Berkeley Talks: Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) on reading the authors you want to write like

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Hannah Weisman: … author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All the Dirty Parts and Bottle Grove. His new book on writing, And Then? And Then? What Else? has been published by Liveright W.W. Norton in 2024. As Lemony Snicket, he’s responsible for numerous books for children, including the 13-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events with four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award. Mr. Snicket’s first book for readers of all ages, Poison for Breakfast, was published by Liveright W.W. Norton in 2021.

Mr. Handler has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist, Maira Kalman, on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with musicians, Stephin Merritt, Benjamin Gibbard, Colin Meloy, and Torquil Campbell. He’s sold more than 70 million copies of his books, a number I can’t even wrap my head around, and has been translated into 40 different languages. His books have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, for which he was awarded both the Peabody and Writers Guild of America Awards.

He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator, Lisa Brown, to whom he’s married, and whom he’s collaborated on several books, and one son.

Daniel Handler is joined by Chanan Tigay in conversation today. Chanan Tigay is an award-winning writer and journalist who’s covered the Middle East, 9/11 and the United Nations for numerous magazines, newspapers and wires. Author of The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible published by Echo Harper Collins, Tigay recently was featured talent in the two-hour History Channel special, The God Code. Born in Jerusalem, Mr. Tigay holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, was an investigative reporting fellow at UC Berkeley, and is professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He recently spent a year at Harvard as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Please join me in welcoming Daniel Handler and Chanan Tigay to the Magnes.

Chanan Tigay: Hello. Thank you for that introduction. I loved having my bio read after Daniel Handler’s. Even my mother would have to admit, but it’s not quite …

Daniel Handler: Well, that’s more than my mother would admit …

Chanan Tigay: Maybe they can talk. Welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. It’s very nice to see everyone here. So many friendly faces in the audience. I would be remiss, I’m going to say this at the beginning so I don’t forget. Please, if you are not yet signed up for the J.’s newsletter, you must sign up for it at jweekly.com, get all sorts of wonderful news about the Bay Area Jewish community every day in your inbox. With that said, I don’t have a question about that.

Daniel Handler: OK. I don’t have anything to add to that either.

Chanan Tigay: Good. Thank you.

Daniel Handler: Yeah, I mean, whose inbox could not use more emails?

Chanan Tigay: Exactly. Correct.

Daniel Handler: Always so lonely when you refresh, and just a couple of petitions to sign.

Chanan Tigay: I’m glad we’ve cleared that up early in the discussion.

We heard your latest book mentioned, And then? And then? What else?, which is essentially a memoir about your relationship with books. So essentially what it really is is a book about books, and this strikes me as, if not uniquely Jewish, then certainly quintessentially Jewish.

Daniel Handler: Yeah, it’s pretty Jewish.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah. Can you talk about how you imagine being a Jew has impacted you both as a writer and a human being?

Daniel Handler: A lot. Next question. No …

Chanan Tigay: Moving on.

Daniel Handler: Yeah. I grew up here in the Bay Area in San Francisco, which is a suburb of Berkeley over to the west. And I grew up with a large Jewish family who we were all very close emotionally, but not close on the family tree. In fact, it was many years before I learned this as a child, and that was because we were the ones who got out. And that, I think, was an enormous shaping of my own worldview. Not only the specificity of Jewish culture, but I think just kind of narratively that the stories that were told around the table when I was growing up were about who made it and who didn’t make it, and like all stories of such, it’s not the story of a meritocracy, which is often the temptation of, certainly, of children’s literature. So it is not that the smartest people or the prettiest people or the kindest people or the cleverest people made it. It was just who made it.

And I think that made the stories scary and more exciting. And so, I think to be armed with that knowledge early feels very Jewish, to me. And I think, then, if you have a Jewish education, you start hearing stories that our people have told for longer than my individual family were telling it. And those are similarly full with the chaos of, “Well, you don’t really know what happened. That was sure a close call,” or, “That didn’t work out at all.” That was what I gained from it the most, was that you are not rewarded for good behavior. That always feels gentile, to me. It isn’t necessarily, but I think that was what I learned, was the chaos of life and kind of refutation of easy narrative.

Chanan Tigay: And you speak in the book about jaunts to the library with your father, who did survive. And you say the books he would take out from the library were of two genres, one was spy novels, and the other was, I guess, nonfiction about the Holocaust. And that seems to be two different purposes for literature. One is escapism, the spy novels, and the other is something else. Did that influence your approach to understanding what the purpose of writing is?

Daniel Handler: Oh, gosh. Well, first let’s figure out the purpose of writing, and then I could figure out whether that’s where I learned it. No, I think I watched my father going over something that was difficult to grasp, and I actually think, in his mind, the spy novels were in fact not necessarily escapism, although I think he relaxed with them, but I think it was part of the chewing over of international intrigue and breathtaking escape. I think that was all part of it.

