Daniel Handler Podcast Interview

[Sixteen]

I came across this podcast a day or two ago. I went to the website (www.salon.com) but got confused and couldn't find a transcript, so I'm going to write one myself.


*applause*

Laura Miller: Good evening, and thank you for coming, especially in this terrible weather. My name is Laura Miller and tonight I am interviewing Daniel Handler.

*applause* *Handler giggles*

LM: He may be beter known to some of you as "Lemony Snicket", the author of twelve - soon to be thirteen - novels in the Series of Unfortunate Events. Um, but he's also written three novels for adults; The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and the forthcoming Adverbs. Or is that just out now?

DH: Uh, it is out today. Hurray!

*applause*

LM: And, if you're really in the know, you'll also know that he is an accordionist, um, a lyricist, composer?

DH: No...

LM: No, that's pushin' it?

DH: Hey, why not?

LM: A screenwriter, astronaut *laughs*. And a cowboy.

*both laugh*

DH: And I built this furniture we're sitting on today.

LM: With no tools.

*both laugh*

LM: So, I understand, you also sarted out as a poet?

DH: I did yes. In fact, I just signed a copy of my High School literary magazine that some enterprising fool found at a garage sale. It went for two dollars, I don't mind saying. Um, yes I wrote a lot of poetry in High School, as I assume everyone did. I hope everyone did, anyway, 'coz that would be a better excuse for mine, if everyone was doing it. Um, and then in college, in case I look familiar to some of you, I was the Connetticut Student Poet, 1992. Thank you very much.

*laughter*

LM: And did you abandon verse eventually?

DH: Pretty much. I started writing longer and longer poems that were narrative in nature. And an enterprising instructor of mine pointed out that there was a whole tradition of this called prose.

*laughter*

DH: And so I took that up. *laughs*

LM: Okay. And, so, your first novel, The Basic Eight - your first novel for adults - and for those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a story of a group of eight friends in a High School very much like Lowell High in San Fransisco. Correct?

DH: Yes.

LM: Which is the school you went to.

*applause*

DH: Alright.

LM: Sounds like there's some people who know it here.

DH: Yeah. I was gonna say "Go Indians" until I realised they're not the Indians anymore. I forget what they've been callled. The Eskimos or some other native people.

LM: Pirates. Why did you want to write a novel about high school? Students?

DH: Well, when I was in high school, there was a murder. Not at my high school but at another high school in the area. I think because I was in High School, this was the first news story that I followed breathlessly. And what happened was that, for some reason, there was a rumour that the murder was because of a Satanic cult going on in the high school. And as a High School student, I just found that unlikely.

*laughter*

DH: I knew plenty of evil people in high school, but they weren't organised. You know?

*laughter*

DH: So, it just fascinated me and turned out that that was not at all the case. And that just stuck in my head for years and I think it's omething I keep coming back to - the notion that you can try to put a narrative on something that actually has no narrative at all. And the tone of the newspaper articles, published in The San *giggles* Fransisco Chronicle - I didn't mean to giggle when I said San Fransisco Chronicle....

*laughter*

DH: As a subscriber, I'm a big fan, particularly the letters to the Editor. But the tone of the articles was "How could this happen?" "How could one student kill another student?" "What is behind this?" And the Satanic cult theory was the preferred narrative. And when it turned out to be not true, the actual story was not very easy to point a finger at. It was not very easy to find a bugaboo behind it and that was just fascinating to me and I think that so much of life is just attempting to put a nice, firm narrative story on what is actually something slippery and wild. And The Basic Eight is a novel told from the point of view of a girl who has commited a murder and she is mournful of all the narratives people are trying to put on it. And she's trying to explain it herself and her explanation is, ultimately, is wild and slippery and doesn't really hold. And so, I think because I followed that story breathlessly that when I was about to write a novel, it was actually the second novel that I wrote, although the first one never got published, thank Goodness. But that was just a story that intrigued me.

LM: Well, for the readers of the Snicket series, it's interesting to see a lot of scepticism about the news media was in your work from the very beginning. *laughs* Adn there's a talk show host called Moprah or something who could very easily work at the Daily Punctilio.

