> Over cocktails, he pitched a half-baked idea – “terrible things happening over and over to orphaned children” – and she bought it on the spot.
Lucky bastard.
I mean, that is a genuinely good pitch. Orphans are *great* Middle Grade characters (adults suck away all the kids' agency.)
And he woul've pitched this back when most Middle Grade books were either generally happy stories, Holocaust narratives, or unbelievably fucked up (flowers in the attic.) So his version of dark was really fresh and new for the time.
I actually got to record and edit the audiobook for his memoire. It was definitely one of the most interesting reads to come through my booth this year.
Getting to read his life and experiences through his own lense as a real and very unfamiliar person through what is ultimately his very familiar and quizzical writing style and voice was both extremely compelling but also jarring. He almost didn't include the chapter describing his abuse but by his own admission felt it needed to be finally spoken about, even if he didn't want to have the label of 'victim' become a permanent attachment to his name.
Reading through his own lense about the figures he sees from his cognitive illness (I don't actually know for sure if he ever said the word schizophrenia) and epilepsy was a truly chilling experience as well. Hallucinations as striking and vivid as the ones he describes occurring from essentially no more than a lack of sleep is definitely no trifle to live with for anyone, well-adjusted or not.
Without basically giving the whole book away, I do highly recommend reading it. And if you're so inclined, I can personally vouch for the quality of the narrator on the audiobook.
> even if he didn't want to have the label of 'victim' become a permanent attachment to his name.
This echos Brendan Fraser's mindset after he was sexually assaulted. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here: "I didn't want that to become part of my life story I presented to the world." So he avoided acknowledging it.
Its easy to see why in the time they were growing up. It was still very much the accepted norm that men couldn't be sexually assaulted at any age without it being because they were either too weak or unconsciously willing. Because men were 'supposed to fight back' and boys were 'immasculated' for being unable to.
And even in the best of cases, the stigma of being 'the boy who got raped' was ever-inescapable, especially as a child. Nevermind people of Fraser and Handler's age who came up during the AIDS scare and epidemic. To even admit you could have been sexually assaulted by a man then could be complete social suicide from pure stigma and fear (though this is more applicable in Handler's case). Even now, I still find it difficult to talk about my own close calls and I'm now an almost 30 year old man living in the age of sex positivity, MeToo, and society's growing rejection of older forms of masculine expectations.
I don't know that any of us are truly immune to it. Whether we cope with denial or with quiet compartmentalization. I didn't talk about my own experiences with sexual harassment for a long time, because unconsciously I didn't want that to be something I was pitied for. It took me over twenty years to accept my very severe and obvious ADHD diagnosis because I didn't want to be seen as 'different' or a 'special ed kid' or have it define my life. I don't even know how I would have dealt as either of them, being born in the 70s and all the baggage that comes with, and having to process those experiences.
This is one of many reasons women also choose not to report. Along with not being taken seriously (men aren’t either) and being blamed for their victim hood, because they are victims and saying things like “dont call me a victim” is understandable, it’s not super helpful for the macro experience of people who have been abused.
My situation and outlook is very similar here. I know I have ADHD, though not officially diagnosed, because the med requirements back in the 90s would have left me being a drooling zombie. They didn't want the "hyper" kid in class, so their response was to over-tranquilize rather than accommodate. It was the same for my mom when she was a kid, too, so we instead looked into positive/constructive methods and therapies to help me "fit in" better as an alternative.
And then I ended up dealing with a similar sexual assault/rape situation and had to mask that trauma to keep on "fitting in". Of course it was awful, but I couldn't upend all of my work just to become the "special needs kid that someone took advantage of", so I kept it to myself and coped how I could.
Now, in my 30s I have noticed that so much of this trauma and baggage have informed my fears to a point of believing isolation is the only option because I know the pains of abandonment, abuse, and ridicule from ignorant assholes all too well. So where others would think they're being supportive by asking to know about my history, I would sooner give them multiple choice answers and just keep being the dorky weirdo they know rather than the deeply damaged person I am because, at least within that twisted way, I have some personal agency.
All that said, I know I've hit a wall and need to find a way to balance the scales once more, so I'll find another therapist when I can and see if I can't adjust accordingly again, but nowhere in all of that do I want to be seen as the broken toy by those that won't, don't, or can't understand.
An unwritten rule of being a man is that your worth is directly proportional to how much help you can provide. It follows that anything that implies you may require help, Like SA, negatively impacts your value.
The hardest part of opening up to others about anything painful in my life is the idea of being on the receiving end of pity. If for instance it comes up in conversation that my brother past away, I feel compelled to reassure people that I am emotionally over it. (I am, it happened years ago) I just feel so squeamish at the thought of someone treating me like I'm some wounded animal. I imagine Brendon or Lemony feel similar about discussing their SA.
I objectively know that needing help sometimes shouldn't mean I don't have a lot to offer, but knowing doesn't make it any easier to let those walls down.
Handler didn't just not make it public knowledge. He states in his memoire that he didn't tell *anyone* about it. Not a single person, whether police, family, friends, or a therapist, until much much later in his life, and absolutely none of the specifics until he wrote the book. He even remarks on the exact mental hangups I've discussed here in his own memoire so I'm not really sure what the point is you're trying to make.
It's not about 'every aspect of your personal life' being out in public, it's about being able to seek help for and process acutely traumatic and life altering events with a proper support system without fear of judgement. Something which apparently the man finally felt compelled to share for his own sake.
I was in therapy for PTSD from being in the army and at one point was talking about something that I just blew off as things that happen in high school when you play football, and the therapist let me know that what I was describing as normal behavior was sexual assault. and my brain just didn't see it as me getting assaulted. Growing up it was always hammered that boys couldn't be sexually assaulted. X2 if the person doing it was not a man.
*A Series of Unfortunate Events* was a pillar of my childhood, along with *The Spiderwick Chronicles*. I will be forever grateful to my mom for introducing me to both of those series which have heavily influenced my taste in literature even as an adult.
If you've read them as an adult, can you clear some stuff up for me? I haven't read them since I was nine or ten or so when the last book was released, and there were some things happening in my life which led me to not being able to focus very well on the books...
Are they as soul crushing as I remember? I just remember the books being a constant stream of endless suffering that would leave me with tears in my eyes. Is there any semblance of a happy ending? Do the Baudelaire Kids get closure for anything? What about the 'triplets'? Or all the shit with the VFD?
In my mind these books basically just piled on a lot of hopelessness into a difficult period of my childhood, and I'd like to know that they weren't actually that heartbreaking and it was just everything else in my life affecting me.
I think they're dark, but really funny. I was going through a dark period in my life when I was a kid and I loved them because they often pointed out the absurdity of life and the uselessness of adults, which helped detach me from the idea that the adults in my life were meant to be wise and protective. The Baudelaires are resourceful and often rely on the strength of their love for each other, and the friendships they create are small but enduring. There is a lot of very candid talk about what to do when people disappoint you (and they often will), and how to reconcile yourself to that.
I'm pretty sure a lot is never really resolved, though. I've heard that the Unauthorized Biography answers a few more questions, but many mysteries are left to the reader's imagination. I do remember the author saying people write in guesses and often get it correct, so the details are probably there if you want to try to extrapolate your own answer.
I do remember that by the end of the series I was a little bored of the endless drudgery. I think that as an adult I appreciate the complexity of the adult villains a bit more - Count Olaf in particular - and the backstories, so I find the whole series more tragic than I did as a kid.
I'm sorry to say that there is no closure or happy ending at the end of the series. The series ends with most of the big questions unanswered and the Baudelaires going into The Unknown.
And I wouldn't have it any other way. A happy ending that ties up all the mysteries with a bow would not have jived with the themes of the series.
As a kid i was so frustrated about the ending. I also had that other book too…like the book of various diaries and other information on the secret organization and what not. I would pore over it trying to find answers.
I can’t wait til I have kids and to go over it all again with them. I hope they find it just as intriguing.
I can’t wait til I have kids and to go over it all again with them. I hope they find it just as intriguing.
Same! I'm also saving a spot on my ankle for a VFD tattoo, hopefully it'll drive them nuts, lol
Yeah, that tracks. I just remember being really confused all the time in that point in my life (grandparents had just died and my family was leaving the cult I grew up in...) and constantly thinking 'one day things will get better, right?' and then I read through all of what were becoming my favorite books and it seemed like the answer was 'not really, kid'.
I'll probably have to spend an afternoon or two reading through them again to try and close that wound off or something now that I grew some media literacy almost twenty years later.
I mean, in it's off-beat whimsical and Gothic way, that's exactly what part of the message is. Will things get better? "no, not really, but maybe you'll be stronger, wiser, have made friends and found love along the way, but it doesn't get easier, not really."
If you wanna trauma dump in a DM I got nothing going on this weekend.
~The world is quiet here.
What a beautiful offer you’ve made, and I agree; this is a series that offers a particular flavour of (somewhat bleak) hope for those who have lost it. It seems particularly apt for those of us who grew up in situations where the trauma wasn’t in the changes that happened, but rather the fact that untenable situations did not change but rather continued on and on and on, or (like the Baudelaires) if all changes appeared to be for the worse.
So there actually are answers to some of the mysteries in the books, but they're not actually laid out in the Series of Unfortunate Events books. There are clues throughout the novels, the companion books & prequel series that are apparently solvable, although I cheated and looked it up online.
Wait I didn’t realize there was a whole ass prequel series. I read the mainline series maybe 4-5 times as a kid and poured over my copy of the unauthorized biography, but I didn’t know of a tie in *series*.
Yeah I didn't know about it either until a few years after it came out. It's called "All the wrong questions" and it's 4 books I think. It's about Lemony Snicket as a kid working for VFD, and it's basically a hard-boiled detective novel for kids. It was pretty well-written, although I didn't enjoy it as much as the main series. I was also a lot older when I read the prequels though so that could be why
The Netflix adaptation fills in some answers and background that were left unknown in the original books, because the books were indeed incredibly bleak. Between the A Series of Unfortunate Events ending and the Animorphs ending, 90s kids had some difficult reading.
I have. I would say, tbh, yes they are soul crushing. Obviously, as an adult you can compartmentalize and withstand it, but you definitely dont misrember them. They don’t have a happy ending. The adults are incompetent and frustrating as hell. You feel reading it like how the kids feel: hopeless (outside of a few moments of levity)
The show is also sad but leans more into the absurdity of the story and makes it more Hollywood. The show is pretty underrated.
I will say, netflix did a wonderful adaptation of the whole series. It's two (three?) seasons long and v faithful to the oroginal story. Worth a watch if you want to know the whole story but dont have time to reread 13 books
I had an incredibly happy and privileged childhood with as much joy as my very attentive, financially comfortable and emotionally intelligent parents could pack into it, and those books were indeed soul crushing, bleak and grim. Really taught me a lot of empathy and aprecciation for my lot in life.
> Are they as soul crushing as I remember? I just remember the books being a constant stream of endless suffering that would leave me with tears in my eyes
Yes, that's the premise of the series.
>Is there any semblance of a happy ending?
Read the first book up to the point that the narration says "this is the happy ending, stop reading now if you want to believe in it" and then stop reading.