But I think what I learned the most from going to the library with my father all the time was that going to the library, checking out books, and having books near you was just the way one lived. And so, I brought a book with me here. I don’t anticipate getting a lot of reading, though, on it, but I always have one. Why wouldn’t you have a book nearby?

Actually, I almost brought two books because I’m almost done with this book. So I had the feeling of, what if I finish this book, and then I don’t have a book with me at the book place where I’m going? What am I going to do then? And so, I camped out in Hannah Weisman’s office for a few minutes before this began, which of course is lined with books. And so, I got even less reading done than I might’ve because I was looking at the lines of books and figuring out what might be in such an office. So I think that’s what I learned most from the library was what a necessity it is, alongside what a luxury is.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah, and it’s clear from what you just said and everything that you write in the book that you’ve had a deep and intimate relationship with books from the time you were a very young child. And it seems to me like being a writer, for you, is almost a very natural extension of that reading. And I’m wondering if being a writer, and a very successful one at that, is what you imagined it would be when you thought about it as a young person?

Daniel Handler: Oh, I mean, what I wanted to be as a young person was part of the excitement of reading. I wanted to make up stories, I wanted to be a writer, but I think part of that was just to be kind of in that game, and my parents were loving and supportive of me, certainly, but they made it clear that you probably were not going to get to make a living as a writer. That’s not usually how it works out.

But being around books, they said, “Oh, well, there are lots of people who think that they’re going to be a big writer, and then they end up being around books, they’d be teaching, it can be doing all these things.” So they kind of helped me understand that. But, for me, that was always kind of part of the way was that I wanted to be near literature, that I wanted to be in the stuff of it. And that’s the most fulfilling part of what I do.

And when I talk with other writers, I think, predictably, writers who might be lost in one way or another with the frustration of making a living, I always try to say, “You’re not going to find your solace by your career going well.” There’s fun stuff that happens if your career goes well, but it’s full of anxiety and work, like anyone’s career. And then, also, this is kind of as glamorous as it gets. If you’re a successful writer, it means you get to go into a room where other nerdy people who can barely leave the house because they want to read come to listen to you. This is the apex of being a successful writer. There’s not a champagne room you get to go to. This is it.

And so, if you can’t be sustained by literary conversation and reading, you should get out of it because this is all we got. And so, I think that was always on my mind, was how do I get to be a part of it? And I think when you’re young, which is where the memoir starts, unsurprisingly, you have that very permeable membrane, if you are loving a book. You were reading a novel probably when you were young, and you think, “What if I were the hero of that book, or if the hero had a friend? And that’s sort of me.” And you might kind of walk around, or when you take a bath, or go to school with this thought, this kind of story going on in your head that you keep changing that’s taken from books that you read and nudged into place by something you saw on television, or something like that, that you have that feeling. I think that’s a very beautiful feeling, and it gets harder to chase down when you’re an adult because you have to do all these things.

To me, that’s really the deep joy of literature. And this book began because Norton was doing a new translation of Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, and they asked if I would write something about it. And so, I wrote about going to the library with my father when I was 12, and that I saw a book called The Flowers of Evil. And I thought, “That sounds good.” And I took it home. I didn’t even know why would I open it. It was obviously a horror novel about evil flowers. Who doesn’t want to see that? So I took it home, and I opened it up and it was full of the strange, lonely, desperate poetry of Baudelaire and about loose women and drugs and liquor and feeling lonely. And that last one was the only one that I’d experienced. And the book kind of unnerved me and frightened me. I took it back to the library, I went back, and I got it out, and I participated like that.

But, I mean, one of the puzzles when I think of myself at that age was that a puzzle, for me, about The Flowers of Evil was that after being in English, and very strange for a while, just switched to French, which I could not read. And I found that very irritating from an author that he would do that. Well, spoiler alert, it’s a translation from the French, and that’s clearly marked in the edition. I own the edition that I got now out of the library. And it’s not like they neglected to mention that, but I was that young reader who every page that isn’t the book is like, “Skip the introduction. What’s that?” I didn’t read the thing that said, “And the original poems are in French,” in the back.

And just to think of my own mind trying to grasp what these poems were saying, completely inappropriate poems, and then when I didn’t even have the sense to know what suddenly switching into French might mean, and that kind of space feels part of the liminal space that we’re talking about with literature. And, for me, that’s the really attractive part. That’s the magic part.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah. You said something interesting about when you’re talking to writers who are sort of lost in one way or another, in the book …

Daniel Handler: Which is all of them, by the way. I just want to make that clear.