DH: Which is the unreliable newspaper in the Snicket books. Yes, I guess she could. When the Snicket movie was released there was talk that I was going to be on Oprah and there was this terrified moment that there would be some moment of small talk with her and I would have to say,"You know I made fun of you in my first book?"

*laughter*

DH: But then I wasn't on, thank Goodness. So I didn't have to worry about that. But, it wasn't just necessarily the news media, it was just sort of any attempt to put a framework on anyhting. And the Baudelaire orphans in the Snicket books have terrible things happens to them all the time and they always seem to think they're just about to find out a very neat explanation for what has happened. And anyone who has been through a series of unfortunate events can attest there isn't one.

LM: I've heard that there are some obsessive fans of The Basic Eight.

DH: It is true. There are. *giggles*

LM: What do you think appeals to them? Because you have so many obsessive fans for the Series of Unfortunate Events. D'you have a sense of what it is about a certain type of novel?

DH: I don't really know 'coz Im not an obsessive fan of anything. I have enormous enthusiasm for things but it's never occured to me to go through anyone's garbage.

*laughter*

DH: Except my own. Looking for a something I meant to file. So, no I don't know but it's nice to have that kind of readership.

LM: Do they turn up at your door? Any of your fans?

DH: A couple of times. I find there's something distasteful about saying, "People like my work so much. It's so awful for me!" So, there have been a couple of unpleasant encounters. But I don't think you can get through life without a couple of unpleasant encounters.

LM: Well, I understand the series was sort of jestated by a conversation with an editor that wanted you to write books for children and, you weren't sure about it and she was a big fan of The Basic Eight.

DH: Well this was before TB8 was published. It was rejected thirty-seven times. Which is no fun, I might add. And one of the people - I was living in New York at the time and growing increasingly desperate. So, it was a major source of food and liquor. If I was rejected by an editor and there was any hint of approval in the rejection letter, I would call the editor and say, "Well maybe we should go out and talk." Really it would have been okay if they sent a bag of groceries but that's not how they do it. You're gonna go out. But this editor said "I like the way you write about young people even though we could never publish TB8 for young people." Because it's full of students who drink absinthe, have sex and murder one another.

*laughter*

LM: And poison their teachers.

DH: Well yes, but he's a bad teacher.

*laughter*

DH: I'm not gonna say he deserved it but we all had a teacher like that. That's actually - I'm completely derailing it here- but one of the things that's interesting abut the more obsessive fans of TB8 is they will come to me and say, "Did you base this on my high school in this part of the world? Because I also had a sexually aggresive teacher." And so the idea that it's actualy sort of a standard -that there's one to be found in every high school- is a little chilling.

LM: Yeah. I thought you were gonna say 'coz we all drank absinthe.

*laughter*

DH: Yes. Absinthe another standard across the board. No, but this editor said "I like the way you write young people. Would you consider writing something that was not just about young people but for young prople?" And I just thought that was a terrible idea. I couldn't imagine, seeing as this novel about young people doing terrible things was being rejected all over the place, and all my ideas for stories were about terrible things. So, I just thought "No way. A children's publishing house? No way." But of course I began to have this idea anyway. So I called this editor back. And what, I guess, what one is supposed to do is, sort of, draw up a proposal, and maybe a sample chapter and talk about what you want to do. But I was so embarrassed by this idea that I didn't want to put so much work into only for it to be rejected again. It was jus something I couldn't take. And by this time I knew the editor lighty, in a term I gguess could be called socially, in that we were at some of the same gatherings. Both hiding in a corner. So I called her and said, "I will meet you at a bar, and I will tell you this idea, and you will tell me it is a bad idea, then we will have a drink and we will go home." And it would jus be a conversation in a bar. I will have secretly shown up early ahead of you so I will have the courage to tell you the idea. And that feels like unhealthy behaviour when you do something like that. You know, you drink it and then you make them take it away. "Oh! I was just.. no.. I um..."