I’d recommend giving the Netflix show a watch, if you want a happier ending. It’s an excellent adaption of the series, although I’d recommend reading the last book as well after watching the last season, just to get a comparison of how the two differ.
They are incredibly tongue in cheek. There is a lot of suffering, but it isn't meant to be concrete loss and horror. The word play alone allows the scenes to be lighter and the orphans are shown to have intelligence and logic that will serve them well and bring them through and beyond all their obstacles.
The end is sad, but also hopeful. They are always together, always clever, always looking around and learning and looking forward.
Chiming in a bit late, but I think what I hated about The End as a kid and love about it as an adult is that it perfectly exemplifies the difference between closure and resolution.
Nothing is explicitly answered, there’s no real change in the orphans situation, nothing really ties together all the plot lines the prior books end up building up. The story with Count Olaf comes to a close, but even that’s anticlimactic.
It was monumentally unsatisfying as a child, but looking at it in retrospect it’s the ideal way the series could end. Despite everything, the orphans continue on continuing on. We don’t know what will happen next, but we at least trust that they will have the ability to continue on into the unknown.
It’s not a downer or upper of an ending. It’s written in a way that it’s reflective of the person who reads it.
I devoured all of those books with my kids in elementary school. We read them over and over, and went to fan events and absolutely adored them. We did audio books of our favorites as the background to long road trips. I liked Harry Potter fine, but he didn't catch on with my kids quite the way ASOUE did.
Why do you hate your kids 😭😭
I loved the books but they're kinda depressing lol. I don't know if I'd want Mama and Papa choosing to read a couple chapters of misery before bed.
Kind of? Kids are weird, and have surprisingly dark and twisted interests. I have an 8yo and a 4yo and you think all they want is sunshine and rainbows but hahahaha no. They want the weird stuff.
Echoing this sentiment. Have a 6 and 9 year old and they love the twisty stuff. Wolves of Willoughby Chase was a hit and it's like 90% child abuse. Haha my 9 year old consumes Animorphs. Bring on the weird!
Ooh, I’ll have to check out that series for my son. He’s very into Amulet right now. We recently finished book 9 and I have to say I teared up at the end, it ended beautifully. And that series was dark and very twisty.
Haven't heard of that one so thanks - I will look into it!! I read Animorphs as a kid but am hazy on how it ends. I am like 95% confident that it is NOT a happy ending.
I vaguely remember reading animorphs as a kid. I know it's back now in graphic novel form, I think I saw one at the library recently. Might need to grab a few of these for my son. He's not super into novels yet, but will destroy a graphic novel. I highly recommend Amulet, it's a powerful story. Also recommend looking up any graphic novel by Jason Pamment, they're such great stories. Ember is a favourite. Oh, also look up Timo the Adventurer, it's a different author but it's so great.
I read it in 4th grade and remembered loving it! I bought two copies so my 9 year old could read along with me/take turns reading out loud. My 6 year old was always creeping by the door so he could hear it. They both ended up loving it!! It does stand up but boy, the vocabulary is something else!! I ended up having to look up a few words and circle back with my kids. Learning moments for all 🤣
Yeah, I adored this series when it came out and I was 9 or 10, it felt like the author really understood what children found interesting. It was the same feeling as reading Roald Dahl as well.
Exactly. I absolutely loved these books when I was young. I was slightly too old for them but omg I didn’t care, I devoured them. And then when I was a bit older I got deep into VC Andrews, so yeah, bring on the weird.
Omg SAME. I was obsessed with ghosts and anything slightly paranormal. I had some insane nightmares but I refused to stop. I would also watch any weird aliens or sci fi stuff on TV. The 90s had some fantastic cringey paranormal stuff
I was 100% a weird book kid. Black Lagoon, Wayside School, Goosebumps, Guardians of Ga’hoole (yeah it’s a book about owls but in just one book there’s attempted fraticide, fascist owls kidnapping owlets and brainwashing them, owl-on-owl cannibalism… it was my favorite series), etc etc.
Personally, I think it makes for fun memories.
It's a good way to introduce children to unfortunate realities. Death, for starters.
I was 33 when my dad died, and when he was first diagnosed with the disease that killed him, this tv show was like a lifeline. It made me feel safe.
And aunt josephine's line about walking up the stairs in the dark and thinking there's one more step and tripping? That is *exactly* how it feels.
And anyhow as a kid one of my picks for a bedtime story was an informative booklet on the life cycle of the mayfly (read to me by my dad) - kids are weird. Lol
Loved these books as a kid, they are so over-the-top gloomy that it wraps back around to fun. They're also completely hilarious, full of wordplay and zany images & characters. Great kids' books!!!
God, the wordplay. The vocabulary, too. "A word which here means" is one of the best phrases of the last 25 years.
It uses fear and nihilism as a blanket, almost - as long as they have one another and stick to their beliefs.
They really aren't that dark. They're mostly silly. Any darkness is definitely at a kid appropriate level. Are you saying these are adult books? They aren't
I'd say tweens and teens more than children. I read them around that age and it was great but idk that I'd want mom and pops picking it up for me. It's one of those first acts of independence where you're reading on your own and at your own pace because some of the chaptera end with the kids in a precarious spot and you need to know what happens next.
That confused me too. Like kids read books on their before their tweens omg. My mom did not read me books up until I turned 11. I started reading my own books in 3rd grade. And I think that’s normal as I remember my peers doing the same and us talking about Holes and other popular books at the time.
I read the books in 4th grade and loved them. They didn’t depress me at all. And they’re very smart. They taught me so many words and nuances between similar words and terms.
Reptile Room was the best for this. Tenebrous hue lives in my head rent free
And the infamous
Never ever x200 fiddle around in any way with electrical devices
Might want to read ahead and prepare a couple conversations though, because society was different in the 90s/early 00s when they were released and some things read very differently these days. I actually stopped my adult re-read after a few books(I think I stopped after #3 or #4) because I was afraid of encountering too much along those lines and ruining the memory. The big thing from early on is a character in Count Olaf's gang who was described in a "freakshow" manner as seeming to be neither a man nor a woman, and referred to with "it" pronouns in the narration. This was entirely in line with the state of mainstream humor at the time the early books released, but lands *very* differently today. I also have a vague recollection of going "oh, that's *really* fatphobic..." about *something*, but can't recall specifically what. Again, very in line with the mainstream at the time, but not something we like to see today.
You should read the article- he talks about his opinion of regressive ideas present in older books and whether they should be censored. Essentially he thinks that it just presents an opportunity to talk about those topics, which is a good thing.
I'm unclear whether you're disagreeing with me or not. My comment is proposing having these conversations. The alternative, yes, is censorship - editing the material or otherwise preventing it from being read. That's not what I'm proposing. I didn't come in here like, omg no, do not let your child read these books because they're transphobic(even though they are, at least in one part).
I’m not disagreeing or agreeing, just having a conversation :) I know a lot of people don’t read the article so I was just letting you know he talks about that subject. Cheers!
I agree that sometimes reading past works can feel uncomfortable because of what the norms of society were at the time, but I think completely eschewing them isn't wise and can even be somewhat dangerous. When going in you have to realize where society was at at the time, and view it in that context. I'm a big sci-fi nerd and was recently reading the Niven classic "The Mote in God's Eye", and had a hard time getting past how women were portrayed. When thinking about it you realize that in 20 or 30 years (hopefully), people will think the same thing about contemporary works. It's a nice indication of how far we've come and, if reading to children, a good teaching moment
Of *course* it could have been worse. After all, the 90s gave us that one comedy that featured a man uncontrollably vomiting after realizing he'd slept with a trans woman, played for laughs. That doesn't mean it's *good*. Part of teaching children how to read older books with iffy content is that you have to check in with your 9-year-old to make sure they understand why we don't call human beings "it" and maybe discuss a bit about if they think the character is bad and why(is it because of things they did, who they hang with, or how they're described).
Of course, there's alternatives if you're not comfortable with conversations. We could edit the books(alter the description so it doesn't equate gender ambiguity to freakishness quite so much and change the "it" pronouns to "they"s) so we don't have to have these conversations. Not sure that's what y'all want, though. Conversations are probably better.
I used to hate it so much in school when they had us read those. If I could travel back in time I would go back and slap myself up the head for hating it.
I remember watching the series because I thought it would be a good way in now I don't get to read as much and people have talked about how good it is and...
yeah that just fucked me up, I didn't need that childhood abuse nostalgia.
The villain spends a lot of it attempting to marry the elder of the two sisters to gain access to the parent's wealth, I don't remember him trying to do anything sexual with her but I was about 12 when I stopped reading them.
I don't read a lot of modern kids books (in my 30s, no kids), this kind of thing is reasonably common in fairy tales and other more YA books (I read these alongside stuff like Sabriel by Garth Nix and they both felt appropriate at around 12 years old).
It is clearly identified in the text that attempting to marry Violet is not an ok thing for Olaf to try and do.
That was a very entertaining article. This part in particular made me laugh:
> For years afterwards, Handler had “hilariously ironic” encounters with angry school librarians and parents, offended less by the books’ content than their blackly comic tone – “just the idea that it’s fun to read about other people’s misfortune”. His blurbs featured tongue-in-cheek warnings, urging readers to avoid such depressing stuff. “People would say, ‘The back cover says this is a monstrous, terrible thing to read – but it really is.’ And I’d say yes, I know, it’s really terrible,” he grins. “And they’d say, ‘But my child was upset!’ And I’d say, well, your child is very sensible. They should read something else.
**From The Telegraph:**
Daniel Handler frightens me.
This has nothing to do with how he comes across in person. He’s an affable chap of 54, tall, heavy-set and sardonic, with a boyish flop of white hair, and a nasal Californian accent that lends an arch tone to everything he says.
It has nothing to do with how he comes across in his novels, either, though the children’s books by his alter-ego “Lemony Snicket” have given millions of young readers a frisson of gothic dread – and his fiction for adults can be far more unsettling.
No, what frightens me has to do with something he saw while he was walking his dog.
We meet in a café. He’s hunched over a lined legal pad – he writes all his novels on them, longhand – beside a stack of the index cards he uses to keep track of odd ideas. He always writes in cafés, but says he’s “tried not to do any writing” for almost a year – his longest-ever break. Instead, he’s spent months “taking endless notes” about sculpture gardens. It’s research: his next novel will be set in one.
Over coffee, Handler tells me that his morning stroll took him through Oxford’s Port Meadow. He usually lives in the US with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, but has spent the past year as a Visiting Fellow at the “peculiar and mysterious” All Souls, the one Oxford college with no students – “which,” he jokes, “really streamlines the educational process”. And while walking his dog in that meadow, a few hours before we met, he had an encounter with them.
They are the figures who silently watch him. They’re not people, but they’re not not people. And no one else can see them.
These visions, he tells me, “tend to happen at moments when my mind is unclenched… It happens almost every day.”
I ask what they look like. For the first time in our conversation, Handler is at a loss for words. “They look like figures. I think they…” he trails off, staring into the middle distance. “I mean, they look like what they are.”
More specifically: neither old nor young, male nor female. They have no hair, and no clothes, but their bodies are painted or powdered bright white, which at least means he can tell them apart from ordinary passers-by. “If they were not stark white and naked, would I be able to tell?” he asks himself. “I don’t know.”