Chanan Tigay: Which is right, which is, say, talking to writers. You talk in the book about a college professor and her husband who really were not only wonderful teachers, but it seems to me amazing mentors to you as a young writer. And I wonder if you can talk for a minute about mentorship in the arts. It sounds like that experience you had is something you try to bring to your interactions with other writers. Can you talk about the value for you coming up as a writer, and then how you try to pave forward?

Daniel Handler: Yeah. I mean, when I got to college, I knew I wanted to be a writer. There was a famous writer who was teaching a class. You had to submit work to get into it, and have an interview with her. So I submitted some work. I’d written a couple of stories and some poems, and I met with her. She was very mean to me. She said that my credentials were very unimpressive, which was embarrassing, but kind of the older I get, the more I think, “I was 18.” I don’t know. The New Yorker hadn’t come knocking on my door yet. And I don’t know what kind of credentials other 18-year-olds were submitting to her, but from her manner, I would guess she was mean to everyone. And then, she said, “I’ll let you in the class, and I’m going to assign you a poem to memorize. And then, on the first day of class, we’re going to meet in a field, and we’re all going to recite these poems.”

And I thought, I guess I didn’t want to be a writer. I didn’t know you had to do that. I thought the reason to memorize a poem would be obviously to seduce women. That’s the only reasonable reason that you would memorize a poem. And so, I didn’t take her class. Got an enemy for life. She’s still mad at me.

And I met another writer who I’d never heard of. Her name is Kit Reed. She’s no longer with us. And she was a huge mentor to me. And her writing class was: You turned in 10 pages a week, and you met in her kitchen alone with her for 15 minutes, then she talked with you. And that sounded good to me. I wanted to write. I didn’t want to do whatever you do in a field with a bunch of other students reciting words, that didn’t sound fun to me.

I was keen enough to take the last time slot. So sometimes I got invited to dinner. It’s hard to go imagine now, but I was very skinny then, and I think was the subject of concern that maybe I should stay for dinner.

But I was welcomed into this world of her and her husband, who was an American studies professor. He taught film and literature, and they just sat around talking and talking about things that they liked, and talking about how things like that were made. And many former students paraded through their things, some of whom were very visible artists, some of whom were … I would say artistically successful, but invisible to the general world. And they were all complaining, because they were artists. That’s how that works. That was really magic to be part of a fellowship of making things that was unconcerned with that kind of mythology of memorizing a home to stand in a field, and was more interested in, “Let’s all work and see what is done.”

And her attention to my own work was individual. So she would say, “It looks like you’re trying to do this. How much Muriel Spark have you read?” That was often what she would say is, “How much have you done this,” instead of, “I bet you’ve never done it.” And so, one of the early things, she said, “Why don’t you read a couple of Muriel Spark novels? And by next week, we’ll come back we’ll talk to them.”

And I went to the library and I ran into another student and I said, “Oh, I hope we’re not both going to reach for the same Muriel Spark,” but he had been recommended something else, because that’s how she worked, was that she tried to figure out what books might help the individual. I mean, I can’t really pretend to be a mentor. I don’t work in an academic setting, and so I don’t have undergraduates coming to find me.

I don’t know how that would work, be a little creepy, but, I mean, when I try to find fellowship with other writers and recommend if somebody’s stuck on something, but will try to think of together who does it well, which I think is part of the glory of participating in a literary tradition, is that you are not the first one to do anything. Lots and lots of people have done it before, and it’s fun to be reminded of that constantly, and to go back and find those books.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah, and I think that message comes through strongly in the book, which is that if you want to be a good writer, you first got to be a good reader. And I appreciate that very much. And I think, among other things, the book seems, to me, to be an argument in favor of ennui, which you describe in the book as a fancy French way of saying bored, or maybe being bored. And I’m curious, in a day and age where the minute anyone feels remotely bored, pull out their phone, pull out their iPad, you don’t have to ever be bored for a second. What is the beneficial about ennui, about being bored?

Daniel Handler: Well, I think when your mind has nothing right on a plate to chew on, then it can wander a little bit and find things that you didn’t know, and it will return to other things that you’ve forgotten, or that have been on your mind anyway. But yeah, that just feels like the best.

A couple nights ago, I had dinner with a friend of mine who has small children, and somebody gave them a video game … it was the first video game console in the household. So they made up a rule that you can only use it on Saturday as … He’s not Jewish. He’s OK, though. And he just said, “Yeah, on the day when they don’t use it, I see my children making a cardboard box into a robot, and going outside and finding these things, doing kind of the stuff of imagination, but when they have this console, then they’re just kind of shooting aliens and leaping over cars all the time.”

