Post by Dante on Jun 7, 2006 12:32:04 GMT -5
(Uh, because of the way ProBoards shortens and displays URLs, you'll have to copy-paste it.)
Not so unfortunate
As Lemony Snicket, he's a multimillionaire superstar with 12 blockbuster children's books to his name. As Daniel Handler, he's just another aspiring author of adult fiction. So is he jealous of himself? Tim De Lisle meets the 'Roald Dahl of our day'
Last Wednesday, one of the world's bestselling authors was due to give a reading at a big London bookshop, Waterstone's in Piccadilly - and it was cancelled due to lack of interest. It summed up Daniel Handler's predicament.
Under his own name, which is how Waterstone's billed him, he is just another aspiring author, with a new novel bobbing at about number 4,000 on the Amazon chart. Under the preposterous pen name of Lemony Snicket, he is a superstar, whose 12 children's books, collectively entitled A Series of Unfortunate Events, have all been international bestsellers. When Handler gives a reading as Snicket, he doesn't get cancelled; he gets mobbed.
It must be a weird feeling, like being jealous of yourself.
"It's quite magical actually," Handler says over green tea in a chic London hotel. "You hand over your credit card and very few people recognise your name."
He says he hasn't been told why the reading was called off. "The publishers are anxious never to hurt my feelings. But I'm in a peculiarly lucky position, because what has happened with the Snicket books means that I'm not panicked for my livelihood every moment, like so many friends of mine who are writers. If they appear at a store in Baltimore and only 10 people are there and only six of them buy books, they know the publisher will say that doesn't pay for the hotel room."
So Handler, at 36, has the life of a novelist - writing full-time in San Francisco, in the seaside house that Snicket bought - without the angst. Which is a neat twist, since angst is what his children's books run on. He has become the Roald Dahl of our day, plying 11-year-olds with eloquently gleeful nastiness.
As well as being two authors, Handler is quite a character. He has the sort of voice that, if he were British, would make Americans say, "I love your accent" - deep, languid and upmarket. Angst comes out as "onnggst".
"I have a bit of a Leonard Zelig phenomenon with accents," he says, "so it's probably pretentious Californian imitating British."
His outfit is half fogey, half dandy, featuring fishnet socks and Chelsea boots, beneath a suit with a green pinstripe by Duncan Quinn, a British tailor based in New York who Handler believes is a moonlighting solicitor. This is typical of the remarks he makes, which are droll and arch and often culminate in a camp giggle. His persona is so sharply drawn, you want to prod him to check that he is real.
As Snicket, Handler writes fast: the 13th and final volume in the series is due in October, only seven years after the first. As himself, partly because of the demands of being Lemony, he writes slowly. The new book, Adverbs, is his third published volume of adult fiction, but his first for six years. At one point, it was "a huge, shaggy mess", running to 1,000 pages, so he cut it to 270.
He became a children's author inadvertently, at the suggestion of a children's editor to whom a manuscript of his had been sent by mistake, and in Adverbs, you can see him reacting against the path his career has taken. The book is all about love - falling in it, wrestling with it, drifting out of it. It is as if he deliberately sought out a subject that children's literature can't handle.
"I didn't think of it that way when I started, but upon completion I thought that romantic love is probably the one thing you can't really put into a children's book," he agrees. "The messy details of romantic life are so far from childhood - waking up with someone, or fighting over coffee, or the way money can transform a relationship - all those issues are peculiarly adult."
"When you're a child, your perception of romantic love is sort of limited to a prince and princess. And if you're older, it might be all about sexual curiosity."
He illustrates this last point with a vignette that perhaps could only come from a children's author, forever popping through the door between experience and innocence. "This week, I taped an episode for Blue Peter and there was a 12-year-old boy, whom they were using as a prop more than an actor, and after he changed out of his costume he had this badge on, 'I don't do mingers.' We don't have an equivalent for that in America, which just proves how civilised and muted we are. What was so interesting was the badge makes an assumption about looking for sex and also belies a complete innocence on how to go about doing it. No one who was actually hoping to go home with anyone would wear a badge indicating that there was such a thing as a minger. And that struck me as exactly what I'm talking about."
Vocally, Adverbs is quite Snicket-like, crisp and playful. Structurally, it is very different - a tricksy, postmodern compilation of 17 stories, interlocking to an extent but not sequential. Handler calls it a novel, but it feels like an album. In fact, it feels like one particular album: 69 Love Songs, the droll, arch triple CD by the Magnetic Fields. Which is not entirely a coincidence, because Handler is friends with Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields and played the accordion on 69 Love Songs.