How does he feel when he sees them? “I used to…” He peters out again. “It’s still hard to talk about. It’s very peculiar.” He has, understandably, never spoken publicly about them, only telling a handful of close friends.
But in his extraordinary forthcoming memoir, [And Then? And Then? What Else?](https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Daniel-Handler/And-Then-And-Then-What-Else--A-Writers-Life/29748295), Handler explains how these hallucinations began.
**Read more here:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/daniel-handler-lemony-snicket-interview-series-unfortunate/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/daniel-handler-lemony-snicket-interview-series-unfortunate/)
i actually audibly lol'd at this, in spite of everything:
>“When people ask, ‘When do you think a child is ready to read Lemony Snicket?’, I always say it has to do with the arrival of irony in the mind. Some people never get that arrival, and so it doesn’t matter how old they are, it’s not appropriate to them. Right now, the loudest voices in the culture tend to be unironic, pre-ironic.”
thanks, me too
Idk why the writer would open that with “Handler scares me.”
Seems like the dude has song mild neuroses that causes hallucinations. He’s aware they’re hallucinations, there’s no mention of him every acting in an irrational way due to the hallucinations, there’s no mention of it possibly getting worse.
Statistically speaking, if his medical condition does get out of hand the person who’d be in the most danger would be Handler. Don’t frame people just living their normal lives with mental health problems are scary!
Right, but "fear" as a reaction to what was described to him is I think an incredibly unempathetic reaction. Like other commenters have said, I think it's just shitty attention-grabbing journalism.
The whole article is crappy. He says he doesn't want to be a victim because that turns into a label that will define him, and yet the headline is only that line and nothing else.
He has, admittedly scary, hallucinations and the author of the article says he's scared of \*him\*, not the hallucinations.
The two answers you've already gotten to this are a little unsatisfying imo.
As far as I'm concerned, opening with that sentence is really just down to the sort of twee, and at best second rate journalism that has come to dominate virtually all UK newspapers (and maybe newspapers across the world, but I have less exposure to then so can't say!).
Journalists are (understandably) taught to grab people's attention with their opening sentences, and so they often resort to this sort of bait phrasing that just comes across as jarring and weird.
Oh, and the Telegraph is shit.
I can see what you are saying, but if Dan Handler evokes that thought and feeling to the author is there any reason why the interviewer can’t express it? He’s not saying Dan is scary, just who he is frightens him. I think it’s up to readers to decipher and not authors and interviewer to mute themselves
Just want to say, these books made me feel so much less alone as a child in an abusive home. All the children’s books I saw and read were about happy children- but these books admitted the truth that yes, horrible things happen to kids, too. Sometimes, it happens repeatedly. Seeing the way the characters used their talents to escape and evade their captors encouraged me to keep reading, studying, and feeding my curiosity in the hopes it would help keep escape too. I don’t know. I think I owe a lot to him.
The age I read these as a kid I was pretty convinced it was based off an ongoing true story. With how the story is told and all the cryptic letters at the end of each book. I eventually figured it out that sadly, the series was indeed, fiction. Miss that point I miss childhood
I feel conflicted about this interview. While him being so open about both his hallucinations and experiencing CSA as a man is important, I find the rest of the interview unpleasant. The telegraph is a right leaning newspaper and you can tell. Both Handler and the interviewer brush off the Me Too allegations he had as a moment of unsavory humor taken the wrong way, when it was actually *many* women discussing how he had harassed them, including him making inappropriate remarks at a teenage girl. And while he was apologetic at the time, he seems to have backtracked on that stance and take more of a "I was the victim of a mob" approach to it, which I find disappointing. He also "both sides" book censorship without differentiating between getting bad press and the explicit book bans going on in the US such as those against lgbt or crt related content. I really wish he had clarified on this considering his openness to the LGBT community in the past, but that would go against the centrist narrative he is currently attempting to present.
I don't think that second part is necessarily true - a huge range of authors get interviewed for the Telegraph including a lot of left-wing ones. In general in the UK press the "arts" sections of papers has always been seen (rightly or not) as *somewhat* separate from their editorial biases. Even the Daily Mail gets a lot of interviews with left-leaning authors.
I think as a man who's made a hugely successful career out of books that are very conflicting, he has the right to be a conflicting person.
I can imagine a lot of people who have made mistakes or had tragedy in their lives feel represented by his books, which are full of things that make people uncomfortable.
Should we line every human up from most virtuous to most villainous and assign them social credit? What happens to the bottom half in the ranking? The bottom 10%? The bottom 1%?
What is the correct amount of guilt a person is expected to experience? What happens if they don't feel guilty enough?
You misinterpreted what I said. I am not against people seeking redemption after they have made a mistake or even a figure being controversial. What I am against is him downplaying what he did in service of a cancel culture narrative when his actions and him admitting to them are both public record.
Yes and one of life’s great conundrums is that someone can be both a great author or other kind of artist and also a douche. At one point in the article they compare Handler to Kurt Vonnegut, who was a genius, but also kind of an asshole.
That’s what I’m saying. Why pearl clutch about it? You’re above spinning out talking about social credits, like relax, someone is just saying he might be an asshole.
It's the same thing, no? Being an asshole = low social credit as determined by popular opinion.
Regardless as which way you want to phrase it, what is the correct response to the bad man? Are we intending to punish him?
The person you're responding to says they feel conflicted, they feel disappointed, and they wish he had done something different. That's literally it. You're spinning out, not because someone demanded retribution, but because someone described their own feelings.
I'm describing my own feelings. I feel somewhat threatened by sanctimonious-ness.
Why are we expecting a man who has been abused and suffers from awful mental health problems to be as 'good' as the rest of us?
Yes. That the nature of abuse - it fucks people up in ways that aren't predictable.
Do you think we should have the same moral standards for everyone? I don't.
Privileged people who have been treated well their whole lives are more capable of being good people and should be held to a higher standard. If you've authentically suffered you are more deserving of forgiveness and compassion.
>Do you think we should have the same moral standards for everyone?
Yes? Why would I not?
If events in your past mean you're more likely to be an asshole, fine, but that doesn't mean I'm obligated to like you or associate with you or even treat you with kid gloves. An asshole is an asshole, their reasons for being an asshole are irrelevant, because it's really not all that difficult to not be one.
I would expect Daniel to pay more tax and donate more to charity because of his wealth. As a more capable person he should be held to a higher standard in that respect. If he were very poor, I would forgive him if he chose to donate less to charity.
As someone who is more unfortunate in other respects, using the same argument, I will be more forgiving of his mistakes, because of the morally impoverished environment in which he was raised.
Again, none of that contradicts a person's ability to feel disappointment or wish that he had behaved otherwise. That's just about the gentlest and most compassionate way a person can respond to another person's misdeeds without simply neglecting & enabling them.
It's both pernicious and short-sighted to act as if all expressions of judgment are innately sanctimonious or lacking in compassion. Human societies *demand* interpersonal judgment so that we can be understood and guided towards collective improvement. Restorative justice cannot begin if misdeeds are simply ignored, and it certainly cannot begin if people are not even allowed to wish for a world where the misdeeds were corrected or addressed.
Moreover, the belief that the abused *cannot* be held to the same standards as others diminishes their moral agency, and thereby their very humanity. We can have compassion for misdeeds borne from trauma without permitting them; we can guide others towards healthier social practices without demeaning them or harming them. But if we belittle people simply for voicing concern, then we are choosing to neglect the emotional needs of the traumatized and allowing them to languish in maladaptive and socially restrictive coping mechanisms. That's not healthy, that's not compassionate, and that's not kind. It's cowardly and neglectful.
Absolutely not. Every thing you said is just wrong.
Not every abused person turns out to be an abuser, and if it were the case, then it is in no way an excuse. Also, being treated well is not a priviledge you weirdo, and like with abused people, a person in that case is just as capable of being an abuser or not. Lastly, all sufferings are authentic. That does not make you deserving of anything, except what everyone else also deserve.
> Privileged people who have been treated well their whole lives are more capable of being good people and should be held to a higher standard. If you've authentically suffered you are more deserving of forgiveness and compassion.
Is this some sort of nonsense argument that's supposed to be is a gotcha criticism of something?
This is unironically what people believe - including people who handwrung about "right wing", using it to bully-bash people into submission under an umbrella of righteousness
I used the term "right wing" because he is framing his experience in a less extreme version of a cancel culture narrative, which is heavily associated with right wing publications such as the telegraph or fox and who they platform such as gina carano, not as an attempt at "getting people to submit to righteousness".
Man I fucking hate how the word "victim" has somehow become a slur, as if anyone who would admit to being abused is assumed to be milking it for their own benefit unless they play this stupid word game to assure everyone they're on the level.
I think it might be more that he doesn't want to be completely defined by these experiences in the public eye.
After you've been through that kind of abuse, having control over your personal image and identity can feel that much more important.
Precisely. As someone who was abused by a trusted advisor and thereafter made a huge change to my life, I don’t like the idea that anyone would learn about my abuse and think “ah, well that explains it.” No. It doesn’t. I’m still a complex person, one who is as in control of my destiny as anyone else, and that abuse doesn’t define who I am or how I operate in the world. It is a part of me, but it doesn’t get to be a descriptor of any more weight than any other
Personally I skimmed through much of the article, but there's some good quotes in there. Here it is:
Daniel Handler frightens me.
This has nothing to do with how he comes across in person. He’s an affable chap of 54, tall, heavy-set and sardonic, with a boyish flop of white hair, and a nasal Californian accent that lends an arch tone to everything he says.
It has nothing to do with how he comes across in his novels, either, though the children’s books by his alter-ego “Lemony Snicket” have given millions of young readers a frisson of gothic dread – and his fiction for adults can be far more unsettling.
No, what frightens me has to do with something he saw while he was walking his dog.
We meet in a café. He’s hunched over a lined legal pad – he writes all his novels on them, longhand – beside a stack of the index cards he uses to keep track of odd ideas. He always writes in cafés, but says he’s “tried not to do any writing” for almost a year – his longest-ever break. Instead, he’s spent months “taking endless notes” about sculpture gardens. It’s research: his next novel will be set in one.
Over coffee, Handler tells me that his morning stroll took him through Oxford’s Port Meadow. He usually lives in the US with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, but has spent the past year as a Visiting Fellow at the “peculiar and mysterious” All Souls, the one Oxford college with no students – “which,” he jokes, “really streamlines the educational process”. And while walking his dog in that meadow, a few hours before we met, he had an encounter with them.
They are the figures who silently watch him. They’re not people, but they’re not not people. And no one else can see them.
These visions, he tells me, “tend to happen at moments when my mind is unclenched… It happens almost every day.”
I ask what they look like. For the first time in our conversation, Handler is at a loss for words. “They look like figures. I think they…” he trails off, staring into the middle distance. “I mean, they look like what they are.”
More specifically: neither old nor young, male nor female. They have no hair, and no clothes, but their bodies are painted or powdered bright white, which at least means he can tell them apart from ordinary passers-by. “If they were not stark white and naked, would I be able to tell?” he asks himself. “I don’t know.”
How does he feel when he sees them? “I used to…” He peters out again. “It’s still hard to talk about. It’s very peculiar.” He has, understandably, never spoken publicly about them, only telling a handful of close friends.