*laughter*

DH: And so I said I have this idea. There are these three orphans and an evil Count would be pursuing them and they would find a library everywhere they went and the library would be interesting, but of no help and nothing good would ever happen and it would be called a series of unfortunate events. And she said "I think that's a good idea." And thatw as even more embarrasssing. Because I hinestly thoguht it just meant she was a lightweight.

LM: But why would that make her a lightweight?

DH: Bacause we were at a bar! So I thought she was gonna call me in the morning and say we can't do it. But she said I like it, would you write it down? And I've just finished writing it down. The 13th volume will be out in the Fall. I can't believe it. But it's true.

LM: And you have all the answers to all the questions that so many people have been craving for so long. Like what is V.F.D.?

DH: Well, remember we were discussing earlier about trying to put a strong narrative framework on something is bound for dissapointment.

*laughter*

DH: So, the thirteenth volume, I think contains as many questions as it does answers. It depends on which questions you're asking.


_______________________________________________________________________________________

That's about half of it. It's taken so long to do that that I won't do the rest just yet. But you should be able to download it here in the meantime.

[Dante]

Well, that first half certainly ends on an interesting note. And thanks for transcribing so much, I know it takes ages. ...After navigating a sea of links, I've finally found the conversation. I sure hope that there wasn't an easier way to do that.

Edit: Right, having listened to the whole thing, that's given a direct source for some information I'd discovered but couldn't rely on, so thanks very much for posting it.

[Sixteen]

Actually, that wasn't a direct link that I gave earlier. Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Dante.

This page is where you can download it.

[Sixteen]

LM: When you first got the idea of doing this gothic, you know, a series of catastrophies with these poor orphans and these terrible villains, were you reacting to what you thought were the prevailing norms of childrens' books?

DH: Um, I guess so. I was reacting to the sort of book I wanted when I was a child. And the more childrens' authors I meet, the more that seems to be the way they're doing it. There's in fact a beautiful dedication to this picture book by Ed Emberley. I believe it's called Ed Emberely's Book on How To Draw Animals. It's sort of a little art book. But the dedication is, "To the boy I was; The book I could not find." And I always thought that was very sweet. And I read voraciously as a child but was often dissapointed by the endings of the books, because they were often in a perdicament in which there seemed to be no way out and then ecause they were brave or plucky they'd sorta get out of it. You know, "There's a dragon and it's coming closer and we're in a little hut!" There is no way. And then it turns out the dragon would just sort of miss them.

*laughter*

DH: And that was very frustrating for me. So, there was a little bit of that. And then, you know, Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey and John Bellair and sort of the more Gothic end of the spectrum was somethiing that really appealed to me. And any book that you arrived on the front porch of a house and knew suddenly it was a very, very bad idea to go in, but you have to go in anyway; that was very appealing to me. And that's what happens in The Bad Beginning. They know at once they shouldn't be at Count Olaf's house, but what choice do you have?

LM: How did the series change as you went along writing it? I mean were there things you didn't expect? Were there surpris-

DH: *laughs* Yes, I didn't expect anyone would be interested.

*laughter*

LM: I mean, I'm assuming you didn't work out the whole backstory in advance. That's been a little improvised?

DH: It's been improvised a little bit, but most of it was all dreamed up in a moment. I never thought that anyone would be interested, honestly. And I was initially contracted for four books. And I couldn't believe it! I mean, I was rejected thirty-seven times for one book. And now people just said, "Oh, yeah, sure, you can write four."

*laughter*

DH: And not only that, when I finally did have to write this kind of summary, I only had sumaries for three books. And then they said, "Write four." And I just couldn't believe it. I mean, money before you wrote the books?! I hadn't dreamed that far. And I remember that I said to my literary agent, "I can't believe they suggested four books when I only suggested three!" Even though I had said to the editor that of course it would be thirteen books and she said let's not get ahead of ourselves.

*laughter*

DH: And my literary agent said, "They're never gonna publish four of these!"