Everybody has their mindless entertainment from time to time. So I don’t want to sound super conservative on that front. I like being bored. I like that feeling. Tomorrow I’m going to be on a plane. That’ll be perfect, be really boring.

Chanan Tigay: The arts are a form of expression, and you are an artist in multiple genres. When you read your bio, you write in multiple genres, first of all, impressive enough. But also, you’re a musician, a playwright, a screenwriter, and I’m curious if there are things you can express in one genre that you can’t express in another. Are there things you can do in one genre that you can’t do in others? I guess the question is, why tell one story as a book, and one as a play, and one in the form of a song?

Daniel Handler: I mean, the short answer is, because I get interested in that. I just think, “Oh, this will be fun. Let’s do this.” The thing that has caused me, I would say, the most trouble in my professional life is that I say to myself, “How hard could it be?” It’s pretty hard. That’s usually the answer.

But yeah, I think prose is what I make the most. I think it’s what comes most naturally to me, and it’s necessarily isolating. I have a couple writer friends, and we will work together, parallel play. We’ll sit at a table in a cafe or in a library, and we’re all working on our things. And I might do this for 10 days in a row with a friend of mine and not know anything about what’s going on in their life because we are hardly having a conversation. And with all those other art forms, you get people in right away. That’s kind of the only way to do it.

And I’m working on a theater piece now. That’s why I will get on a plane tomorrow, and I’ll see some actors. And then, there’s this kind of magical headache of working with actors on a theater thing where you have to get them to do it well enough to learn that it’s your fault that it’s not working. Because at first, you’re like, “Ugh, don’t say it like that. Say it in these magic ways,” and then they say it, and you’re like, “It’s my fault, then. Thanks for coming, actors.” It’s a whole different part of the brain. It’s very magical.

The music that I play, I play in the service of … I work for other people who are really doing the real music. And I think that’s great, too, because I get to not be in charge, because most of my professional life, I’m the guy. And so, then it’s kind of nice to just have to wait my turn, and do my little thing, and get it edited out and 9 times out of 10, turns out we didn’t need Daniel Handler. It’s a nice feeling.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah. You talked about parallel play. My wife is a fiction writer. We work near each other all the time and shout out our brilliant lines as we’re writing them. You and your wife actually work together on a number of projects, and I’m curious what that’s like.

Daniel Handler: Well, I love my wife very much, so that works out pretty well. Mostly, what we’ve worked on together are picture books. It is a little bit of a similar process where I write a manuscript that gets her to draw the things that are in the manuscript so that they don’t have to be words in the manuscript. So as the manuscript gets shorter and shorter, I know we’re working well. Yeah.

But, I mean, I would say it feels a little parallel play, too, because she goes to her studio and she comes back. She is a brutally honest person in general, and so she’s great to give a first draft to because she will not sugarcoat her opinion. And so, that works pretty well in a collaboration, too. You have to get to a point where you can be that way with someone. You can’t do it with people right away, but we’ve been together for a thousand years now.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah, and that kind of feedback is extremely valuable.

Daniel Handler: Yeah.

Chanan Tigay: In the book, you say that loneliness is at the heart of literature, and I found that arresting because I always thought it was the opposite, which is that literature was supposed to make you feel less alone. And maybe these are really the same thing, or two sides of the same coin. But I’m wondering if you can explain what you mean by loneliness being at the heart of literature.

Daniel Handler: Well, I think it’s made in isolation. I think anyone here who is a writer knows that feeling of, there’s something you want to get down on paper, and no one else cares about it as much as you do, and never will. And so, you make your thing, and you have this corner of your mind where you’re always thinking about it, to some extent. It’s hardly a thought you can share often until it’s really down on paper. And then, I think, for the most part, that’s how reading works.

Not when you’re small. Maybe when someone’s reading to you and you have those beautiful nights in the company of another person reading. But, I mean, for the most part, if you’re reading at whatever pace you want, whatever you want, and you’re doing it alone. Even if you’re in a book club or something, the act of appreciating it is alone. And I think that’s lonely.

But, I mean, I think lonely has a tincture of being bad. I think it’s good for you to be lonely. We’re surrounded by people all the time. So I think you don’t want to be lonely all the time, but I think you want to be lonely sometimes. And I think literature offers that.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah. You speak in the book about creating our own canon. So there’s a traditional canon. There’s Moby Dick and Shakespeare and all that.

Daniel Handler: I’ve heard of those guys.

Chanan Tigay: Did they sell 70 million copies in their books?

Daniel Handler: That’s for sure how to line up the successful art is in copies sold.

Chanan Tigay: Yeah, but when you suggest that we create our own canon, you don’t necessarily mean a list of books that are the most significant to us, but actually the moments in books, turns of phrase and plot twists that are, in some ways, significant. And I’m wondering if you could take us through a bit of your own canon, in that regard, the moments and turns of phrase and plot twists in books, specific books that have been most impactful to you as a writer.

