Bypassing the Blues Via Great Books




After “Undeclared” was dropped, Apatow went into a funk and took some time off from writing to do stand-up. He also doubled his therapy and put himself through a great-books program. Adam McKay remembers talking with Apatow around that time: “A friend and I were talking about the ending of J. D. Salinger’s ‘Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ and I remember Judd saying that he couldn’t talk about books that way. I recommended a few for him to read, like Paul Auster’s ‘Book of Illusions.’ I ran into him a few weeks later, and he’d read it and couldn’t stop talking about it.”