*laughter*

DH: So yes, I had this huge grand scheme in mind, but you know, known only to me. And I was sort of charmed by that idea. That there would only be a few copies extount of the first three in a planned tri..ska..de..cology. And that no-one would ever read what became of it. I loved that idea. So, that's what changed the most. People were reading them.

LM: For the people that haven't read the adult novels, the sensiblity, althought they're very different, is clearly the same person. And do you ever wonder why you had so much trouble landing this with the adult audience?

DH: I think this returns to the theme of trying to put a narrative on something that doesn't make any sense. *laughs* No, it's a complete mystery to me. Before the first two books were published, they sent me to a couple of cities to meet booksellers. And, so the booksellers had read the books but they hadn't been published yet. And in each city, the booksellers would have a pool on who I really was. And no-one guessed that I was Daniel Handler, because no-one had heard of Daniel Handler. So, it's interesting for me to see with Adverbs what people will think as it's the first book that's come out since anyone has heard of anything that I've done. It'll be interesting to see if people think they're the same or different.

LM: The story immediately, is a man who is walking down the street in New York with his girlfriend. And she's upset with him because he's just told her that his father has died two weeks ago and this is the first she's heard of it. And he has to go to the reading of the will and she's so upset that she doesn't go with him. So he gets into a taxicab and immediately falls in love with the driver. But the fact of the matter is that he's already lied to his girlfriend because his father is still alive. God only knows where he thought he was going.

DH: Yeah, dishonest men are another motif in the book. I think we see a lot of that in love.

LM: But, I take it that wasn't autobiographical. You never fell in love with a taxi driver.

DH: I've been in a taxi.

*laughter*

DH: No, it just occured to me when I was in a taxi actually, because there's always that little licence where you see the driver's name and I thought it would be funny to call him by his name. And the it occured to me that calling someone by their first anme is intimate. And thenit occured to me that you could fal in love with a taxi driver. Maybe that's happened before. There was a lot of taxi-taking in the book in which there were people in love, out of love, falling in love, falling out of love and there's something about the nature of taxicabs that felt like love beacause you can't decide whether it's the journey or the destination that matters. And the taxi is this temorary space that throws people together for a short amount of time and that also feels like love. And therre's something magical about a taxi space. Whose it is, it's sort of your own space, it sort of belongs to the driver, yet you're telling him where to go. I love taxiabs. Its one of the few things I miss about New York is that it's so hard to get a taxi here. Althought there are wonderful drivers here.

LM: There's a question that a lot of the Snicket readers ask. Where are those books set?

DH: Um...

LM: How do you imagine it?

DH: Well, it's a place governed almost entirely by books. And that's where I live, frankly. *laughs* Maybe that's San Fransisco, too. Gloomy, bad weather, terrible things are happening. But great stuff to read! And always when young people ask me what country the books are set in, I tell them that for the most part, they're set in a city. Which is not a satisfying answer for them at all. But it's the place where all stories of that type are set. It feels vaguely British, and vaguely a long time ago, but it's never exactly clear what era it is. The world of Lemony Snicket books has computers and horse-drawn carriages, gentlemen clubs with leather seats in which secret organisations talk about poetry that was written a hundred years ago. And all sorts of literary deliciousness, but nothing specific.

LM: There's so many literary references in the book. The hospital patients are called Haruki Murakami, Mrs. Dalloway. Are you doing that for the parents who read the books? Or are you hoping there's a kid somewhere who's read-

DH: No, it started because I have no idea how to name characters at all. I have a real trouble with it. Either the names are completely ridiculous literary references like Flannery Culp, who is the hero of The Basic Eight, or Violet Baudeliare, or Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire and that ridiculous. Or, in Adverbs, my new tactic was completely plain names; Joe, Alison; nothing objectable there.

LM: Well, there's a character named "Hank Hayride".

DH: Well ,I came up with this character named Hank and realised I had to give him a last name. And all I could think of was "Hayride" and it was so funny that I just had to put it in there.