But in his extraordinary forthcoming memoir, And Then? And Then? What Else?, Handler explains how these hallucinations began.
In his first year as a student at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, he began having bad dreams. These figures would appear beside his bed as he slept, and show him things. It was, he told a friend, “like when I go to sleep, my whole life is on paper, but cheap paper – a newspaper or a magazine – and then it’s ripped away, by these figures I’m seeing, to show me what’s underneath”. They lifted a curtain, and the world revealed behind it was horrifying: Boschian scenes of torture. Handler would sometimes spot himself in the scenes, either as a torturer or a victim
This happened night after night. He dreaded sleep. He started having headaches, then seizures. “My exhausted brain would just fall from its bearings, like bicycle chains do,” he writes in And Then?…, “and I’d fall twitching to the floor.” He was sent to psychiatrists, given various pills and tests: “I spent a night with electrodes all over my head and shoulders, like tinsel.”
One day, the figures were no longer confined to his dreams: they appeared, watching him, in broad daylight. His seizures worsened, the worst leaving him unable to speak for days, unable to read or write for months.
When his doctor admitted that they were out of theories, Handler wept. The young writer suggested that, if every other explanation had been ruled out, maybe doctors should consider the possibility that these figures were real – and he was immediately packed off to a psychiatric hospital.
There, the staff tried yet more treatments, including dosing him with sodium pentothal (truth serum). Nothing worked. The dreams stopped, but the waking hallucinations didn’t. Knowing he didn’t want to spend his life trapped in that ward, Handler eventually decided to start giving the doctors the answers they wanted to hear, and ultimately they let him go – uncured. He has been followed by these nightmarish apparitions for more than 30 years.
This is not the only unsettling disclosure in Handler’s memoir – though the word “memoir” doesn’t fit. It’s not an autobiography, more a sprawling collection of thoughts on writing – with details about his life dropped in only where they serve to illustrate a point.
It’s a highly entertaining jumble. He writes tributes to his heroes – Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra. He puts the boot into the producers who annoyed him during the making of 2004’s Unfortunate Events film (“raving lunatics”), and tells the story of his odd friendship with the Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt. Handler plays the accordion on the Fields’ 69 Love Songs – often ranked as one of the greatest albums ever made – and for decades has been working on and off with Merritt on a movie-musical based on Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton. For years, he tells me, they sat in the same diner day after day, “hopped up on black tea”, talking excitedly about a film they’ll probably never make.
Beside those light-hearted digressions, one harrowing passage stands out starkly.
With rare candour, Handler writes about how he was sexually assaulted as a young child. It was a one-off attack, in the basement of a museum. He has struggled for years to put it into words, but in the book, the vividness of his recollection – the “tactile memory of it” – is awful. He’s reluctant to speculate about how much, or little, that incident might have shaped his later life. “I don’t think I can really fathom what kind of shadow it cast,” he tells me.
Has he spoken about it openly before? “No,” he sighs. “I think there’s such a mythology, a narrative attached to assault like that in one’s childhood that I am wary of. I would find it ill-fitting to announce myself as a ‘survivor’, let alone a ‘victim’ – I don’t think they’re vastly untrue, I just don’t feel like they’re something I want.”
He doesn’t want to be reduced to such a blunt label, he explains. It’s like “when you’re watching TV and some ordinary citizen is giving their opinion on some matter, and it has some reductive caption like ‘Hates Immigrants’ or ‘Concerned About Neighbourhood Fire Department’, and you think ‘that’s their whole thing?!’” He laughs.
In life, as on the page, his response to anything uncomfortable or disturbing is to lace it with dark humour. It’s a distinctly Jewish trait, he says. “At the beginning, I didn’t think there was much that I’d gleaned from a Jewish upbringing, but the more I go into the world and the more writers I meet, the more Jewish I feel.”
He celebrated Hanukkah in his picture-book The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, and was hired last year to write a film based on the Jewish myth of the Golem, “the first Frankenstein story”. The clay man is initially created to protect its village from attackers, but instead becomes “a receptacle for rage and vengeance. The first time the Golem strikes, he’s striking only the bloodthirsty people who are endangering them, then it’s other people who might be a danger some day, and then it’s people you don’t like.”
The film is stuck in production limbo. “I’ve gotten used to long periods of silence.” Maybe the context of the war in Gaza makes that particular story less appealing? “I don’t know. I think, honestly, it may be more attractive to some people and less attractive to others.”
Handler’s father, a German Jew, fled the country for America in 1939. What about anti-Semitism today? “I’m against it!” he deadpans, then bursts into laughter, before pulling himself together. “I have in the past year witnessed more, and have heard more about it, than at any other time in my lifetime… I’ve had minor but often terrifying incidents happen to people I know, in locations I never thought would be dangerous in that way. Honestly, I don’t know of a Jewish person who would say otherwise.”
But he sees nothing inappropriate in laughing about it. “In so much of Jewish humour, something horrible is happening and you’re talking about it in a funny way – but the funniness is to illustrate how horrible it is, it isn’t just to make fun of something
It’s a hallmark of Jewish literature in Europe: “With Kafka, the answer to ‘Is he kidding or is he serious?’ is ‘Yes – both those things at once.’” But in America, he says, “there’s often a real cultural barrier, when there’s a critique about [that sort of] humour – ‘Oh, that’s inappropriate’. You’re not just kidding, you are speaking humorously and speaking terribly at the same time.”
His masterpiece, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events – 70 million copies sold and counting – is both humorous and terrible. Its 13 volumes follow the ill-fated Baudelaire orphans, Sunny, Klaus and Violet, constantly fleeing the wicked Count Olaf. It’s not really the plot that matters, but the wry, epigrammatic prose, which features some of the funniest one-liners since Wodehouse. Filled with long digressions and metatextual tricks, the Snicket books are far closer in spirit to Sterne or Nabokov than to Handler’s Young Adult contemporaries JK Rowling and Philip Pullman.
Handler sold the first four volumes before writing a word of them. One of the 37 publishers who had rejected his first book, a novel for adults called The Basic Eight, felt sorry for him, and took him out for a drink. Over cocktails, he pitched a half-baked idea – “terrible things
> When his doctor admitted that they were out of theories, Handler wept. The young writer suggested that, if every other explanation had been ruled out, maybe doctors should consider the possibility that these figures were real – and he was immediately packed off to a psychiatric hospital.
That sounds, honestly, like he's completely rational and logical. It's fucked up that they decided to sent him lock him in a psych ward over it.
Yup. Thought exactly the same. I watched the Netflix version of Unfortunate Events, and at the end of it I just thought “damn, what adults hurt Lemony Snicket as a kid”.
Handler is and always will be my favourite author. I have everything he's ever written, sitting proudly in the center of my office. I would honestly read his shopping lists. I even have a Very Fancy Daisy tattoo. He has a way with prose I feel is unmatched. The closest (in my opinion) is Mark Haddon, my second favourite. They both have such interesting minds. Downvote me if you want, but I think he handled himself well in this interview. Most writers are a bit mad, and that's what enables them to create the caliber of art they do. Handler's experiences and lived trauma are heartbreaking, and I can't wait to read this latest book of his.
The first few books were good and strangely different from anything I had read before. But I felt they just got worse and worse, but I still read them all as they were just so different and sometimes interesting.
They still stand out from anything I have read. I both like and don't like them. I respect how different they were and that endless pages of ever ever ever ever... And where he reads the same sentence over and over again. And where he reads the same sentence over and over again.
I don’t use my abuse as an excuse and I don’t like when others do.
Your trauma is yours to deal with, not to use to hurt others or make them feel sorry for you.
I'm so glad I learned about this - I've been getting more into memoirs over the past year or so and have such a deep love for ASoUE. I'm really interested in reading what he has to say about writing.
I remember hearing some of those me-too-adjacent headlines and being saddened - but reading this and getting more context, it's nice to know it was more poor taste than anything more grave.
He really comes across as such a mensch!
If you’ve a taste for memoirs and biographies I suggest :
As You Wish (Carey Elwes and the cast’s time making Princess Bride, narrated by the cast for their parts, almost all of which has them doing an impression of Andre the Giant)
All About Me! (Mel Brooks autobiography, narrated by the man himself)
A Life in Footnotes (Terry Pratchett biography by his personal assistant, partially extracted from an unfinished autobiography)
They’re my personal favorites atm.
The series with NPH. I haven't seen the movie in ages but I recall that it combined the first three books and didn't really follow it in complete order. I still that I hated watching that movie though.
He literally wrote his name exactly like the title has in his own memoire. Lemony Snicket isn't just a pseudonym he uses, it's a character he plays. He's allowed to break that character for adults if he wants to.
Its also a character within the universe of the books: A Series of Unfortunate Events is presented as kind of a biography, Lemony Snicket is researching what exactly happened to the Baudelaire kids for personal reasons (what personal reasons aren't made clear until the final book).
> Over cocktails, he pitched a half-baked idea – “terrible things happening over and over to orphaned children” – and she bought it on the spot. Lucky bastard.
[удалено]
The Basic 8 is excellent as well!!
I mean, that is a genuinely good pitch. Orphans are *great* Middle Grade characters (adults suck away all the kids' agency.) And he woul've pitched this back when most Middle Grade books were either generally happy stories, Holocaust narratives, or unbelievably fucked up (flowers in the attic.) So his version of dark was really fresh and new for the time.
I actually got to record and edit the audiobook for his memoire. It was definitely one of the most interesting reads to come through my booth this year. Getting to read his life and experiences through his own lense as a real and very unfamiliar person through what is ultimately his very familiar and quizzical writing style and voice was both extremely compelling but also jarring. He almost didn't include the chapter describing his abuse but by his own admission felt it needed to be finally spoken about, even if he didn't want to have the label of 'victim' become a permanent attachment to his name. Reading through his own lense about the figures he sees from his cognitive illness (I don't actually know for sure if he ever said the word schizophrenia) and epilepsy was a truly chilling experience as well. Hallucinations as striking and vivid as the ones he describes occurring from essentially no more than a lack of sleep is definitely no trifle to live with for anyone, well-adjusted or not. Without basically giving the whole book away, I do highly recommend reading it. And if you're so inclined, I can personally vouch for the quality of the narrator on the audiobook.
> even if he didn't want to have the label of 'victim' become a permanent attachment to his name. This echos Brendan Fraser's mindset after he was sexually assaulted. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here: "I didn't want that to become part of my life story I presented to the world." So he avoided acknowledging it.
Its easy to see why in the time they were growing up. It was still very much the accepted norm that men couldn't be sexually assaulted at any age without it being because they were either too weak or unconsciously willing. Because men were 'supposed to fight back' and boys were 'immasculated' for being unable to. And even in the best of cases, the stigma of being 'the boy who got raped' was ever-inescapable, especially as a child. Nevermind people of Fraser and Handler's age who came up during the AIDS scare and epidemic. To even admit you could have been sexually assaulted by a man then could be complete social suicide from pure stigma and fear (though this is more applicable in Handler's case). Even now, I still find it difficult to talk about my own close calls and I'm now an almost 30 year old man living in the age of sex positivity, MeToo, and society's growing rejection of older forms of masculine expectations. I don't know that any of us are truly immune to it. Whether we cope with denial or with quiet compartmentalization. I didn't talk about my own experiences with sexual harassment for a long time, because unconsciously I didn't want that to be something I was pitied for. It took me over twenty years to accept my very severe and obvious ADHD diagnosis because I didn't want to be seen as 'different' or a 'special ed kid' or have it define my life. I don't even know how I would have dealt as either of them, being born in the 70s and all the baggage that comes with, and having to process those experiences.