Daniel Handler: I mean, it’s a long question, but … I mean, a long answer to the question. But it was a long question. I mean, I think that there’s such a mythology that’s placed on top of literature that you are tempted to forget that the heart of it is enthusiasm. What you like is what you like, and that the books, the reason why everyone is here in a room talking about books is because, at some point, you were handed a book that you really loved, and that made you read another one, and you made read another one, and made you read another one, and before you knew it, you were lost.

And I think that for writers, I try to encourage them to seek out what they’re enthused by. And of course, part of it is that you have to read everything because you don’t know what you’re enthused by, but when you’ve found things that you’re enthused by, to then when you’re a writer, I don’t think you have to do this if you’re not a writer, you figure out what it is that you really, really like. What is that?

Instead of just, “Gosh darn it, Toni Morrison is sure a great writer,” that you think, “What is it about Beloved that I return to that I think about all the time?” Which is one of the magic things about it being books, as opposed to other collaborative art forms where the inspiration can be hard to pinpoint. It’s all there on paper. So then, you can go back and find that scene, and look at it, and study it for what it is that you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to take from it.

And I think that that’s what Kit Reed really taught me to do: “Let’s read some of Muriel’s book and figure out how that’s paced, and how that might help you, helplessly.” I think about it because I just went by it, but close to my house in San Francisco is what used to be a hospital. It’s now condos, like everything else in San Francisco, but it is a hospital that, among other things, is the site of the movie Vertigo. Part of Vertigo was filmed at the hospital.

So I love to go by it and think about it. And there’s a scene where poor Jimmy Stewart has been through the ringer, and so he’s taken some time at a mental hospital, and his long-suffering girlfriend, Barbara Bel Geddes, who knows deep in her heart that her boyfriend loves Kim Novak more, gives up on him. She’s playing Mozart for him. He is in a wheelchair and he looks haggard, and she walks down the hallway, this hallway that I drive by all the time, and you never see her again in a movie.

That scene always struck me, but I didn’t remember that you never saw her again in a movie until I was watching it for the purpose of waiting for that scene. And then, I thought, “Oh, that’s so funny.” She’s kind of a love interest for half the movie, and then just when things have gotten too crazy, she walks out of the movie. She leaves them in an asylum, and then the movie does get even crazier.

And my second novel Watch Your Mouth has two parts. And I remember thinking, “I want that thing in that movie to feel at the end of the first part of my novel, to have that feeling of like, OK, some things are gone. What in the world can happen in the second half of this story?”

And that was exciting to me, and I lifted that from that scene in Vertigo, and no one in a million years would think that, there’s nothing in the novel that reflects that plot or anything like that, but that was what it did for me. And so, in writing that novel, I would say that scene in Vertigo was part of my personal canon, but now, that was many years ago. I’ve worked on gazillion other things since. But when I’m working on something, I try to find the things. I literally put them on my desk, if I can, the books and things that are most interesting to me so I can keep thinking, “Oh, yes, that’s what I’m doing. This is what I’m taking from …”

Chanan Tigay: I love hearing you break it down that way. I’ve so often heard stuff like, “Oh, Hemingway would see a Picasso painting, and his short story was inspired by the painting,” and I never could make a one-to-one kind of relationship between …

Daniel Handler: Yeah, well, I mean, literature has placed this irritating mythology on itself. You can see the horrible biopic in which Hemingway would stare at the Picasso painting. “Oh, yes.” And then a quick cut to crumple, crumple, crumple, throw. I’m going to take this again. “No, you’re such a writer. Maybe I’ll lean out of the window and smoke and look at the landscape.” And then you try that when you’re 22 and it’s pretty, but you don’t get anything done. You don’t get any writing done. You got to do it another way. That’s not …

Chanan Tigay: But one of the things I loved in the book is, actually, the same kind of interpretation that you just gave to Vertigo, you do to children’s books that you read as a young person, which you enjoyed and were meaningful to you, but you couldn’t put words at that point to the way the cadences are happening in the sentences, the use of language particular ways. But you really, then, with your adult writerly eye go back and break down those scenes in these kids’ books that were really meaningful to you. And I wonder if doing that translates into your own writing books for children.

Daniel Handler: Yeah, I think so. I mean, when I first started writing for children, I didn’t have any children, and I wasn’t a child, and I didn’t know any children socially, didn’t go out drinking with a bunch of children, contrary to some people’s suspicions. But it was easy to find the books that I loved. I went to the library. In fact, I was embarrassed to be a grown man in the children’s section of the library. It was at the Epiphany Branch. I was living in New York, then it was at the Epiphany Branch. It seemed magical.

