An Interview with Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Even a casual understanding of Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s career would be enough to recognize the link between the sense of being caught between the dramatic and the comedic he felt in his beginnings as a writer and his current day creative output. The writer and creator of BoJack Horseman has a preternatural ability for creating narratives that tackle the bleak realities of life, while recognizing that humor is often found (and thriving) in the darkness.

Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Twisted Glory, Bob-Waksberg’s debut short story collection, charts the many perplexing forms that love can take, venturing out far from the borders of storybook romance. A dog does his best to understand the language of his companion so as to make their relationship work. A sister resents her brother for representing their familial trauma in a play. An average woman recovers from a fleeting love affair with a coworker. Bob-Waksberg approaches each story not only as an opportunity to explore a new set of characters, but also a new structure, new language, new formats. What binds these stories is their unpredictability—every aspect is created with such specificity that you’d be hard pressed not to feel pleasantly surprised while reading.

Ultimately, the collection isn’t so much an optimistic view of love as a realistic one. While some cynics lean on “realism” as a defense mechanism for their perspectives, Bob-Waksberg’s realism is the steady-handed literal version that encapsulates harbored adoration, anger, and everything in between. In speaking to Bob-Waksberg, the intention of his oft-melancholy work is abundantly clear: it’s not to wallow pointlessly in the disappointments of life, but rather to address the unavoidable despair and make room for all the other emotions that our lives contain, too. On the occasion of his debut short story collection being published, I spoke with Raphael Bob-Waksberg about his approach to writing both television and prose, the embarrassment of a first draft, and working to justify a somewhat kooky story structure. 

—Rachel Davies

THE BELIEVER: Two of the stories in the collection were previously published. I’m wondering how many of them you already had before this collection was planned and how many were written specifically for the book.

RAPHAEL BOB-WAKSBERG: I would say I had about a third of a book when I started making the book with Knopf, which was about three years ago. I also found some older things that I didn’t quite know were short stories that I massaged and turned into stories. It’s a real mix of things that I wrote about ten years ago and things that are more recent, but even the older things I edited and I worked on. I don’t...