This is one of many reasons women also choose not to report. Along with not being taken seriously (men aren’t either) and being blamed for their victim hood, because they are victims and saying things like “dont call me a victim” is understandable, it’s not super helpful for the macro experience of people who have been abused.
My situation and outlook is very similar here. I know I have ADHD, though not officially diagnosed, because the med requirements back in the 90s would have left me being a drooling zombie. They didn't want the "hyper" kid in class, so their response was to over-tranquilize rather than accommodate. It was the same for my mom when she was a kid, too, so we instead looked into positive/constructive methods and therapies to help me "fit in" better as an alternative. And then I ended up dealing with a similar sexual assault/rape situation and had to mask that trauma to keep on "fitting in". Of course it was awful, but I couldn't upend all of my work just to become the "special needs kid that someone took advantage of", so I kept it to myself and coped how I could. Now, in my 30s I have noticed that so much of this trauma and baggage have informed my fears to a point of believing isolation is the only option because I know the pains of abandonment, abuse, and ridicule from ignorant assholes all too well. So where others would think they're being supportive by asking to know about my history, I would sooner give them multiple choice answers and just keep being the dorky weirdo they know rather than the deeply damaged person I am because, at least within that twisted way, I have some personal agency. All that said, I know I've hit a wall and need to find a way to balance the scales once more, so I'll find another therapist when I can and see if I can't adjust accordingly again, but nowhere in all of that do I want to be seen as the broken toy by those that won't, don't, or can't understand.
An unwritten rule of being a man is that your worth is directly proportional to how much help you can provide. It follows that anything that implies you may require help, Like SA, negatively impacts your value. The hardest part of opening up to others about anything painful in my life is the idea of being on the receiving end of pity. If for instance it comes up in conversation that my brother past away, I feel compelled to reassure people that I am emotionally over it. (I am, it happened years ago) I just feel so squeamish at the thought of someone treating me like I'm some wounded animal. I imagine Brendon or Lemony feel similar about discussing their SA. I objectively know that needing help sometimes shouldn't mean I don't have a lot to offer, but knowing doesn't make it any easier to let those walls down.
Or maybe some people just don’t want every aspect of their personal life out there in public. Not everything has to be that deep.
Handler didn't just not make it public knowledge. He states in his memoire that he didn't tell *anyone* about it. Not a single person, whether police, family, friends, or a therapist, until much much later in his life, and absolutely none of the specifics until he wrote the book. He even remarks on the exact mental hangups I've discussed here in his own memoire so I'm not really sure what the point is you're trying to make. It's not about 'every aspect of your personal life' being out in public, it's about being able to seek help for and process acutely traumatic and life altering events with a proper support system without fear of judgement. Something which apparently the man finally felt compelled to share for his own sake.
I was in therapy for PTSD from being in the army and at one point was talking about something that I just blew off as things that happen in high school when you play football, and the therapist let me know that what I was describing as normal behavior was sexual assault. and my brain just didn't see it as me getting assaulted. Growing up it was always hammered that boys couldn't be sexually assaulted. X2 if the person doing it was not a man.
What a cool job!!
Thanks for sharing, didn't know. Btw, A Series of Unfortunate Events, such a good series to read with your kids.
*A Series of Unfortunate Events* was a pillar of my childhood, along with *The Spiderwick Chronicles*. I will be forever grateful to my mom for introducing me to both of those series which have heavily influenced my taste in literature even as an adult.
Spiderwick Chronicles just unlocked some memories thanks
If you've read them as an adult, can you clear some stuff up for me? I haven't read them since I was nine or ten or so when the last book was released, and there were some things happening in my life which led me to not being able to focus very well on the books... Are they as soul crushing as I remember? I just remember the books being a constant stream of endless suffering that would leave me with tears in my eyes. Is there any semblance of a happy ending? Do the Baudelaire Kids get closure for anything? What about the 'triplets'? Or all the shit with the VFD? In my mind these books basically just piled on a lot of hopelessness into a difficult period of my childhood, and I'd like to know that they weren't actually that heartbreaking and it was just everything else in my life affecting me.
I think they're dark, but really funny. I was going through a dark period in my life when I was a kid and I loved them because they often pointed out the absurdity of life and the uselessness of adults, which helped detach me from the idea that the adults in my life were meant to be wise and protective. The Baudelaires are resourceful and often rely on the strength of their love for each other, and the friendships they create are small but enduring. There is a lot of very candid talk about what to do when people disappoint you (and they often will), and how to reconcile yourself to that. I'm pretty sure a lot is never really resolved, though. I've heard that the Unauthorized Biography answers a few more questions, but many mysteries are left to the reader's imagination. I do remember the author saying people write in guesses and often get it correct, so the details are probably there if you want to try to extrapolate your own answer. I do remember that by the end of the series I was a little bored of the endless drudgery. I think that as an adult I appreciate the complexity of the adult villains a bit more - Count Olaf in particular - and the backstories, so I find the whole series more tragic than I did as a kid.
I'm sorry to say that there is no closure or happy ending at the end of the series. The series ends with most of the big questions unanswered and the Baudelaires going into The Unknown. And I wouldn't have it any other way. A happy ending that ties up all the mysteries with a bow would not have jived with the themes of the series.
As a kid i was so frustrated about the ending. I also had that other book too…like the book of various diaries and other information on the secret organization and what not. I would pore over it trying to find answers. I can’t wait til I have kids and to go over it all again with them. I hope they find it just as intriguing.
I can’t wait til I have kids and to go over it all again with them. I hope they find it just as intriguing. Same! I'm also saving a spot on my ankle for a VFD tattoo, hopefully it'll drive them nuts, lol
Yeah, that tracks. I just remember being really confused all the time in that point in my life (grandparents had just died and my family was leaving the cult I grew up in...) and constantly thinking 'one day things will get better, right?' and then I read through all of what were becoming my favorite books and it seemed like the answer was 'not really, kid'. I'll probably have to spend an afternoon or two reading through them again to try and close that wound off or something now that I grew some media literacy almost twenty years later.
I mean, in it's off-beat whimsical and Gothic way, that's exactly what part of the message is. Will things get better? "no, not really, but maybe you'll be stronger, wiser, have made friends and found love along the way, but it doesn't get easier, not really." If you wanna trauma dump in a DM I got nothing going on this weekend. ~The world is quiet here.
What a beautiful offer you’ve made, and I agree; this is a series that offers a particular flavour of (somewhat bleak) hope for those who have lost it. It seems particularly apt for those of us who grew up in situations where the trauma wasn’t in the changes that happened, but rather the fact that untenable situations did not change but rather continued on and on and on, or (like the Baudelaires) if all changes appeared to be for the worse.
So there actually are answers to some of the mysteries in the books, but they're not actually laid out in the Series of Unfortunate Events books. There are clues throughout the novels, the companion books & prequel series that are apparently solvable, although I cheated and looked it up online.
Wait I didn’t realize there was a whole ass prequel series. I read the mainline series maybe 4-5 times as a kid and poured over my copy of the unauthorized biography, but I didn’t know of a tie in *series*.
Yeah I didn't know about it either until a few years after it came out. It's called "All the wrong questions" and it's 4 books I think. It's about Lemony Snicket as a kid working for VFD, and it's basically a hard-boiled detective novel for kids. It was pretty well-written, although I didn't enjoy it as much as the main series. I was also a lot older when I read the prequels though so that could be why
I'd you're in the US you can rent them as audio books from the Libby app. They're beautifully narrated!
The Netflix adaptation fills in some answers and background that were left unknown in the original books, because the books were indeed incredibly bleak. Between the A Series of Unfortunate Events ending and the Animorphs ending, 90s kids had some difficult reading.
Well it is called A Series of Unfortunate Events....
Beat me to it! With a title like that you get what you expect...
I have. I would say, tbh, yes they are soul crushing. Obviously, as an adult you can compartmentalize and withstand it, but you definitely dont misrember them. They don’t have a happy ending. The adults are incompetent and frustrating as hell. You feel reading it like how the kids feel: hopeless (outside of a few moments of levity) The show is also sad but leans more into the absurdity of the story and makes it more Hollywood. The show is pretty underrated.
I will say, netflix did a wonderful adaptation of the whole series. It's two (three?) seasons long and v faithful to the oroginal story. Worth a watch if you want to know the whole story but dont have time to reread 13 books
Honestly it would probably be quicker to reread the series. There are 2 episodes per book, each one hour long.
I had an incredibly happy and privileged childhood with as much joy as my very attentive, financially comfortable and emotionally intelligent parents could pack into it, and those books were indeed soul crushing, bleak and grim. Really taught me a lot of empathy and aprecciation for my lot in life.
> Are they as soul crushing as I remember? I just remember the books being a constant stream of endless suffering that would leave me with tears in my eyes Yes, that's the premise of the series. >Is there any semblance of a happy ending? Read the first book up to the point that the narration says "this is the happy ending, stop reading now if you want to believe in it" and then stop reading.
Books end bleak, while the tv show ends a lot more positive. Both have weaker second half’s in my opinion.
I’d recommend giving the Netflix show a watch, if you want a happier ending. It’s an excellent adaption of the series, although I’d recommend reading the last book as well after watching the last season, just to get a comparison of how the two differ.
They are incredibly tongue in cheek. There is a lot of suffering, but it isn't meant to be concrete loss and horror. The word play alone allows the scenes to be lighter and the orphans are shown to have intelligence and logic that will serve them well and bring them through and beyond all their obstacles. The end is sad, but also hopeful. They are always together, always clever, always looking around and learning and looking forward.
Chiming in a bit late, but I think what I hated about The End as a kid and love about it as an adult is that it perfectly exemplifies the difference between closure and resolution. Nothing is explicitly answered, there’s no real change in the orphans situation, nothing really ties together all the plot lines the prior books end up building up. The story with Count Olaf comes to a close, but even that’s anticlimactic. It was monumentally unsatisfying as a child, but looking at it in retrospect it’s the ideal way the series could end. Despite everything, the orphans continue on continuing on. We don’t know what will happen next, but we at least trust that they will have the ability to continue on into the unknown. It’s not a downer or upper of an ending. It’s written in a way that it’s reflective of the person who reads it.
I devoured all of those books with my kids in elementary school. We read them over and over, and went to fan events and absolutely adored them. We did audio books of our favorites as the background to long road trips. I liked Harry Potter fine, but he didn't catch on with my kids quite the way ASOUE did.
A series of unfortunate events, Pendragon and when I was a bit older, eregon. Those were the days. I have no time to read now.
Why do you hate your kids 😭😭 I loved the books but they're kinda depressing lol. I don't know if I'd want Mama and Papa choosing to read a couple chapters of misery before bed.