And I would go there, and I remember this one woman librarian said to me, “Oh, I always see you here in the children’s section. Are you a teacher?” And I thought, that’s probably a very good reason to be in there, so I’m going to say yes. And then, with no foresight, without realizing that I was going to come back there again and again and again.

So I was eventually going to have to make up a school that I taught at, and to tell a few anecdotes about imaginary children. And then, she got very excited when I finally thought, “Oh, I’ll take a shortcut back to the truth.” So I said, “Hey, I sold my novel. I’m not working as a teacher anymore.” And she said, “We should have a party for you when the novel is published.” And I said, “Oh, thank you.” And then, I avoided her for a long time.

So she never had a party, because what I thought of is that my friends would go and she would say, “I never saw a teacher with more dedication.” And they would say, “Teacher? That guy’s not a teacher.” And it was all because I was self-conscious about finding those books. But yes, I went back to them and I thought, “What did I love about The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily? What is it about Zilpha Keatley Snyder that I think is interesting? What is the pace of this?”

I remember I read these Italo Calvino Italian folk tales when I was young. What was appealing about that? Then to just try to think about that. And I think that that was a really wonderful way to approach children’s literature, for me, and that children’s literature, in the way that literature has this layer of annoying mythology on top of it, children’s literature has this layer of annoying pedagogy on top of it. So if I had gone to a children’s publisher and said, “Boy, I’d like to write for children. Teach me how,” they would say, “Well, remember, the important thing is that we want to teach children to end all of the world’s major problems. So write a book that ends one of those problems. Fix the environment in a book. Kids love that,” and they don’t.

Chanan Tigay: My writing students often ask me if they need to go live in New York City when they graduate, and I know you’ve lived in New York. I guess it was a while back, I take it, and here, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the literary community here in the Bay Area. What’s interesting and unique about it?

Daniel Handler: Oh, I like it here better. I mean, I like it here better, I think, in all ways, really. I wasn’t not made for New York City, but … How can I describe it? I guess, as a parallel, my son attended the School of the Arts in San Francisco for high school, and I knew some people who had their children in the School of the Arts in LA and the School of the Arts in New York.

Now, New York and LA are obviously big places where entertainment can be made. So if your child is an actor in the School of the Arts in New York, when they perform in something, people associated with the industry looking for 17-year-olds to put on TV will come and see those performances. And LA, if they’re making a movie, the same thing. In San Francisco, there’s not the center of that industry. And so, the School of the Arts didn’t have that “Maybe you’re about to be discovered and become a rock star” in any of its programming.

And so, that meant that I felt like the creativity just felt more kind of intuitive and led by imagination and impulse, rather than kind of a professional urge. And I feel similarly that the writing community here … I mean, I’m friends with all types of writers. I bump into all types of writers, and it doesn’t feel … there’s no competition. I mean, there is competition, but that’s not what the stuff is made of. And it is because we all were not right where publishing is. So nobody is saying, “Oh, you’re dating that woman who works at the agency. Well, maybe that’ll help me.” You don’t have that feeling. So it feels, to me … but more interesting, more fun.

Chanan Tigay: You hear a lot of writers talk about writing, and it really feels like they hate actually writing, like you’re pulling teeth and painful all the time. One gets the sense reading your books that you actually enjoy it. Is that true?

Daniel Handler: I do. Yeah. Well, Kit Reed, my mentor when I was finishing college, I said to her, “I want you to tell me if I’m good enough to do this.” And she said, “That’s a really stupid question.” She said, “What you need to do is go figure out if that’s what you enjoy doing.” And so, rather than say, “Try to go to an MFA program or something,” she said, “Try to get a job where you have enough time and energy to write every day.” And so, I did. I found an office job, and I did it badly, so I had lots of energy and time. I worked answering phones at the computer science department of the City College of San Francisco. And here’s a crazy coincidence. Guess who was a dean there? My mother. (Audience laughs) It’s crazy. She somehow rode on my coattails and became a dean while I was a bad employee answering phones. It’s crazy.

But it was a halftime job, so they didn’t have to give us health insurance. And I went home to my stupid apartment every afternoon, and I wrote, and I really, really loved it. That’s what I liked to do, was to write all day long. And I was very frustrated when Kit gave me that advice, because first of all, I had that kind of anxiety that you get when you graduate from a school, and you think, “Could someone tell me my future, please?” And they can’t.

But also, it was a reminder that if you want to be a writer, that’s the relationship you can have, and that’s the delight that you can have. There’s no, the careerist stuff will happen or it won’t, or it’ll ebb and flow, and people have loved me and hated me over the years, but it’s doing the work that is most exciting to me. So yeah, I really, really like it.

