SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Raphael Bob-Waksberg insisted that his debut book is optimistic, even if the numbers didn’t quite add up.

In his sun-filled kitchen, he thumbed through the pages of his new short story collection, “Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory,” delivering a happy-or-not verdict to each entry. The final tally tipped heavily toward bleak. “Nothing but despair,” he conceded with “Move Across the Country,” about a woman attempting to outrun her feelings (“Hope the Sadness can’t be as fleet as you are, hope the Sadness is more rooted”).

Gloom might be expected from Bob-Waksberg, the 34-year-old creator of “BoJack Horseman.” The Netflix animated series has won accolades for its treatment of sobering human questions that run underneath the goofy veneer of an animal-populated Hollywood. With his book, he has taken a somewhat romantic turn, one that retains his somber sensibilities.

“The idea of a book of love stories conjures maybe something different in the imagination from what the book is,” he said ahead of his book’s Tuesday release, a new season of “BoJack” and another television series, “Undone,” that he is working on for Amazon. “I don’t know if this is a thing you want to give your beloved as a token of your affection, necessarily.”