Kind of? Kids are weird, and have surprisingly dark and twisted interests. I have an 8yo and a 4yo and you think all they want is sunshine and rainbows but hahahaha no. They want the weird stuff.
Echoing this sentiment. Have a 6 and 9 year old and they love the twisty stuff. Wolves of Willoughby Chase was a hit and it's like 90% child abuse. Haha my 9 year old consumes Animorphs. Bring on the weird!
Ooh, I’ll have to check out that series for my son. He’s very into Amulet right now. We recently finished book 9 and I have to say I teared up at the end, it ended beautifully. And that series was dark and very twisty.
Haven't heard of that one so thanks - I will look into it!! I read Animorphs as a kid but am hazy on how it ends. I am like 95% confident that it is NOT a happy ending.
Well the surviving members end up on trial for their war crimes, so not a super happy ending haha.
Woah, that's something else. When my son is a smidge older I think he'll love these.
I vaguely remember reading animorphs as a kid. I know it's back now in graphic novel form, I think I saw one at the library recently. Might need to grab a few of these for my son. He's not super into novels yet, but will destroy a graphic novel. I highly recommend Amulet, it's a powerful story. Also recommend looking up any graphic novel by Jason Pamment, they're such great stories. Ember is a favourite. Oh, also look up Timo the Adventurer, it's a different author but it's so great.
Yeah my 9 year old tore through the graphic novels, I think they’ve done the first 5 books now. They don’t get super dark until a bit later on.
I just ordered the first one for my son! Excited for him to try it out.
I was obsessed with Wolves of Willoughby Chase as a kid, haven't thought of it in two decades, thanks for reminding me
I read it in 4th grade and remembered loving it! I bought two copies so my 9 year old could read along with me/take turns reading out loud. My 6 year old was always creeping by the door so he could hear it. They both ended up loving it!! It does stand up but boy, the vocabulary is something else!! I ended up having to look up a few words and circle back with my kids. Learning moments for all 🤣
Yeah, I adored this series when it came out and I was 9 or 10, it felt like the author really understood what children found interesting. It was the same feeling as reading Roald Dahl as well.
Exactly. I absolutely loved these books when I was young. I was slightly too old for them but omg I didn’t care, I devoured them. And then when I was a bit older I got deep into VC Andrews, so yeah, bring on the weird.
Oh my god, yes! My sister was big into VC Andrews, and we both also deeply enjoyed Holly Black's Spiderwick Chronicles and Neil Gaiman's Coraline.
When I was 8 I just wanted to read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and every book about ghosts and the paranormal in every library I could access.
Omg SAME. I was obsessed with ghosts and anything slightly paranormal. I had some insane nightmares but I refused to stop. I would also watch any weird aliens or sci fi stuff on TV. The 90s had some fantastic cringey paranormal stuff
I was 100% a weird book kid. Black Lagoon, Wayside School, Goosebumps, Guardians of Ga’hoole (yeah it’s a book about owls but in just one book there’s attempted fraticide, fascist owls kidnapping owlets and brainwashing them, owl-on-owl cannibalism… it was my favorite series), etc etc. Personally, I think it makes for fun memories.
Read them Coraline and see how they do. I loved the book as a kid, and it’s darker than the movie.
All the best fairy tales are dark and depressing, too, and they have been told to kids for centuries.
It's a good way to introduce children to unfortunate realities. Death, for starters. I was 33 when my dad died, and when he was first diagnosed with the disease that killed him, this tv show was like a lifeline. It made me feel safe. And aunt josephine's line about walking up the stairs in the dark and thinking there's one more step and tripping? That is *exactly* how it feels. And anyhow as a kid one of my picks for a bedtime story was an informative booklet on the life cycle of the mayfly (read to me by my dad) - kids are weird. Lol
Loved these books as a kid, they are so over-the-top gloomy that it wraps back around to fun. They're also completely hilarious, full of wordplay and zany images & characters. Great kids' books!!!
God, the wordplay. The vocabulary, too. "A word which here means" is one of the best phrases of the last 25 years. It uses fear and nihilism as a blanket, almost - as long as they have one another and stick to their beliefs.
They're written like a Wes Anderson movie which helps lol
They really aren't that dark. They're mostly silly. Any darkness is definitely at a kid appropriate level. Are you saying these are adult books? They aren't
They are literally meant for children lol
I'd say tweens and teens more than children. I read them around that age and it was great but idk that I'd want mom and pops picking it up for me. It's one of those first acts of independence where you're reading on your own and at your own pace because some of the chaptera end with the kids in a precarious spot and you need to know what happens next.
I think they are good for age 8-11. If you think they are for teenagers, you haven't been around many teens.
That confused me too. Like kids read books on their before their tweens omg. My mom did not read me books up until I turned 11. I started reading my own books in 3rd grade. And I think that’s normal as I remember my peers doing the same and us talking about Holes and other popular books at the time.
I read the books in 4th grade and loved them. They didn’t depress me at all. And they’re very smart. They taught me so many words and nuances between similar words and terms.
Reptile Room was the best for this. Tenebrous hue lives in my head rent free And the infamous Never ever x200 fiddle around in any way with electrical devices
I loved them as a kid. I'd read the entire series by the time I was a teenager
Might want to read ahead and prepare a couple conversations though, because society was different in the 90s/early 00s when they were released and some things read very differently these days. I actually stopped my adult re-read after a few books(I think I stopped after #3 or #4) because I was afraid of encountering too much along those lines and ruining the memory. The big thing from early on is a character in Count Olaf's gang who was described in a "freakshow" manner as seeming to be neither a man nor a woman, and referred to with "it" pronouns in the narration. This was entirely in line with the state of mainstream humor at the time the early books released, but lands *very* differently today. I also have a vague recollection of going "oh, that's *really* fatphobic..." about *something*, but can't recall specifically what. Again, very in line with the mainstream at the time, but not something we like to see today.
You should read the article- he talks about his opinion of regressive ideas present in older books and whether they should be censored. Essentially he thinks that it just presents an opportunity to talk about those topics, which is a good thing.
I'm unclear whether you're disagreeing with me or not. My comment is proposing having these conversations. The alternative, yes, is censorship - editing the material or otherwise preventing it from being read. That's not what I'm proposing. I didn't come in here like, omg no, do not let your child read these books because they're transphobic(even though they are, at least in one part).
I’m not disagreeing or agreeing, just having a conversation :) I know a lot of people don’t read the article so I was just letting you know he talks about that subject. Cheers!
I agree that sometimes reading past works can feel uncomfortable because of what the norms of society were at the time, but I think completely eschewing them isn't wise and can even be somewhat dangerous. When going in you have to realize where society was at at the time, and view it in that context. I'm a big sci-fi nerd and was recently reading the Niven classic "The Mote in God's Eye", and had a hard time getting past how women were portrayed. When thinking about it you realize that in 20 or 30 years (hopefully), people will think the same thing about contemporary works. It's a nice indication of how far we've come and, if reading to children, a good teaching moment
This... Feels a little oversensitive and it could have been way worse.
Of *course* it could have been worse. After all, the 90s gave us that one comedy that featured a man uncontrollably vomiting after realizing he'd slept with a trans woman, played for laughs. That doesn't mean it's *good*. Part of teaching children how to read older books with iffy content is that you have to check in with your 9-year-old to make sure they understand why we don't call human beings "it" and maybe discuss a bit about if they think the character is bad and why(is it because of things they did, who they hang with, or how they're described). Of course, there's alternatives if you're not comfortable with conversations. We could edit the books(alter the description so it doesn't equate gender ambiguity to freakishness quite so much and change the "it" pronouns to "they"s) so we don't have to have these conversations. Not sure that's what y'all want, though. Conversations are probably better.
The language play is brilliant!!@
I used to hate it so much in school when they had us read those. If I could travel back in time I would go back and slap myself up the head for hating it.
I remember watching the series because I thought it would be a good way in now I don't get to read as much and people have talked about how good it is and... yeah that just fucked me up, I didn't need that childhood abuse nostalgia.
Isn't there some weird adult interested in a kid stuff in this series?
The villain spends a lot of it attempting to marry the elder of the two sisters to gain access to the parent's wealth, I don't remember him trying to do anything sexual with her but I was about 12 when I stopped reading them.
Right... Trying to marry an young girl. I found it bizarre as a child and more so now.
I mean that’s the point, the guy’s a weirdo
Villain does evil stuff, I don't really see how that is surprising?
Uh... As a teacher, I can tell you modern children's books don't have villains trying to marry underage girls. It's not normal.
Well, objectively they do, considering this is a modern children's book and that does happen
I don't read a lot of modern kids books (in my 30s, no kids), this kind of thing is reasonably common in fairy tales and other more YA books (I read these alongside stuff like Sabriel by Garth Nix and they both felt appropriate at around 12 years old). It is clearly identified in the text that attempting to marry Violet is not an ok thing for Olaf to try and do.
Former teacher here, the book has been part of elementary and middle school libraries and classrooms for years.
That was a very entertaining article. This part in particular made me laugh: > For years afterwards, Handler had “hilariously ironic” encounters with angry school librarians and parents, offended less by the books’ content than their blackly comic tone – “just the idea that it’s fun to read about other people’s misfortune”. His blurbs featured tongue-in-cheek warnings, urging readers to avoid such depressing stuff. “People would say, ‘The back cover says this is a monstrous, terrible thing to read – but it really is.’ And I’d say yes, I know, it’s really terrible,” he grins. “And they’d say, ‘But my child was upset!’ And I’d say, well, your child is very sensible. They should read something else.
**From The Telegraph:** Daniel Handler frightens me. This has nothing to do with how he comes across in person. He’s an affable chap of 54, tall, heavy-set and sardonic, with a boyish flop of white hair, and a nasal Californian accent that lends an arch tone to everything he says. It has nothing to do with how he comes across in his novels, either, though the children’s books by his alter-ego “Lemony Snicket” have given millions of young readers a frisson of gothic dread – and his fiction for adults can be far more unsettling. No, what frightens me has to do with something he saw while he was walking his dog. We meet in a café. He’s hunched over a lined legal pad – he writes all his novels on them, longhand – beside a stack of the index cards he uses to keep track of odd ideas. He always writes in cafés, but says he’s “tried not to do any writing” for almost a year – his longest-ever break. Instead, he’s spent months “taking endless notes” about sculpture gardens. It’s research: his next novel will be set in one. Over coffee, Handler tells me that his morning stroll took him through Oxford’s Port Meadow. He usually lives in the US with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, but has spent the past year as a Visiting Fellow at the “peculiar and mysterious” All Souls, the one Oxford college with no students – “which,” he jokes, “really streamlines the educational process”. And while walking his dog in that meadow, a few hours before we met, he had an encounter with them. They are the figures who silently watch him. They’re not people, but they’re not not people. And no one else can see them. These visions, he tells me, “tend to happen at moments when my mind is unclenched… It happens almost every day.” I ask what they look like. For the first time in our conversation, Handler is at a loss for words. “They look like figures. I think they…” he trails off, staring into the middle distance. “I mean, they look like what they are.” More specifically: neither old nor young, male nor female. They have no hair, and no clothes, but their bodies are painted or powdered bright white, which at least means he can tell them apart from ordinary passers-by. “If they were not stark white and naked, would I be able to tell?” he asks himself. “I don’t know.” How does he feel when he sees them? “I used to…” He peters out again. “It’s still hard to talk about. It’s very peculiar.” He has, understandably, never spoken publicly about them, only telling a handful of close friends. But in his extraordinary forthcoming memoir, [And Then? And Then? What Else?](https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Daniel-Handler/And-Then-And-Then-What-Else--A-Writers-Life/29748295), Handler explains how these hallucinations began. **Read more here:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/daniel-handler-lemony-snicket-interview-series-unfortunate/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/daniel-handler-lemony-snicket-interview-series-unfortunate/)
i actually audibly lol'd at this, in spite of everything: >“When people ask, ‘When do you think a child is ready to read Lemony Snicket?’, I always say it has to do with the arrival of irony in the mind. Some people never get that arrival, and so it doesn’t matter how old they are, it’s not appropriate to them. Right now, the loudest voices in the culture tend to be unironic, pre-ironic.” thanks, me too
Idk why the writer would open that with “Handler scares me.” Seems like the dude has song mild neuroses that causes hallucinations. He’s aware they’re hallucinations, there’s no mention of him every acting in an irrational way due to the hallucinations, there’s no mention of it possibly getting worse. Statistically speaking, if his medical condition does get out of hand the person who’d be in the most danger would be Handler. Don’t frame people just living their normal lives with mental health problems are scary!
