The Powerhouse bookstore hosted a virtual book launch for POISON FOR BREAKFAST, Lemony Snicket’s brand-new book that is out now.
In case you missed it, you can watch a recording of the book launch above, in which Mr. Snicket’s official representative is interviewed by author Myla Goldberg, and answers questions sent in by fans (including yours truly at 41:20!). Mr. Handler talks about children’s natural inquisitiveness, bewilderment, the illustrations in PFB, and more.
In April 2000, Daniel Handler was enlisted by Slate.com to contribute five columns for their “Diary” feature - each column written in the form of a journal or blog entry, together all covering a typical week in the life of the author. Handler’s pieces typically tend to digress from descriptions of daily routine into general ramblings about whatever happens to be on his mind at the time. They’re mostly non-essential and more than a little pretentious, but they’re amusing enough, and so I thought it’d be worth posting them here.
The first entry, about deadlines and working on The Ersatz Elevator
The final entry, about Coney Island, bathrooms, and Meredith Heuer (Side note: it seems the photograph he discusses taking here is the same one seen in the back pages of The Carnivorous Carnival.)
(The re-discovery of these columns and the above text was made by a volunteer named Marlowe. We send our regards.)
Daniel Handler recently wrote a short story for the Berkeley Rep Theater’s “Place/Settings: Berkeley” project. The latter “is a 10-part podcast series in which local writers share a story centered in a specific location in Berkeley, inspired by their own personal histories.” The Daily Californian reports that
[Daniel Handler] drew from his own experiences growing up in San Francisco to write his episode, “Black Mass Sonata.” In the episode, a listless teenager wandering through Berkeley winds up at The Musical Offering Cafe on Bancroft Way. While listening to Alexander Scriabin’s evocative“Black Mass Sonata,” he finds comfort in the shared human experience of feeling lost.
“It’s a true story from my life,” Handler shared in an interview with The Daily Californian. Speaking to his personal connection to Berkeley, he shared, “As someone who grew up in San Francisco, Berkeley seemed very glamorous to me when I was young. It was full of young people doing exciting things, and when I was in high school, the idea of many people in their twenties doing something more glamorous and exciting than what I was doing was certainly very appealing.”
In the rest of the article, Handler briefly talks about how music has impacted his writing, and how the project came out of current restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
> The podcast series can be had for $10 with a new story being released weekly (the debut was on Jan 12, 2021); Acquire a ticket and/or read more about it here.
1)Victoria Chang’s poems are always sharp with grief and laughter—Obitis perfect for a crazy year of mourning. Suggested pairing: Mid-day tea, instead of looking at social media.
2)A House is a Body by San Francisco’s own Shruti Swamy (also a Handler-Brown Library fellow!) is a set of wild and limitless adventures that gave me all kinds of shivers. Suggested pairing: Sofa, popcorn, deep breaths between stories.
3) Gianni Rodari’sTelephone Talesis a loopy, gorgeously illustrated collection of stories that sound simultaneously familiar and unprecedented. Suggested pairing: Morning espresso, or or two before reading the news.
4) Sara Mesa’s Four by Fouris spooky and haunting and puzzling and shocking. Suggested pairing: subscribe to Open Letter books and get terrific literature in translation all year long.
5)The Society of Reluctant Dreamers byJosé Eduardo Agualusa is an Angolan noir, a Portuguese romance, a gossamer headtrip. Suggested pairing: Call in sick and read the whole thing stopping only for crackers and brandy.
(For a temporary offer to obtain one of these books for free w/ the purchase of a Snicket/Handler book @ Booksmith book store in San Francisco, see here.)
Dec 8, 2021 - Daniel Handler vists the Kansas City Public Library to discuss the newest Lemony Snicket book, Poison for Breakfast. Prior to the discussion, you can see Mr. Handler doing hijinks at the library’s North-East and Plaza Branches. Starts 1 minute in. At 18 minutes in, Daniel talks about coming from the Jewish tradition of carrying one’s history of pain and suffering with you, as well as the importance of humor. “There’s something funny about endless misery, and there’s something miserable about endless fun.”
Further talking points: the role of reading (20:40); Daniel’s method of writing (24min); on responding to one’s environment (37min), like during this pandemic, and being invited to Oxford University; on tzimtzum and making space (42min); on libraries as refuge for the homeless (1h1m); on censorship of literature (1h6m).