Chanan Tigay: This question, it makes sense to me, but maybe it won’t make sense to you. Obviously, you are Daniel Handler. You are also Lemony Snicket. Is it more fun to write as one or the other?

Daniel Handler: No, it’s all fun. It’s a good time. I have bad days of it, obviously, and there’s frustrations that come with working on the writing, but … I mean, I’ve had jobs, and I’ve done this. This is better, and I really enjoy doing it. Yeah.

Chanan Tigay: One aspect of that you didn’t seem to enjoy doing, having read the book, is working in Hollywood. There’s a fabulous story where after nine drafts of a screenplay of your own work, you’re called in to, I guess, fix it, and it doesn’t quite work out as you planned. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Daniel Handler: Yeah. Well, I mean, anyone who’s ever heard the writer worked in Hollywood, I don’t know a writer who’s had a good time in Hollywood. But yeah, I wrote nine drafts of the screenplay for the Lemony Snicket movie, and then there was a big … The producer quit or the director was fired, blah, blah, blah. And I said, “I don’t know if I’m up for doing another draft of this. I don’t think I can rewrite it again.” And they said, “That’s so funny. We thought the same thing. We don’t think you can, too. Get out of here.” And I was flown down to LA to have that conversation. It took eight minutes.

And I was like, “Well, what? OK.” So I got back in the car, and it took me to the Burbank Airport. People have been to the Burbank Airport. It’s kind of the size of this room, and I didn’t really … So I went to the bar of the Burbank Airport, and I said, “I was just fired from Paramount Pictures. I’m buying everybody here a drink.” It was three people. But one of the three people said, “I was fired from Paramount Pictures a few years ago.” And we were like, “Oh.”

So then, he bought the next round. The delight of the movies is the danger of the business. Movies are fantastic. They’re projected up on the wall. There’s the most beautiful people in the world. There’s startling things brought to fruition, and it costs a whole lot of money. If you write down the sentence, an acrobat is carried off by hyenas. That doesn’t cost anybody anything, but we’re like, “This is what’s happening in the movie, and wouldn’t that be great?”

They have to make all that happen, and it costs a whole lot of money. And the people who are in charge of that money act like you would if someone said, “Will you take this bag of $300 million and walk downtown with it?” You wouldn’t stop at a friend’s house and chat it up. You would go immediately because you would be terrified of having that money taken from you.

And that, they’re all terrified all the time, and so they don’t know what to do. So they panicked a lot. And so, yes, then they called me back, and they said, “There are these holes in the script that the other guy made,” and I was like, “Yeah, well, you know, maybe you shouldn’t have fired me.” They were mean to me then, too. They’re just mean. Yeah, they’re scared. Yeah, because it’s money. It’s a whole lot of money to make a movie.

And so, everyone’s terrified of it. And everyone who works on the creative side is unhappy about that, and everybody who works on the other side is unhappy about that. But for any circumstances in which one is unhappy, it doesn’t seem to be getting fixed anytime soon.

Chanan Tigay: Would you, or have you … do it again?

Daniel Handler: Obviously. Yeah. It’s fun, also. And it’s fun when you’re used to working in isolation to work and collaboration, that part’s fun. And they’ll pay you. Yeah, the Writers’ Guild health insurance is really great. I’ve often just thought if we ever had real universal healthcare in this country, it will be really interesting to see what happens to writing in television and film, is because a lot of people do it for the health insurance. And if they didn’t do it for the health insurance, they wouldn’t do it. And so, it’s a fascinating aspect of Hollywood history.

Chanan Tigay: So I’d like to open the floor to a few questions from the audience … We have a microphone to go around. Is it …

Audience 1: [I was listening to an] interview with Maggie Smith on the way here from San Francisco. She was saying that her favorite part of writing is revision, and I wanted to ask you what your favorite part of writing is.

Daniel Handler: Oh. Revision is pretty fun. One of the things that feels like a mad luxury in my life is, when I have a horrible first draft, I get it printed and bound at Kinko’s, usually, and then I get to walk around with it, but then I open it. It’s embarrassing because it’s really awful. But that part’s fun. I don’t know. But the first draft part’s fun, too. I do really enjoy it. The writer Michelle Tea says that writing is like kindergarten. You have to make a mess, and then you have to clean up, and that most people are good at one part of it. Cleaning up comes more naturally, to me. Boy, would my wife find that hilarious that I said that, but she’s at another Jewish event, so no one’s going to talk.

But I think I’ve been getting better at making a mess first. The first draft is fun. It feels like stone soup. You’re like, “Let’s just put all of it in it. That’s great.” You know, I don’t know. The dialogue will just go on for 30 pages, and then you print it, and you’re like, “All right, not 30. Let’s get it down here.” Yeah, I think part. Yeah, I like all of it.

