Under his own name, Daniel Handler has a diverse and busy career. First and foremost, he's a writer, with two novels (1999's psychological thriller The Basic Eight and 2000's sex-soaked operatic incest story Watch Your Mouth) under his belt. A third literary novel, Adverbs, is due out next May, and his McSweeney's humor book How To Dress For Every Occasion, By The Pope will hit stores at the beginning of December. Handler has also played accordion with various small ensembles, and with The Magnetic Fields, most notably on 69 Love Songs. He's scripted two films—the modern opera Rick, starring Bill Pullman, and the screen adaptation of Joel Rose's novel Kill The Poor—and he and Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt are currently collaborating on a musical.
But in spite of all his other projects, Handler is still best known as Lemony Snicket, the broody, dour pseudonymous author of the gothic children's books collectively known as A Series Of Unfortunate Events. From its start with The Bad Beginning, the series was a runaway hit; at one point, they claimed seven of the 10 slots on the New York Times' children's-lit bestseller list. In 2004, the first three books were loosely adapted into a feature film, Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events; Handler was pushed off the project before it was completed, but returned to do a hilarious commentary track as the dismally bitter Snicket, alongside apologetic director Brad Silberling. With the 12th Snicket book, The Penultimate Peril, recently in stores, and the 13th and final book approaching, Handler talked to The A.V. Club about the books, the film, and what it's like to be the best and only accordion player anyone knows.
The AV Club: How did you initially sell your agent and publisher on a series of dour, dark, vocabulary-building kids' books?
Daniel Handler: I guess through naïveté, which is pretty much a motif in my professional life. [Laughs.] I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea. She kept pestering me, saying, "I think you'd be great to write for children," and "I'm looking for new writers." I was so broke and so desperate that I couldn't believe I was turning away an editor who was interested in my work, but I honestly thought that there was no way a children's publishing house would take any interest in my work.
And so, to get her off my back as much as anything else, I agreed to meet her in a bar to discuss an idea I had, because I figured she would say it was a really lousy idea. So if we were meeting in her office, it would be really awkward, but if we were meeting in a bar, then at least we would both have a drink in our hands. And I told her I had an idea for a gothic novel, which had been falling apart as I was writing it, but I thought instead it could be the story of children growing through all these terrible things. I expected she would hate that idea, and instead she said she liked it, which embarrassed me even more, because I just thought it meant she was a lightweight. All I could picture was that the next morning, she was going to call me and say, "I've sobered up, and you're right, it's a terrible idea." But instead, she called and said, "I'm not drinking anything, and I still like the idea," so it went from there. I wrote some of the book and gave it to her, and I kept being amazed that people weren't horrified by it. I kept waiting for someone to say, "What is anyone thinking? We're not going to publish this," but they didn't, and then the books were published. [Laughs.]
AVC: The series' anti-marketing irony level is so high, with the author, the dust jackets, and the merchandising constantly emphasizing, "Don't read this, don't buy these, they're awful." Doesn't that make publishers and marketers uncomfortable?
DH: Well, not on purpose. The way that the stories go in the Snicket books is just the way stories naturally go to me. They're full of misery, and yet the misery ends up being slightly hilarious. And in terms of the warnings on the back of the books, that really started as an honest assessment of their marketability. [Laughs.] I'd finished the first two and they were going to publish them, and they said, "We need you to write a summary that will drive people to these books." And it took forever. I couldn't think of a thing to say. I looked at the back of other children's books that were full of giddy praise and corny rhetorical questions, you know, "Will she have a better time at summer camp than she thinks?" "How will she escape from the troll's dungeon?" All these terrible, terrible summaries of books, and I just couldn't... I was so convinced that the books were going to fail that I couldn't imagine how I could write something on the back that would drive people to them. Then I was in a pharmacy and I saw the warnings on the backs of poisonous substances, and I thought, "Well, that's what I can do." So I wrote a list of ingredients in the book, and warnings that they shouldn't consume those ingredients. The editor and the publisher thought that it was a great way to go in terms of reverse psychology, but it honestly hadn't occurred to me that it was reverse psychology. I just thought that it was sort of an honest assessment making clear that if you were timid or easily disturbed, you could turn away.
AVC: So you've never had any resistance to that approach from people who don't get the joke?
DH: I think there've been a few pockets of people here and there, but there was certainly never any organized resistance. And I love meeting people who have absolutely no sense of irony. It's really fascinating to imagine what it would be like to go through life without understanding even the most basic of ironies. It's sort of like trying to imagine what it's like to walk around without a torso. So every so often, when I meet someone who's honestly appalled by these books and doesn't understand why they would be attractive to people... I find such people sort of charming, even though they usually don't like me.
AVC: The books are marketed to kids, but the linguistic jokes, literary references, and political jabs seem to be aimed at an older audience. Do you have an ideal reader in mind?
DH: No. The thing with the literary references and other in-jokes is that some young people get them and some old people get them, and some young people don't and some old people don't, so I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started—this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more—and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children. But I think there are probably just as many adults who would miss the humor of these books, if not more, as there are children.
AVC: Your two adult novels have noticeably different narrative voices, and then Lemony Snicket has a third style. Was there a process to finding the voice for those books?
DH: Not really. The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have. With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me. I mean, I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.
AVC: So are all those assumptions untrue?
DH: [Laughs.] I can't believe I'm actually being asked to comment on my own erudition. [Laughs again.] If I were to say, "Yes, I am a fascinating, erudite person," what would that say about me? I don't know. I mean, I think they're all pieces of me, they're all to be found somewhere in the muddle, but I don't think I'm as monochromatic as any of the narrators I've adopted.
AVC: Has working on the Lemony Snicket books changed your manner of writing for adults?
DH: Not really, though it's taken me much longer to write the third novel than it took to write the first two, because what has happened with the Snicket books has been so enormous, and it takes up a lot of time.
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