Q:if you could make one big change to the [future], what’s it going to be? Daniel Handler: I want a full-blown return to etiquette. judith martin, a.k.a. miss manners, is the finest person writing non-fiction. I met her, that was a big thrill for me. if there were a way to put her thoroughly in charge of the world tomorrow, I’d do it in a heartbeat. that would cover a lot of problems too. that would end hunger, misogyny, and tele-marketing and all the things we hate.
In which Daniel Handler and I tell you everything you will ever really need to know about being a writer, and about writing for the market, in 2 minutes and 11 seconds.
In honor of Pride month (at least here in the US, I don’t know if other countries hold Pride the same month as us), I think it’s important to note the awesome LGBT diversity that either has been written into A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler (who is bisexual himself) or ascribed to the series by so many people in this wonderful fandom.
Even before the Netflix series came out, Sir and Charles’s relationship was always heavily coded as gay. For one, even in 2000 when The Miserable Mill first came out, partner was already a term that had gained widespread popularity in same-sex relationships when the closest substitute for marriage for them was a civil partnership. The two of them also seem to have an awful lot of involvement in each other’s personal lives for business pairs, and Charles seemed to serve no actual role in the company except to stand alongside Sir. The biggest rainbow flag, however, was definitely in The Penultimate Peril when the two of them are sharing a hotel room with a single bed, Charles is in nothing but a bathrobe encouraging Sir to undress, and Sir utters the phrase “I just love the smell of hot wood”. I mean… it doesn’t get much clearer than that. Also the fact that the Netflix series made it canon without making any sort of deal of it whatsoever is just icing on top of the cake.
Next on the list is definitely Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender. Although in the book series, the character was less perceived by the children as nonbinary but overweight and confusing, the books still avoided using gendered pronouns. The Netflix series capitalizes on the increased attention to Count Olaf’s troupe and the VFD in general to show the Henchperson as canonically nonbinary, and very confident in their gender. They appear in both traditionally masculine and feminine clothes at fairly equal rates and yet their gender presentation or identity is never mocked once in the series and is respected by even the most despicable of villains. It is easy to throw LGBT characters in books or tv shows just for emotional fodder and to fall dangerously close to the “kill your gays” trope by making all LGBT characters discriminated against and marginalized, but showing an openly nonbinary character being accepted for who they are (which is admittedly a fairly awful person, they are in Olaf’s troupe) regardless of their gender is an amazing message to send to nonbinary children, teens and adults that they are not destined to be discriminated against and that we are quickly moving into a time when nonbinary identities are respected and understood.
And there are even more little references throughout the books and the series, Larry Your-Waiter having two mothers for example, that I honestly do not have the energy to go through completely and fully explain, that I hope you will just take my word for.
Then there are the openings made available in pretty much any series to interpret any of the characters as LGBT, and the ideas of a transgender-Isadora or lesbian-Jacqueline, or less commonly but my personal favorite, bisexual-Lemony-and-Olaf-as-bitter-first-loves-that-have-never-gotten-over-their-resentment-for-each-other-because-that-honestly-is-just-how-dramatic-both-of-them-are-as-people, have been pervasive in the community since the beginning. And I think it’s awesome that the series has not just permitted that, but encouraged it by openly showing LGBT characters whose sexualities and genders are actually discussed on screen or in book (looking at you, Harry Potter).
As an LGBT kid it was mindblowing to have what was even more a taboo topic then than it is now broached in a children’s novel, and as an LGBT adult it has been no different.
There are a lot of reasons I was drawn to A Series of Unfortunate Events as a kid, and if I wanted to try and analyze them all I would have to write an entire anthology of books about the series and me and psychology and by the end of the day I would be very tired and you all would be very bored, so I’m not going to do that, but when I think about the series and probably the main reason why I’ve stuck with the series so long as a kid and now as a quasi-adult, what stands out to me is the beautiful way that Daniel Handler writes, portrays and deals with abuse.
There are a lot of messages that the series conveys across its thirteen volumes and even more in the companion pieces Handler has authored, but almost all of them come back to deal with abuse in some way, particularly child abuse. Even beyond just roundabout lessons that can be applied to child abuse, it actually depicts and deals with child abuse, a topic that is virtually nonexistent in middle grade literature even now as we start to become more aware of the topic. Children with harrowing backgrounds are common in the genre, but the difference between the Baudelaires and Harry Potter is that Snicket makes it very clear that what is happening to the Baudelaires is abuse and is wrong, whereas the Harry Potter series dismisses Harry being forced to live under the stairs as simply mean guardians and an abusive school teacher as a romantic pining for his lost love (don’t get me started on Snape discourse). A Series of Unfortunate Events tells children up front that abuse does happen and that that is what it is - abuse.