"It must have been an influence," Handler says, "but I didn't think it was until I saw Mr Merritt one time and he said: 'What are you working on, on the adult side?' I said: 'Oh, it's this thing that sort of experiments with all these different kinds of love,' and there was this awkward pause, and I thought, oooh ..." He lets his giggle finish the point.
Handler and his wife, Lisa Brown, an illustrator, have a son, Otto, who is two. What sort of dad is he? "Apparently, one who goes on tour," he sniggers. "What sort of dad am I? What are my choices?"
Well, did he change nappies? "Oh yeah. In fact, I was the exclusive changer of nappies for the first, like, two months. My wife had some trouble with her hands in pregnancy." How about getting up in the night? "Otto breastfed for a long time, but I would get up in the morning. And to this day, my wife sleeps a little late and I get up in the morning. It's strange how little is expected of fathers. It used to drive Lisa insane when Otto was tiny, and I would just take him for a walk round the neighborhood and people would say, 'What a wonderful father you are.' Even if I had a bottle of beer in one hand."
We talk about children's fiction, which seems to be going through a golden age. "I don't have much to compare it to, but it has certainly undergone this explosion of attention. Another children's writer I know has compared it to playing rock'n'roll in the 60s. Suddenly, everyone's paying attention, so the stakes are higher."
And so are the sales. Does he know how many books he has sold? It's one of those questions you ask expecting evasive action, but Handler, after a decorous gulp, answers it. "It's about 50m as Snicket."
That's huge. "Yes. It's about 50m more than I thought I would sell."
And it's a source of ... ? "Astonishment."
And would I be right in assuming that you make about a dollar a book? "Yeah, ah, that's not an unreasonable assumption."
So you're a very wealthy man. "I ... yes. I could not put it any other way."
Has it changed the life you lead? "I love when I'm asked that." Another giggle. "What if the answer were 'no'?"
OK, do you live the life of someone with that much money? "I don't think so. I'm not flying in on my Lear jet to a private island where the rich and powerful play. But San Francisco real estate is pretty expensive, and I have a nice house; certainly nicer than I ever thought I would have. And I sort of went from someone who had a poster of a Henry Darger to someone who had a Henry Darger."
The money led to what he describes as a strange experience. "We were in a lawyer's office and we had to decide at what age Otto would be given a, you know, substantial amount of money. And they said, '15?' and we said, 'God no!' And they kept suggesting older and older ages until we surpassed our own age: 'People of 33 should not be handling this sum of money. That's absurd!'"
· Adverbs, by Daniel Handler, is published this week by Fourth Estate (RRP £20).
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1792233,00.htmlNot so unfortunate
As Lemony Snicket, he's a multimillionaire superstar with 12 blockbuster children's books to his name. As Daniel Handler, he's just another aspiring author of adult fiction. So is he jealous of himself? Tim De Lisle meets the 'Roald Dahl of our day'
Last Wednesday, one of the world's bestselling authors was due to give a reading at a big London bookshop, Waterstone's in Piccadilly - and it was cancelled due to lack of interest. It summed up Daniel Handler's predicament.
Under his own name, which is how Waterstone's billed him, he is just another aspiring author, with a new novel bobbing at about number 4,000 on the Amazon chart. Under the preposterous pen name of Lemony Snicket, he is a superstar, whose 12 children's books, collectively entitled A Series of Unfortunate Events, have all been international bestsellers. When Handler gives a reading as Snicket, he doesn't get cancelled; he gets mobbed.
It must be a weird feeling, like being jealous of yourself.
"It's quite magical actually," Handler says over green tea in a chic London hotel. "You hand over your credit card and very few people recognise your name."
He says he hasn't been told why the reading was called off. "The publishers are anxious never to hurt my feelings. But I'm in a peculiarly lucky position, because what has happened with the Snicket books means that I'm not panicked for my livelihood every moment, like so many friends of mine who are writers. If they appear at a store in Baltimore and only 10 people are there and only six of them buy books, they know the publisher will say that doesn't pay for the hotel room."
So Handler, at 36, has the life of a novelist - writing full-time in San Francisco, in the seaside house that Snicket bought - without the angst. Which is a neat twist, since angst is what his children's books run on. He has become the Roald Dahl of our day, plying 11-year-olds with eloquently gleeful nastiness.
As well as being two authors, Handler is quite a character. He has the sort of voice that, if he were British, would make Americans say, "I love your accent" - deep, languid and upmarket. Angst comes out as "onnggst".
"I have a bit of a Leonard Zelig phenomenon with accents," he says, "so it's probably pretentious Californian imitating British."
His outfit is half fogey, half dandy, featuring fishnet socks and Chelsea boots, beneath a suit with a green pinstripe by Duncan Quinn, a British tailor based in New York who Handler believes is a moonlighting solicitor. This is typical of the remarks he makes, which are droll and arch and often culminate in a camp giggle. His persona is so sharply drawn, you want to prod him to check that he is real.
