I Hate You, I Love You, I'm Hungry By Bruce Eric Kaplan

“I pick up most of my wisdom from celebrity interviews,” says a cartoon on page nine of Bruce Eric Kaplan’s new book, I Love You, I Hate You, I’m Hungry.

Kaplan, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, author/illustrator of five Simon & Shuster titles (including The Cat That Changed my Life and No One You Know), and a television produce and writer, is obviously a man of many talents. One of those talents is indisputably wry social commentary. On each new page, he expresses with brash honesty and poignant insight a look into the world that most think, but never say.

According to Kaplan’s introduction, the book derives its title from a simple theory of life: “It’s that everything we do, we do for one of three reasons: because we love someone, because we hate someone, or because we’re hungry.” With hunger defined as a need or desire for something – anything – Kaplan makes us think, through his introduction, through his cartoons, through his wit. Everything from work to relationships, and even a brief look at politics, is covered in a simplistic black-and-white cartoon style that doesn’t detract from the major theme or message.

In every cartoon is a small nugget of truth we either cannot or will not express outside the sanctity of our own minds. For example, one cartoon features a man who states, “I am looking for a position where I can slowly lose sight of what I originally set out to do with my life, with benefits.”

How many of us have been in the same position, fearing that the job that we are taking will be the only one we’ll ever have despite our ambitions, or, worse, waking up to realize that that has become true? How many of us have felt like the man who attends a movie with a companion and says, “Seeing it again, I was newly struck by whatever you thought about it”?

Reading Kaplan’s collection of cartoons is like reading into our very souls. They make the reader laugh, but, more importantly, they make the reader think. In his introduction, Kaplan hopes that the cartoons will have some meaning for the reader, “whoever you are,” and they do.

There isn’t a single person who will read this book without finding something within its pages to identify with or muse about. The delicate art of social commentary is hard to pull off without sounding preachy or condescending, but Kaplan does it with wit and style. But, from a cartoonist of the New Yorker and a writer on Seinfeld, that comes as no surprise.

Author: Bruce Eric Kaplan

Pages: 192

Publisher: Simon & Schuster