It showcases dozens of different varieties of abuse, physical, emotional, neglect, and it even hints at sexual with Olaf’s predatory behavior towards Violet. It shows different kinds of abusers, Mr. Poe, who does it out of genuine ignorance and an unwillingness to learn, and Count Olaf, who does it out of cruelty.
More than showing child abuse, it shows how people react to child abuse, either through internalizing it and believing that they are deserving of their fate, withdrawing from other people, or becoming distrusting of any and all adults to the point that they might miss out on people who could have possibly saved them if they had just trusted them. A Series of Unfortunate Events presents trauma in an accurate, non-sugar coated way to the audience that most needs to hear it.
As a seven year-old kid living with abusive parents, at the time I didn’t know why I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events so much, but I knew I loved it in a way I had never loved or related to a book before, and more than a decade later it still has a dramatic impact on my life. I was a cynic from a young age, and there’s something just draining about reading story after story of quick fixes and happy endings and stories where things go right when your life never seems to go right. I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events because the things that were happening to the Baudelaires, even though they took place in a fictional universe, were real. Handler never tried to pretend that life was great because it isn’t and if you’re a kid who has been taught by literature over and over that life is supposed to be great all the time and it’s great for everyone except you, that messes you up. A Series of Unfortunate Events told me it was okay to be messed up, and it told me that other people are messed up too, and the world is just as imperfect for everyone else as it was for me.
Esme Gigi Genevive Squalor would be a wonderful name for a chicken, not only because Esme’s personality perfectly embodies the sophisticated and self-absorbed air that all chickens have despite their extreme lack of intelligence, but also because the initials of Esme’s name spell out the word EGGS.
I scroll through the ASOUE tag on Tumblr at least once a day and when I do I see dozens upon dozens of posts of people asking for season 3 of the Netflix adaptation of ASOUE to answer all their questions. Specifically, I see people asking about whether we’ll find out what’s in the sugar bowl or why the Duchess of Winnipeg gave Lemony Snicket the ring in the first place or whether Count Olaf actually did kill the Baudelaire parents, the list goes on.
But as I read these posts and I reread the books I have to say… I don’t want to find out the answers to everything. And I really hope the Netflix series doesn’t answer them all. Because that’s probably the greatest lesson of all in the stories: that life doesn’t have all the answers and is often incomplete and unfulfilling.
As the Baudelaire children have their grand adventures and seek escape from Count Olaf and his troupe of horrors, they are plagued with dozens of questions that seem to follow them throughout the story: Why does Count Olaf do this? What does the eye mean? What does VFD stand for? Why did their parents lie to them about all this? What is in the sugar bowl?
And for the most part, their questions are answered. It is a story after all and stories have to have some sort of resolution. But as our questions are answered even more questions appear. Even with the resolution of A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Beatrice Letters and The Unauthorized Autobiography, we still do not know much of anything about the VFD or have answers to most of the in-series questions left unresolved at the end of The End.
But that’s the way life is. Life doesn’t answer all your questions in a neat little bundle at the end. Life isn’t beholden to the same conventions as literature - because as much as we’d prefer it not to be so, life isn’t a story it’s an ongoing journey paved by the questions we ask and receive along the way. And much like a dissatisfying answer to a long-held question, it ends when it ends, whether we’ve resolved all of our sub-plots or not. A Series of Unfortunate Events purposefully doesn’t answer all of the questions by the end of the series because life never answers all the questions and if the Netflix series were to attempt to change that - to fix it - as I’ve seen people suggest, then I think that would do a great disservice to the thematic integrity of the series and the lessons Handler has taught through this book in general.
One thing that A Series of Unfortunate Events does really well is that it establishes very early on to a quite young audience that sometimes people don’t mean it personally when they hurt you, but that doesn’t excuse their behavior.
Take Mr. Poe for instance: in every single encounter the Baudelaire orphans have with him, he messes everything up. He consistently puts the children in dangerous situations just because it’s convenient for him, he never listens to what the children actually have to say, and he refuses to be held accountable for his own mistakes, thereby dooming himself to make them over and over again.
