words. In addition to his magazine work, the author has also shown his comic sensibility as a TV screenwriter (Girls, Seinfeld), and screens small and large are more prominent throughout these pages than any memories of development as an artist. "As I guess is obvious, I loved TV," he writes. "I wanted to crawl in the TV and stay there permanently. I guess in a way when I grew up and became a TV writer, I finally did." The fact that entertainment plays such a formative role in Kaplan's life suggests how emotionally impoverished he found his family. His mother was "discombobulated" by the strains of raising three boys, while his father went off to work, his own ambitions of becoming a writer thwarted by the demands of supporting a family. The whole family seemed to make do, letting broken things remain that way, enduring their lives rather than particularly enjoying them. The author's parents never had visitors to the house except for a neighboring couple on New Year's Eve, when they would "bring out the plastic champagne glasses. I got Cheez-Its on New Year's Eve. Cheez-Its represented total, utter wild abandon." Readers of a similar background will find that these memories strike a responsive chord, along with the desire to find something less stultifying. Childhood memories dominate, but the last years of his parents bring to the fore the melancholy that has been there all along.

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March 1, 2015
I was a child but I wasn't very good at it, the noted New Yorker cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer acknowledges in this whimsical, understated memoir of his growing-up years. Illustrated with his signature cartoon drawings, the story is often funny, though it elicits more chuckles than guffaws. It begins, appropriately, in 1964 with Kaplan's birth and ends, poignantly, with the deaths of his parents many years later. His life in between is limned in snippets of memoryhis mother's being discombobulated by having three sons (Kaplan has two older brothers), his father's mild obsession with thieves, but, most of all, his own more serious obsession with TV and the movies (mostly ones he saw on TV). As I guess is obvious, I loved TV. I wanted to crawl in the TV and stay there permanently. Perhaps, he observes, he did just that when he grew up to be a TV writer. Otherwise his was a quiet life. Its highlight? I got Cheez-Its on New Year's Eve. Cheez-Its represented total, utter wild abandon. Yes, indeed, a quiet life, but a pleasantly diverting one, just like this memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2014

You've seen that neat BEK signature at the bottom of those single-panel New Yorker cartoons. And because Kaplan is also a screenwriter and producer, you've seen his hand in popular series like Seinfeld and Girls. Here he writes about his upbringing in suburban New Jersey. Quirky BEK drawings throughout.

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