Chanan Tigay: Yes.

Audience 2: Hi. You probably have answered this question many, many times, and probably people have heard the answer, but I’m just still wondering, how did you come up with that great name of the Lemony Snicket?

Daniel Handler: So great you can’t say it out loud. Yeah, that’s very Jewish, too. You know who’s great, but whose name we will never say? And the comparison ends there, I want to add. How did I? I was at that terrible office job, and I was researching my first novel, which is called The Basic Eight. It’s about a girl in high school who has a crush on a boy, and he is not interested in her. And so, she bludgeons him to death with a croquet mallet. It’s a comedy.

And after the murder, in part of the novel, the murder is kind of made hay with by media and cultural figures as what happens. And I wanted to steal from that kind of rhetoric. So I was calling, at my office job, various right-wing organizations, long distance, I might add, because I figured my job was a grant for the City of San Francisco, which is not how the City of San Francisco felt about it, as it turned out. But I would call them, right-wing organizations, and I would ask them to mail me their materials so that I could mock them in my novel.

And I was on the phone with a woman and she said, “Of course I will mail you our stupid materials. What is your name?” And I thought, “Don’t give them your name.” And so, I just said something else that wasn’t my name, which was the phrase Lemony Snicket.

And then, there was a pause on the phone. And during the pause, I thought, “All I had to do was say something that wasn’t my name. That was the whole parlor game. And I said this. No one is that dumb to think that that is a real name.” And then, the woman from the right-wing organization said, “Is that spelled how it sounds?” And I said, “Yes.” And then, I said, “Read that back to me,” because I had no idea how it would be spelled.”

Yeah, so I guess the answer is, I don’t know. I panicked, and I said something, and then I went with it for many volumes of children’s books.

Audience 3: Hi.

Daniel Handler: Hi. 

Audience 3: Hi. Did you have an agent at the beginning? And do you have the same agent, and do they follow you around to represent you?

Daniel Handler: I love the fantasy that my agent would follow me around. She’s right here. Some little person. Yes, I’ve only had one literary agent so far in my life, Charlotte Sheedy. She’s terrific. And I do remember that she called me at that office job, and said that she would represent me. It took many years to sell my first book. It took almost six years to sell my first book, and it sold for the least amount of money she had ever negotiated for [inaudible]. I mean, she’s a wonderful agent, and we’ve been together for a long time. And obviously things have gone well for both of us, and we crack each other up, and we delight in each other’s company, so that’s nice. But she didn’t follow me around.

What can I say about her? I mean, I didn’t know how anything worked, really. She represented a book by the father of someone I went to high school with, is how I came to write to her. But I think when she called me on that office, we cracked each other up. And I think that was the beginning of our professional relationship. Yeah, it’s been pretty great.

Chanan Tigay: Last question.

Daniel Handler: Oh, this is the last question? OK. Because it better sum up the whole festival. I didn’t realize I was a headliner. So this was like, you have to now bring a pit of Jewish wisdom in literary culture and swirling stew that everyone will leave inspired. It’s like, I can’t wait until next year’s festival.

Audience 4: I wanted to ask you about your writing and collaboration on the New American Haggadah. So it is a Jewish question.

Daniel Handler: Oh yeah, that is pretty Jewish. It doesn’t get much more Jewish than the Haggadah. Yeah. So for people who don’t know, it’s called the New American Haggadah. It came out a few years ago. The translation of the text was by Nathan Englander, a great Jewish novelist. And the whole thing was kind of shepherded by Jonathan Safran Foer, another Jewish novelist.

And originally, there was a gazillion people participating, that was Jonathan’s first draft. And so, he asked all of these writers to write things about different moments in the story and the Seder, and then that apparently … I never saw those pieces, so I don’t know what it looked like, but it didn’t look like that. And then, it kind of got whittled down to, “We should have someone talk about politics.” Jeffrey Goldberg talks about the politics of it on purpose. It wasn’t that he was included in a group chat by accident. Thank you. Thank you very much. There was a rabbi who gave a spiritual thing, and they asked me to do the part for young people, which was fun.

And the whole thing was, and my section in particular was reviewed furiously, with furious reach in a prominent Jewish publication, which just, perfect, that’s what you want. You’re supposed to stay up all night arguing. Yeah, it was fun. It was a good time.

The translation, I gather, is controversial, but my Hebrew, though, come by honestly at the [inaudible] Hebrew School is not up to the task of judging the individual translations of Haggadahs. Over the years, I seem to have had other things to do during that time, but I’m glad all of you, who obviously have further things to do during this time, came here to the Jewish festivals so that we may speak of books, as our people have done for generations. Thanks. 

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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