*laughter*

DH: I think I've permanently abandoned a story I was working on in which there was a situation in which two people had the same name. And one man was being mistaken for the other on paper. And so, the only name I could come up with was John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

*laughter*

DH: *sings* His name is my name too. And then the story became incredibly tiresome. Who wants that?! So it started that way and to my delight, in the Snicket books I could make the names ridiculous and literary and it wouldn't seem desperate, but rather part of a plan. And so, it became the plan! And I suppose it's for the adults that read them, but I don't see much of a difference between my adult readers and children readers, frankly. Interms of who goes and finds the reference and who it washes by. When the twelfth volume came out last Fall, I was on tour and the book was called The Penultimate Peril and I was asked by a bunch of adults about my vocabulary and how I felt about putting big words even in the title that children couldn't, maybe, read. And many of these adults thought that penultimate was a fancy word for last. Rather than next-to-last.

*laughter*

DH: So, it was sort of hard to say, "No, Im not scared that children won't know what that word means. I'm scared that you don't know what that word means."

*laughter*

LM: Well, you do have this element of irony in everything you write. And you always run up against these people who just go pfft. And that must be a problem with the children's books. Have you had people that just went too depressing or violent for children?

DH: Oh sure, but I don;t worry about them. I thought most people would think that. So, the idea that it's just a handful of them; it surprises me, but it surprises me the other way. I thought I'd be driven out of town! Remember I was living in New York. It's been bizzare. I mean it's been wonderful, but more bizzare than wonderful. Very wonderful, but more bizzare. I never thoguht I'd be a writer that a whole lot of people read and liked. I thought I'd be a strange oddballl writer. That's strange. John Hawkes was my model.

LM: I think we might get some questions from the audience now.

Audience member #1: I have a question. You talk about this person named Beatrice in the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Who is she?

DH: She is the woman to whom all the books are dedicated.

*laughter*

DH: I will tell you that the word Beatrice is the last word in the last volume in a Series of Unfortunate Events.

LM: And these aren't the only books that are dedicated to someone named Beatrice. That's something you might find out.

DH: Yeah, plenty of people have loved that girl.

*laughter*

Audience Member #2: How did you come up with the name Lemony Snicket?

DH: Speaking of not being good at naming things, eh? I finally decided to tell the truth about the beginning of the story. What I used to say was I was doing research for The Basic Eight which was sort of true, but mostly was after college and what I did was call and recieve materials from organisations I found offensive or funny. What I did was call a right-wing political organisation and religious groups and corporate lobbies and get them to send stuff to me. And some of those materials ended up in The Basic Eight but it wasn't what you would call research. I was fooling around with nothing better to do. And it occured to me when I was on the phone to one of the religious organisations that I couldn't use my real name. And the woman said, "What's your name?" "And I said, "Lemony Snicket." And she said, "Is that spelled like it sounds?"

*laughter*

DH: And I said, "Yes, read that back to me." Because I had no idea how it was spelled. And so I had this name lying around. And my other hobby was looking at local newspapers and I would try to find the least offensive story there, the most harmless article, and I would write an outraged letter to the editor.

*laughter*

DH: I began to sign those Lemony Snicket. One I remember was, "New drinking fountain installed" someplace and I wish I could rememebr the content of the complaint, but all I can recall is that it started, "How dare you?"

*laughter*

DH: So, I had this unsavoury, mysterious, Lemony Snicket lying around and it occured to me it would be interesting to publish the books under the name of the narrator rather than the author. And it's strange how far that name has come. Because it's not the kind of name that sounds like it's gonna do well.

Audience Member #3: Tell us something of your movie, or film experience please.