If you divide it up evenly, Mr. Poe is just as responsible for the children’s ill fate as Count Olaf because for every single book in which he’s involved, and up through The Carnivorous Carnival in the Netflix series, he is capable of righting the situation and saving the children and he still decides to save his own behind rather than helping the children who are in dire need of an adult figure they can trust. Desmond Tutu famously said that “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.
And yet, Handler draws a distinctive line between Mr. Poe and Count Olaf in the series because one truly is worse than the other. Mr. Poe doesn’t mean to harm the children, and genuinely does care about their wellbeing, even if he is awful at doing so. He is always appalled when Count Olaf is actually revealed at the end and he does want the children to be safe. Count Olaf on the other hand actually hates the children and means to cause them harm.
The series draws the same distinction between Charles and Sir in that regard and Jerome and Esme, as well. It makes the point that people hurt each other and do harm in the world for all sorts of reasons and very rarely is it personal - that we shouldn’t take it personally when people are bad because adults are fallible too and sometimes they make mistakes without thinking. But even more so, the series makes the point that unintentionality does not excuse the harm that they do. Just because someone doesn’t hate you and that someone didn’t mean to harm you doesn’t mean you are obligated to forgive them or be understanding of their position. So often in this world people make excuses for their behavior, saying they didn’t mean to do something or they didn’t understand the effect it would have or they just weren’t listening and we’re expected to accept their apology and move on because we’re told intent means everything.
But the thing is, intent isn’t everything. Intent is only half the battle and our actions always have consequences, regardless of whether we like those consequences or not. Ignorance is not an excuse for inaction because it is our responsibility in the world as citizens of the world to be conscious of the effect our choices could have on others. The Baudelaire orphans never forgive Mr. Poe, and in The Penultimate Peril when Mr. Poe approaches them and offers them help and offers to take them to their next home, they refuse his help and their refuse his apology because his intentions in that instance don’t matter because he created great harm in the world and just because he didn’t foresee it doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have. This follows the same vein as excusing someone’s behavior because it was rooted in deep trauma or mental illness or justified revenge - the reason why someone did something wrong doesn’t matter, they still did something wrong and they need to face up to their crimes.
It was an important message then, but I think it’s an even more important one now in the political climate that we live in. There are so many people in this world right now who want to cause harm: neo-Nazis, the alt-right, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, and we have an administration that actively takes delight in causing harm to oppressed people as long as it stands to benefit them in some financial way. They know they are hurting people and they continue to do so anyways so long as it makes them more comfortable. These are the Count Olafs of the world.
But then there are the ignorant people that support Trump and his administration, that do racist things like calling the cops on black people just because they look “suspicious”, or use their religion as an excuse to justify discrimination, and simply regurgitate everything they’ve been told by others just as ignorant as them about the way the world ought to work, and those are the people who pave the way for the Count Olafs of the world. It is easier to excuse their bad behavior because they really don’t mean for what they do to cause harm - most of the time they genuinely think they’re doing the right thing - but their actions have just as big of consequences as the actions of the Count Olafs. The children never would have ended up in Count Olaf’s clutches time and time again if Mr. Poe hadn’t put them there. The Count Olafs are worse, and it’s important to recognize the difference between intended harm and unintended harm, but we have to hold the Mr. Poes of the world accountable too, because ignorance is just as much a choice as malice.
The End, the final book in the ASOUE series deviates substantially from the twelve previous books in the series because it doesn’t follow the traditional narrative that the other books adhere to at all. In the other books it always goes something like the orphans wind up in a new place, they meet someone they think can be an ally to them and then that person winds up either dying or being ineffectual or compromised in some sort of way by the arrival of Count Olaf and the orphans are forced to flee from danger, hoping along the way that eventually when all this is said and done they can find some nice quiet place to live, where they aren’t constantly in danger.
In The End, by contrast, they arrive with Count Olaf to a new location with people who are quick to eliminate Olaf as a danger for them and attempt to bring them into their peaceful happy lives. In actuality, the story could have ended there. They had no real reason to go against the rules of the island or question the authority of Ishmael, and none of the islanders or Ishmael were rude to them at all. The only reason they returned to Count Olaf and rebelled against the island is because they thought it was boring. After twelve books of adventure after adventure, trying to escape danger time and time again, the Baudelaire orphans realize that they actually don’t know how to exist in safety.