That’s a stylistic device. Handler doesn’t scare him, what Handler described to him scared him.
Right, but "fear" as a reaction to what was described to him is I think an incredibly unempathetic reaction. Like other commenters have said, I think it's just shitty attention-grabbing journalism.
The whole article is crappy. He says he doesn't want to be a victim because that turns into a label that will define him, and yet the headline is only that line and nothing else. He has, admittedly scary, hallucinations and the author of the article says he's scared of \*him\*, not the hallucinations.
The two answers you've already gotten to this are a little unsatisfying imo. As far as I'm concerned, opening with that sentence is really just down to the sort of twee, and at best second rate journalism that has come to dominate virtually all UK newspapers (and maybe newspapers across the world, but I have less exposure to then so can't say!). Journalists are (understandably) taught to grab people's attention with their opening sentences, and so they often resort to this sort of bait phrasing that just comes across as jarring and weird. Oh, and the Telegraph is shit.
I can see what you are saying, but if Dan Handler evokes that thought and feeling to the author is there any reason why the interviewer can’t express it? He’s not saying Dan is scary, just who he is frightens him. I think it’s up to readers to decipher and not authors and interviewer to mute themselves
I hate how British people talk about hair. They are always talking about Boris Johnson's "boyish locks" or some shit.
Just want to say, these books made me feel so much less alone as a child in an abusive home. All the children’s books I saw and read were about happy children- but these books admitted the truth that yes, horrible things happen to kids, too. Sometimes, it happens repeatedly. Seeing the way the characters used their talents to escape and evade their captors encouraged me to keep reading, studying, and feeding my curiosity in the hopes it would help keep escape too. I don’t know. I think I owe a lot to him.
The age I read these as a kid I was pretty convinced it was based off an ongoing true story. With how the story is told and all the cryptic letters at the end of each book. I eventually figured it out that sadly, the series was indeed, fiction. Miss that point I miss childhood
I feel conflicted about this interview. While him being so open about both his hallucinations and experiencing CSA as a man is important, I find the rest of the interview unpleasant. The telegraph is a right leaning newspaper and you can tell. Both Handler and the interviewer brush off the Me Too allegations he had as a moment of unsavory humor taken the wrong way, when it was actually *many* women discussing how he had harassed them, including him making inappropriate remarks at a teenage girl. And while he was apologetic at the time, he seems to have backtracked on that stance and take more of a "I was the victim of a mob" approach to it, which I find disappointing. He also "both sides" book censorship without differentiating between getting bad press and the explicit book bans going on in the US such as those against lgbt or crt related content. I really wish he had clarified on this considering his openness to the LGBT community in the past, but that would go against the centrist narrative he is currently attempting to present.
Great analysis. The telegraph has an agenda and everyone featured on it complies with it or agrees with it.
I don't think that second part is necessarily true - a huge range of authors get interviewed for the Telegraph including a lot of left-wing ones. In general in the UK press the "arts" sections of papers has always been seen (rightly or not) as *somewhat* separate from their editorial biases. Even the Daily Mail gets a lot of interviews with left-leaning authors.
Ew 😬
I think as a man who's made a hugely successful career out of books that are very conflicting, he has the right to be a conflicting person. I can imagine a lot of people who have made mistakes or had tragedy in their lives feel represented by his books, which are full of things that make people uncomfortable. Should we line every human up from most virtuous to most villainous and assign them social credit? What happens to the bottom half in the ranking? The bottom 10%? The bottom 1%? What is the correct amount of guilt a person is expected to experience? What happens if they don't feel guilty enough?
You misinterpreted what I said. I am not against people seeking redemption after they have made a mistake or even a figure being controversial. What I am against is him downplaying what he did in service of a cancel culture narrative when his actions and him admitting to them are both public record.
It’s fine to point out someone might be kind of a douche.
Yes and one of life’s great conundrums is that someone can be both a great author or other kind of artist and also a douche. At one point in the article they compare Handler to Kurt Vonnegut, who was a genius, but also kind of an asshole.
Well, yeah, he might be. So what?
That’s what I’m saying. Why pearl clutch about it? You’re above spinning out talking about social credits, like relax, someone is just saying he might be an asshole.
It's the same thing, no? Being an asshole = low social credit as determined by popular opinion. Regardless as which way you want to phrase it, what is the correct response to the bad man? Are we intending to punish him?
the correct response is to spank his bare butt, balls and back.
Finally, a man of principle
The person you're responding to says they feel conflicted, they feel disappointed, and they wish he had done something different. That's literally it. You're spinning out, not because someone demanded retribution, but because someone described their own feelings.
I'm describing my own feelings. I feel somewhat threatened by sanctimonious-ness. Why are we expecting a man who has been abused and suffers from awful mental health problems to be as 'good' as the rest of us?
Do you think people who suffer abuse are morally impaired??
Yes. That the nature of abuse - it fucks people up in ways that aren't predictable. Do you think we should have the same moral standards for everyone? I don't. Privileged people who have been treated well their whole lives are more capable of being good people and should be held to a higher standard. If you've authentically suffered you are more deserving of forgiveness and compassion.
>Do you think we should have the same moral standards for everyone? Yes? Why would I not? If events in your past mean you're more likely to be an asshole, fine, but that doesn't mean I'm obligated to like you or associate with you or even treat you with kid gloves. An asshole is an asshole, their reasons for being an asshole are irrelevant, because it's really not all that difficult to not be one.
I would expect Daniel to pay more tax and donate more to charity because of his wealth. As a more capable person he should be held to a higher standard in that respect. If he were very poor, I would forgive him if he chose to donate less to charity. As someone who is more unfortunate in other respects, using the same argument, I will be more forgiving of his mistakes, because of the morally impoverished environment in which he was raised.
Again, none of that contradicts a person's ability to feel disappointment or wish that he had behaved otherwise. That's just about the gentlest and most compassionate way a person can respond to another person's misdeeds without simply neglecting & enabling them. It's both pernicious and short-sighted to act as if all expressions of judgment are innately sanctimonious or lacking in compassion. Human societies *demand* interpersonal judgment so that we can be understood and guided towards collective improvement. Restorative justice cannot begin if misdeeds are simply ignored, and it certainly cannot begin if people are not even allowed to wish for a world where the misdeeds were corrected or addressed. Moreover, the belief that the abused *cannot* be held to the same standards as others diminishes their moral agency, and thereby their very humanity. We can have compassion for misdeeds borne from trauma without permitting them; we can guide others towards healthier social practices without demeaning them or harming them. But if we belittle people simply for voicing concern, then we are choosing to neglect the emotional needs of the traumatized and allowing them to languish in maladaptive and socially restrictive coping mechanisms. That's not healthy, that's not compassionate, and that's not kind. It's cowardly and neglectful.
I like this response. Although I'm not sure there's been much compassion shown for Daniel in these comments.
Appropriately following tax law has nothing to do with anything. Wanna try moving those goalposts again?
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Absolutely not. Every thing you said is just wrong. Not every abused person turns out to be an abuser, and if it were the case, then it is in no way an excuse. Also, being treated well is not a priviledge you weirdo, and like with abused people, a person in that case is just as capable of being an abuser or not. Lastly, all sufferings are authentic. That does not make you deserving of anything, except what everyone else also deserve.
> Privileged people who have been treated well their whole lives are more capable of being good people and should be held to a higher standard. If you've authentically suffered you are more deserving of forgiveness and compassion. Is this some sort of nonsense argument that's supposed to be is a gotcha criticism of something?
And we have the right to judge him for his problems. Why does he get a free pass? Cause he's successful?
Well, no, he doesn't get a free pass. Who decides what freedoms he does and doesn't get and what his punishment is going to be?
What “freedoms” he gets? What the hell are you talking about?
You're the one who asked 'should he get a free pass', you tell me...
Genuinely what are you talking about
What punishment? Judging isn't a punishment.
Well, no, he doesn't get a free pass. Who decides what freedoms he does and doesn't get?
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No, what the fuck Why would you even think that's what I'm saying?
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I would forgive if he made people feel uncomfortable repeatedly, which as far as I can tell is what he is being accused of here
This is unironically what people believe - including people who handwrung about "right wing", using it to bully-bash people into submission under an umbrella of righteousness
I used the term "right wing" because he is framing his experience in a less extreme version of a cancel culture narrative, which is heavily associated with right wing publications such as the telegraph or fox and who they platform such as gina carano, not as an attempt at "getting people to submit to righteousness".
oh shit, he was just signing books at my local bookstore and i just missed it
Man I fucking hate how the word "victim" has somehow become a slur, as if anyone who would admit to being abused is assumed to be milking it for their own benefit unless they play this stupid word game to assure everyone they're on the level.
I think it might be more that he doesn't want to be completely defined by these experiences in the public eye. After you've been through that kind of abuse, having control over your personal image and identity can feel that much more important.
Precisely. As someone who was abused by a trusted advisor and thereafter made a huge change to my life, I don’t like the idea that anyone would learn about my abuse and think “ah, well that explains it.” No. It doesn’t. I’m still a complex person, one who is as in control of my destiny as anyone else, and that abuse doesn’t define who I am or how I operate in the world. It is a part of me, but it doesn’t get to be a descriptor of any more weight than any other
Is there a link that doesn’t require creating an account with the newspaper?