DH: I wrote two films. Both adaptations of novels. One called Kill the Poor by Jill Rose and Rick based on a rigoletto. And there are some projects that we could optimisticallly say are going to hit screens in the future; pessimistically we could say aren't. And then the Snicket movie. It took 5 years and I wrote 8 drafts of a screenplay and was fired and it was a long hard haul. Parts of which were wonderful and parts of which were terrible. It's a strange world of movie-making. It costs a lot of money I'm working on a movie but they're shooting a six-minute filn costing 40,000 dollars. That's a lot of money for six minutes. And the Lemony Snicket movie cost over 2 million dollars. Which is even more. I'm glad I'm not in charge of it! The overhead of writing is not expensive. I wrote over a thousand pages for Adverbs, much less of which I ended up with. And you cant do that in film. "I dunno. Build a lake. See if it works." You know? So it was long and hard. Also, there's a story which I've never told and I think I will now. Towards the end of the Snicket movie, they took me in to see different versions of different scenes. And I'm a visual idiot. I'm the kind of person in a furniture store will say that's the perfect couch for the corner and my wife will say it's five times bigger than you could ever fit in the corner. So, I was of no help whatsoever. And we were in this small room, and there was this woman sitting on a couch behind us. And she said, "Are you guys cold?" and we said, "No, actually, we're not cold." And then we went and looked at the screen and we were arguing because that's how they do it. Then I looked behind me and this woman had taken not only the throe pillows, but the actual structural pillows from the sofa and made like a little fort so just her head was sticking out. And she had done this all while we were looking at the screen, so it was so startling. And she said (and I'm not making this up) she said, "You're going to have to trust our decision-making process, Daniel."

*laughter*

DH: And that was tough for me. Because her decision-making process had lead her to build a fort in front of other people, rather than, say, getting a sweater.

*laughter*

Audience Member #4: In the movie, were you happy with the actors they chose for the parts, and will there be another movie?

DH: I have no idea if there will be another movie. If all of oyu sent the a load of money they would be helped. I was happy with the actors for the mst part. I was particularly happy with the actors who played the henchmen. They're all really talented actors, but you wouldn't know it because they're hardly in it. One of them, Craig Ferguson, now hosts a TV show which is strange. There's no stopping that guy. And the only actors I thought of, I couldn't think of any actors that would be good that weren't dead. James Mason would make a grat Count Olaf but he's dead. And they would make that point to me *giggles*. It's amazing I lasted eight drafts. Boris Karloff would be a great Olaf. Dead. And long dead, too. I had to trust their decision-making process. They insisted on live actors.

*laughter*

DH: Different strokes for different folks. Jim Carrey was not something that would have occured to me and I know some people were dissapointed by that. But there were people it could have been -- let's say, notorious anti-Semites who make long, Aramaic movies about Jesus and funnel their money to their dad's Holocaust-denying churches. Not to name names.

LM: And someone thought that someone like that would make a good Olaf?

DH: Yes. So, one should be thankful for small mercies, or large mercies, as it would turn out.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________


The interview ends here. I think there was more, but they wanted to keep it under forty minutes.

[Phoebonica]

That's an excellent interview.

volunteer16 said:

DH: I will tell you that the word Beatrice is the last word in the last volume in a Series of Unfortunate Events.

Arrgh, as if I wasn't dying of curiosity enough.

And we were in this small room, and there was this woman sitting on a couch behind us. And she said, "Are you guys cold?" and we said, "No, actually, we're not cold." And then we went and looked at the screen and we were arguing because that's how they do it. Then I looked behind me and this woman had taken not only the throe pillows, but the actual structural pillows from the sofa and made like a little fort so just her head was sticking out. And she had done this all while we were looking at the screen, so it was so startling. And she said (and I'm not making this up) she said, "You're going to have to trust our decision-making process, Daniel."

*laughter*

DH: And that was tough for me. Because her decision-making process had lead her to build a fort in front of other people, rather than, say, getting a sweater.

Is anyone else picturing Lindsey Naegle or whatever her name is from The Simpsons? The executive woman.

And please tell me no one really suggested Mel Gibson for Count Olaf.

[s]

That interview actually made me laugh out loud.

"And my other hobby was looking at local newspapers and I would try to find the least offensive story there, the most harmless article, and I would write an outraged letter to the editor."

I'm going to have to do that sometime, now.

Thanks a ton for typing up a transcript, Sixteen.

[SnicketFires]

I really enjoyed this interview. It's one of the best I've read in quite a while. Thanks for typing out the transcript, Sixteen.