As Snicket, Handler writes fast: the 13th and final volume in the series is due in October, only seven years after the first. As himself, partly because of the demands of being Lemony, he writes slowly. The new book, Adverbs, is his third published volume of adult fiction, but his first for six years. At one point, it was "a huge, shaggy mess", running to 1,000 pages, so he cut it to 270.
He became a children's author inadvertently, at the suggestion of a children's editor to whom a manuscript of his had been sent by mistake, and in Adverbs, you can see him reacting against the path his career has taken. The book is all about love - falling in it, wrestling with it, drifting out of it. It is as if he deliberately sought out a subject that children's literature can't handle.
"I didn't think of it that way when I started, but upon completion I thought that romantic love is probably the one thing you can't really put into a children's book," he agrees. "The messy details of romantic life are so far from childhood - waking up with someone, or fighting over coffee, or the way money can transform a relationship - all those issues are peculiarly adult."
"When you're a child, your perception of romantic love is sort of limited to a prince and princess. And if you're older, it might be all about sexual curiosity."
He illustrates this last point with a vignette that perhaps could only come from a children's author, forever popping through the door between experience and innocence. "This week, I taped an episode for Blue Peter and there was a 12-year-old boy, whom they were using as a prop more than an actor, and after he changed out of his costume he had this badge on, 'I don't do mingers.' We don't have an equivalent for that in America, which just proves how civilised and muted we are. What was so interesting was the badge makes an assumption about looking for sex and also belies a complete innocence on how to go about doing it. No one who was actually hoping to go home with anyone would wear a badge indicating that there was such a thing as a minger. And that struck me as exactly what I'm talking about."
Vocally, Adverbs is quite Snicket-like, crisp and playful. Structurally, it is very different - a tricksy, postmodern compilation of 17 stories, interlocking to an extent but not sequential. Handler calls it a novel, but it feels like an album. In fact, it feels like one particular album: 69 Love Songs, the droll, arch triple CD by the Magnetic Fields. Which is not entirely a coincidence, because Handler is friends with Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields and played the accordion on 69 Love Songs.
"It must have been an influence," Handler says, "but I didn't think it was until I saw Mr Merritt one time and he said: 'What are you working on, on the adult side?' I said: 'Oh, it's this thing that sort of experiments with all these different kinds of love,' and there was this awkward pause, and I thought, oooh ..." He lets his giggle finish the point.
Handler and his wife, Lisa Brown, an illustrator, have a son, Otto, who is two. What sort of dad is he? "Apparently, one who goes on tour," he sniggers. "What sort of dad am I? What are my choices?"
Well, did he change nappies? "Oh yeah. In fact, I was the exclusive changer of nappies for the first, like, two months. My wife had some trouble with her hands in pregnancy." How about getting up in the night? "Otto breastfed for a long time, but I would get up in the morning. And to this day, my wife sleeps a little late and I get up in the morning. It's strange how little is expected of fathers. It used to drive Lisa insane when Otto was tiny, and I would just take him for a walk round the neighborhood and people would say, 'What a wonderful father you are.' Even if I had a bottle of beer in one hand."
We talk about children's fiction, which seems to be going through a golden age. "I don't have much to compare it to, but it has certainly undergone this explosion of attention. Another children's writer I know has compared it to playing rock'n'roll in the 60s. Suddenly, everyone's paying attention, so the stakes are higher."
And so are the sales. Does he know how many books he has sold? It's one of those questions you ask expecting evasive action, but Handler, after a decorous gulp, answers it. "It's about 50m as Snicket."
That's huge. "Yes. It's about 50m more than I thought I would sell."
And it's a source of ... ? "Astonishment."
And would I be right in assuming that you make about a dollar a book? "Yeah, ah, that's not an unreasonable assumption."
So you're a very wealthy man. "I ... yes. I could not put it any other way."
Has it changed the life you lead? "I love when I'm asked that." Another giggle. "What if the answer were 'no'?"
OK, do you live the life of someone with that much money? "I don't think so. I'm not flying in on my Lear jet to a private island where the rich and powerful play. But San Francisco real estate is pretty expensive, and I have a nice house; certainly nicer than I ever thought I would have. And I sort of went from someone who had a poster of a Henry Darger to someone who had a Henry Darger."
The money led to what he describes as a strange experience. "We were in a lawyer's office and we had to decide at what age Otto would be given a, you know, substantial amount of money. And they said, '15?' and we said, 'God no!' And they kept suggesting older and older ages until we surpassed our own age: 'People of 33 should not be handling this sum of money. That's absurd!'"
· Adverbs, by Daniel Handler, is published this week by Fourth Estate (RRP £20).