Which seems to defeat the entire point of the Baudelaire’s quest for safety in the other twelve books, but I think it’s an important point about what happens after the worst has already happened. The Baudelaires have reached safety after so long, but they’re so used to not being safe that they don’t even know how to be comfortable in a safe environment. They’ve wanted this for so long but once it finally came they realized that they were never prepared for it.
This is a common trope in the lives of people who have survived insurmountable trauma. They spend the duration of their trauma clinging to this hope of a better life outside of it and imagining a perfect world where they are safe all the time, but then when they escape they realize that they’ve become so used to their trauma world that the regular world seems completely foreign to them. Furthermore, once they’ve physically escaped their trauma they’re left with the second, more daunting task of emotionally escaping it and moving on.
The End isn’t an escape from danger in the traditional sense, but more a look into what we do once we have escaped danger and how danger eventually escapes us. Most books end when the danger has been resolved, the plot has been fulfilled and everything has been worked out. But ASOUE shows that even after the danger has been resolved, everything will never be worked out completely. Life isn’t a book with a simple exposition, climax and resolution, it is a series of unfortunate events and even after we’ve conquered our demons we still have to live knowing what happened to us and where and when and that antagonist is a much harder one to defeat.
“This obituary is filled with errors - most importantly - I AM NOT DEAD!“
“The world is quiet here.”
“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
“Our love broke my heart…and stopped yours.”
“PLEASE READ SOMETHING ELSE.”
“I have a long list of things I’d rather not do.”
“I was in deep denial, and I’m not talking about a river in Egypt.“
“Could it be that our ______ is unreliable?”
“Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something.”
“…and that’s why we broke up.”
“The thing with your heart’s desire is that your heart doesn’t even know what it desires until it turns up.”
“When we were together I felt breathless. Now you are.”
“S/he gave me a hug and for a second I was embraced by a body that makes me want to go home and never eat again.”
“Sometimes words are not enough.”
“Everyone tells you it’s all right to cry, but not enough people say it’s all right if you don’t want people to know.”
“There is no easy way to train an apprentice. My two tools are example and nagging.”
“But I must admit I miss you terribly. The world is too quiet without you nearby.”
“You, meanwhile, are often dressed like a slob, and spend your days serving coleslaw.”
“Imagining the worst doesn’t keep it from happening.”
“Well this isn’t too bad, I don’t have a left arm anymore but at least nobody will ever ask me if I’m left-handed or right-handed.”
“You don’t spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.”
”When something simple and true takes you by surprise, it hits you in the stomach.”
“It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.”
“Of course you can trust me - we read the same books.”
“You might be afraid of the _____, but the _____ is not afraid of you. That’s why the _____ is always close by.”
“The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.”
“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again. ”
“They say love’s like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.”
“Anyone who thinks the pen is mightier than the sword has not been stabbed with both.”
“But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us.”
“The only thing that made sense of the world was you.”
“Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up…unless it looks like an ax murderer.”
“I want you to love me in particular.”
“I would much prefer it if you were alive and well.”
“Sometimes even in most unfortunate of lives there will occur a moment or two of good.”
“No reality has the power to dispel a dream.”
““Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world.”
“It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.”
“Summer without you is colder than Winter, and Winter without you is even colder.”
“’Finders keepers’ is what they say, and I wanted to be kept.”
“Nobody should feel pain all by themselves.”
“We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves, and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back.”
“He who wants the world must first escape from it.”
“It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.”
i like lemony snicket because he’s unnecessarily devoted to maintaining his ridiculous persona. see being a children’s book writer really doesn’t require that you adopt a persona, but he does it. he’s been doing it for like a decade. a while back he had a whole feature in poetry magazine and he kept up the persona through the entire thing
A Series of Unfortunate Events is anarchist propaganda because all of the problems are caused by both capitalist bureaucracy and a weird insistence from everybody with power that “the rules,” no matter how silly, must be followed.
I mean, partially, yes; for sure. But Daniel Handler has also stated that the series is a direct allegory for antisemitism:
Something just occurred to me: Count Olaf has been described as an antisemitic caricature, a take on the Smiling Merchant. If ASoUE is a story about kids escaping antisemitic violence, then Olaf is literally Handler saying “antisemitic caricatures keep following us and harassing us and no one listens when we point at him and say he’s a threat to us and those we love.” Recontextualizes a lot of the story tbth