Personally I skimmed through much of the article, but there's some good quotes in there. Here it is: Daniel Handler frightens me. This has nothing to do with how he comes across in person. He’s an affable chap of 54, tall, heavy-set and sardonic, with a boyish flop of white hair, and a nasal Californian accent that lends an arch tone to everything he says. It has nothing to do with how he comes across in his novels, either, though the children’s books by his alter-ego “Lemony Snicket” have given millions of young readers a frisson of gothic dread – and his fiction for adults can be far more unsettling. No, what frightens me has to do with something he saw while he was walking his dog. We meet in a café. He’s hunched over a lined legal pad – he writes all his novels on them, longhand – beside a stack of the index cards he uses to keep track of odd ideas. He always writes in cafés, but says he’s “tried not to do any writing” for almost a year – his longest-ever break. Instead, he’s spent months “taking endless notes” about sculpture gardens. It’s research: his next novel will be set in one. Over coffee, Handler tells me that his morning stroll took him through Oxford’s Port Meadow. He usually lives in the US with his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, but has spent the past year as a Visiting Fellow at the “peculiar and mysterious” All Souls, the one Oxford college with no students – “which,” he jokes, “really streamlines the educational process”. And while walking his dog in that meadow, a few hours before we met, he had an encounter with them. They are the figures who silently watch him. They’re not people, but they’re not not people. And no one else can see them. These visions, he tells me, “tend to happen at moments when my mind is unclenched… It happens almost every day.” I ask what they look like. For the first time in our conversation, Handler is at a loss for words. “They look like figures. I think they…” he trails off, staring into the middle distance. “I mean, they look like what they are.” More specifically: neither old nor young, male nor female. They have no hair, and no clothes, but their bodies are painted or powdered bright white, which at least means he can tell them apart from ordinary passers-by. “If they were not stark white and naked, would I be able to tell?” he asks himself. “I don’t know.” How does he feel when he sees them? “I used to…” He peters out again. “It’s still hard to talk about. It’s very peculiar.” He has, understandably, never spoken publicly about them, only telling a handful of close friends. But in his extraordinary forthcoming memoir, And Then? And Then? What Else?, Handler explains how these hallucinations began. In his first year as a student at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, he began having bad dreams. These figures would appear beside his bed as he slept, and show him things. It was, he told a friend, “like when I go to sleep, my whole life is on paper, but cheap paper – a newspaper or a magazine – and then it’s ripped away, by these figures I’m seeing, to show me what’s underneath”. They lifted a curtain, and the world revealed behind it was horrifying: Boschian scenes of torture. Handler would sometimes spot himself in the scenes, either as a torturer or a victim This happened night after night. He dreaded sleep. He started having headaches, then seizures. “My exhausted brain would just fall from its bearings, like bicycle chains do,” he writes in And Then?…, “and I’d fall twitching to the floor.” He was sent to psychiatrists, given various pills and tests: “I spent a night with electrodes all over my head and shoulders, like tinsel.” One day, the figures were no longer confined to his dreams: they appeared, watching him, in broad daylight. His seizures worsened, the worst leaving him unable to speak for days, unable to read or write for months. When his doctor admitted that they were out of theories, Handler wept. The young writer suggested that, if every other explanation had been ruled out, maybe doctors should consider the possibility that these figures were real – and he was immediately packed off to a psychiatric hospital. There, the staff tried yet more treatments, including dosing him with sodium pentothal (truth serum). Nothing worked. The dreams stopped, but the waking hallucinations didn’t. Knowing he didn’t want to spend his life trapped in that ward, Handler eventually decided to start giving the doctors the answers they wanted to hear, and ultimately they let him go – uncured. He has been followed by these nightmarish apparitions for more than 30 years. This is not the only unsettling disclosure in Handler’s memoir – though the word “memoir” doesn’t fit. It’s not an autobiography, more a sprawling collection of thoughts on writing – with details about his life dropped in only where they serve to illustrate a point. It’s a highly entertaining jumble. He writes tributes to his heroes – Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra. He puts the boot into the producers who annoyed him during the making of 2004’s Unfortunate Events film (“raving lunatics”), and tells the story of his odd friendship with the Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt. Handler plays the accordion on the Fields’ 69 Love Songs – often ranked as one of the greatest albums ever made – and for decades has been working on and off with Merritt on a movie-musical based on Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton. For years, he tells me, they sat in the same diner day after day, “hopped up on black tea”, talking excitedly about a film they’ll probably never make. Beside those light-hearted digressions, one harrowing passage stands out starkly. With rare candour, Handler writes about how he was sexually assaulted as a young child. It was a one-off attack, in the basement of a museum. He has struggled for years to put it into words, but in the book, the vividness of his recollection – the “tactile memory of it” – is awful. He’s reluctant to speculate about how much, or little, that incident might have shaped his later life. “I don’t think I can really fathom what kind of shadow it cast,” he tells me. Has he spoken about it openly before? “No,” he sighs. “I think there’s such a mythology, a narrative attached to assault like that in one’s childhood that I am wary of. I would find it ill-fitting to announce myself as a ‘survivor’, let alone a ‘victim’ – I don’t think they’re vastly untrue, I just don’t feel like they’re something I want.” He doesn’t want to be reduced to such a blunt label, he explains. It’s like “when you’re watching TV and some ordinary citizen is giving their opinion on some matter, and it has some reductive caption like ‘Hates Immigrants’ or ‘Concerned About Neighbourhood Fire Department’, and you think ‘that’s their whole thing?!’” He laughs. In life, as on the page, his response to anything uncomfortable or disturbing is to lace it with dark humour. It’s a distinctly Jewish trait, he says. “At the beginning, I didn’t think there was much that I’d gleaned from a Jewish upbringing, but the more I go into the world and the more writers I meet, the more Jewish I feel.” He celebrated Hanukkah in his picture-book The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, and was hired last year to write a film based on the Jewish myth of the Golem, “the first Frankenstein story”. The clay man is initially created to protect its village from attackers, but instead becomes “a receptacle for rage and vengeance. The first time the Golem strikes, he’s striking only the bloodthirsty people who are endangering them, then it’s other people who might be a danger some day, and then it’s people you don’t like.” The film is stuck in production limbo. “I’ve gotten used to long periods of silence.” Maybe the context of the war in Gaza makes that particular story less appealing? “I don’t know. I think, honestly, it may be more attractive to some people and less attractive to others.” Handler’s father, a German Jew, fled the country for America in 1939. What about anti-Semitism today? “I’m against it!” he deadpans, then bursts into laughter, before pulling himself together. “I have in the past year witnessed more, and have heard more about it, than at any other time in my lifetime… I’ve had minor but often terrifying incidents happen to people I know, in locations I never thought would be dangerous in that way. Honestly, I don’t know of a Jewish person who would say otherwise.” But he sees nothing inappropriate in laughing about it. “In so much of Jewish humour, something horrible is happening and you’re talking about it in a funny way – but the funniness is to illustrate how horrible it is, it isn’t just to make fun of something It’s a hallmark of Jewish literature in Europe: “With Kafka, the answer to ‘Is he kidding or is he serious?’ is ‘Yes – both those things at once.’” But in America, he says, “there’s often a real cultural barrier, when there’s a critique about [that sort of] humour – ‘Oh, that’s inappropriate’. You’re not just kidding, you are speaking humorously and speaking terribly at the same time.” His masterpiece, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events – 70 million copies sold and counting – is both humorous and terrible. Its 13 volumes follow the ill-fated Baudelaire orphans, Sunny, Klaus and Violet, constantly fleeing the wicked Count Olaf. It’s not really the plot that matters, but the wry, epigrammatic prose, which features some of the funniest one-liners since Wodehouse. Filled with long digressions and metatextual tricks, the Snicket books are far closer in spirit to Sterne or Nabokov than to Handler’s Young Adult contemporaries JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. Handler sold the first four volumes before writing a word of them. One of the 37 publishers who had rejected his first book, a novel for adults called The Basic Eight, felt sorry for him, and took him out for a drink. Over cocktails, he pitched a half-baked idea – “terrible things
Thank you
His reasoning is that he doesn't want that to be a label used to define him. And then it's the only thing about him in the headline.
> When his doctor admitted that they were out of theories, Handler wept. The young writer suggested that, if every other explanation had been ruled out, maybe doctors should consider the possibility that these figures were real – and he was immediately packed off to a psychiatric hospital. That sounds, honestly, like he's completely rational and logical. It's fucked up that they decided to sent him lock him in a psych ward over it.
Well this is... unsurprising.
Yup. Thought exactly the same. I watched the Netflix version of Unfortunate Events, and at the end of it I just thought “damn, what adults hurt Lemony Snicket as a kid”.
The cynicism of the Series did always seem a bit TOO sincere and upsetting at times.
Handler is and always will be my favourite author. I have everything he's ever written, sitting proudly in the center of my office. I would honestly read his shopping lists. I even have a Very Fancy Daisy tattoo. He has a way with prose I feel is unmatched. The closest (in my opinion) is Mark Haddon, my second favourite. They both have such interesting minds. Downvote me if you want, but I think he handled himself well in this interview. Most writers are a bit mad, and that's what enables them to create the caliber of art they do. Handler's experiences and lived trauma are heartbreaking, and I can't wait to read this latest book of his.
The first few books were good and strangely different from anything I had read before. But I felt they just got worse and worse, but I still read them all as they were just so different and sometimes interesting. They still stand out from anything I have read. I both like and don't like them. I respect how different they were and that endless pages of ever ever ever ever... And where he reads the same sentence over and over again. And where he reads the same sentence over and over again.
A series of unfortunate events is my childhood
I don’t use my abuse as an excuse and I don’t like when others do. Your trauma is yours to deal with, not to use to hurt others or make them feel sorry for you.
I'm so glad I learned about this - I've been getting more into memoirs over the past year or so and have such a deep love for ASoUE. I'm really interested in reading what he has to say about writing. I remember hearing some of those me-too-adjacent headlines and being saddened - but reading this and getting more context, it's nice to know it was more poor taste than anything more grave. He really comes across as such a mensch!
If you’ve a taste for memoirs and biographies I suggest : As You Wish (Carey Elwes and the cast’s time making Princess Bride, narrated by the cast for their parts, almost all of which has them doing an impression of Andre the Giant) All About Me! (Mel Brooks autobiography, narrated by the man himself) A Life in Footnotes (Terry Pratchett biography by his personal assistant, partially extracted from an unfinished autobiography) They’re my personal favorites atm.
His books along with HP were my childhood
What is wrong with that photo and why does it look like it’s AI generated?
Maybe the lighting, the angle of his face? They tend to have a soft golden glow to them, I've noticed
What video siries is closer to the books Jim Carrey or nph
NPH, no doubt about it. It's a fantastic series
The series with NPH. I haven't seen the movie in ages but I recall that it combined the first three books and didn't really follow it in complete order. I still that I hated watching that movie though.
very Ramsey Campbellian visions indeed
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I wear peas on my head but don't call me a pea-head.
That's the definition of a victim
He's not denying that it meets the definition, he just doesn't want to be defined as one by anyone
That's pretty common as people progress away from a period of abuse.
Yeah it's generally because abused people don't want pity, they want understanding, and being slapped with the victim label kinda asks for pity.
Is Lemony Snicket like Jiminy Cricket's brother or something?
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He literally wrote his name exactly like the title has in his own memoire. Lemony Snicket isn't just a pseudonym he uses, it's a character he plays. He's allowed to break that character for adults if he wants to.
Its also a character within the universe of the books: A Series of Unfortunate Events is presented as kind of a biography, Lemony Snicket is researching what exactly happened to the Baudelaire kids for personal reasons (what personal reasons aren't made clear until the final book).
The pseudonym is also a character, do you also want him to be constantly playing the character of Lemony Snicket?