“This book is about bewilderment,” Lemony Snicket writes in the first page of “Poison for Breakfast,” his new, stand-alone adventure to be published Aug. 17. The slim volume, geared for young readers and adults alike, offers a dive into creativity, philosophy, the writing life and life – and death – in general. (And there might or might not be a crime in it.)
What it is not is another installment of Snicket’s beloved children’s novels, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” about the tragic Baudelaire orphans that has so far been translated into more than 40 languages and spawned a television series on Netflix, a feature film and a merchandising empire. Nor is it part of the prequel to that series, “All the Wrong Questions.”
And it is most certainly not one of the novels by the writer Daniel Handler (which include “Why We Broke Up” and “We Are Pirates”), even though Handler is Snicket and Snicket is Handler. Although Snicket is not married to book illustrator Lisa Brown and does not have a son named Otto, which Handler is and does.
Bewildered yet? Good. That’s just where you should be, according to Handler. At least I think that’s what he is saying. Here’s a telephone conversation with the author (only slightly edited for clarity). Judge for yourself.
Hello, can I speak to Daniel? I mean Mr. Handler –
Hello, hi. It’s Daniel.
Hey, wow. I was expecting some fancy assistant to answer and an awkward process of them getting you connected. But you just picked up.
Yeah, that’s right. You’ve reached me directly in my hovercraft.
Just like Tony Stark! Listen, I have to start this conversation by admitting something very personal. I have a son who’s 12 years old. He was not at all turned on by school, I mean not interested in anything at all, until fifth grade, when his language arts teacher introduced him to “The Reptile Room,” his first Lemony Snicket book. It totally flipped the switch for my son in terms of school, and turned him on to reading.
Well, that is so lovely to hear. I think I have to credit the teacher more than I get to credit me, but I’m glad that your son found a way in.
He’s read all of “The Unfortunate Events” series, saw the movie and watched the show on Netflix. When I told him I was talking to you today, he begged me to stay home from school so he could eavesdrop.
[Laughs] I’m not sure that’s a sign of academic success, but I’ll take it.
Yeah, I don’t know that he’s going to be an academic wunderkind, but because of your stories he’s definitely a reader, so thank you.
Well, you’re quite welcome. That’s very sweet of you to tell me.
Actually, his teacher, Miss Van Hoogmeod – who sounds like a character in one of your books – said that she’s found that a lot of neurodivergent children — my son has an ADHD diagnosis – really resonate with your books. Has anyone told you that?
They have, yeah. I have a son and I feel like I have a little bit of a window, retroactively, into what that is. It was not something that I had any understanding of when I was writing the books.
I was going to say, didn’t your son come along after you had started the series?
Way, way, way after, and he was very scared of the books for a long time. And I think also he just felt, you know, he just felt a little awkward about it. But then he actually really loved the other series, “All the Wrong Questions,” and that led him back to “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
I think he’s one of the few people who went that way. But, I think that a narrator kind of stopping and explaining things is often a real kind of guardrail for people who are challenged by kind of ordinary linear storytelling.
It’s interesting because the interruptions and explanations in Lemony Snicket books are very unreliable, but I think there’s something about the “Can we stop the action here and go over something?” Just the structure of that, I think, is quite comforting to that kind of brain.
My son was that way for a lot of things. I’m so grateful for the kind of technology that allows you to have a movie in your home and stop it, you know? Because we’d just pause and say, like, “Okay. Remember what’s going on here? They’re in love and there’s a villain.”
Funny you mention that. My son had to write an essay analyzing a book, and of course he picked one from “Unfortunate Events.” He was writing about how that is one of his favorite techniques in all your books, how you give the definition and the context for words.
I thought I would share that just because that’s been my understanding. I mean, my son is 17 now so it’s a different thing, but even when he was younger I learned that the best thing to do, if he had a busy day, was to stop and say, “Okay, we’re having lunch now, remember, and then after lunch we’re going to do this thing or that thing.” He just needed to take a breath and think about what had just happened, what was happening and what was going to happen.
Yes, exactly. Anyway, you’ve often said how much you enjoy writing in libraries. But in the pandemic, libraries were closed. How did you manage?
Yeah, I mean, between libraries and cafés, which is how I write most of the time, it was a little tough. This is a little embarrassing, but I would pack up my stuff in my office. I would zip up my notebook in my little bag and I would walk across my house, which normally I wouldn’t stop to explain, but because you thought there might be a long network of assistants, I’ll just tell you that my house is plenty big, and I have no complaints, but it is not a vast estate that I’m walking across. It’s just a Victorian house in San Francisco. And I would walk across to our breakfast table and I would sit down and I would put on music and I would kind of try to create the illusion that I had gone someplace, that I commuted. It wasn’t super successful.
My son was obviously home from school, and my wife is an illustrator, but her studio is within walking distance of the house and she doesn’t share it with anyone, so she got to get away a lot. But my son would often be working right next to me. And I think that one of the pleasures of working in a library or a café is that someone working alongside you keeps you honest.
During the pandemic, I’d get on Google Hangouts with my writer friends, and we wouldn’t say anything. We’d just write, but it helped to know the others were there, working.
When I was running the writers’ room for the Netflix show, we spent a couple of weeks up here – I ran in my dining room, basically. But then everybody got sent home and all day long we would keep a chat open; I actually don’t remember what platform it was on because I’m not very technological.
It was a weird thing – the first couple of days, I would say things like, “I’ll be right back, I’m just making tea.” Until finally the writers had to say, “You don’t have to say that. We don’t see you and we don’t care that you’re getting up from the table.” But yeah, we would just kind of, you know, ask each other questions or run a line of dialogue by one another. That was really nice.
I think that’s one of the things that I’m going to hopefully maintain post-pandemic. There was something really nice about that connection.
Yeah. I’ve had a weekly gathering with a bunch of writers on Zoom just to kind of talk about literature. A bunch of them are nearby, but a bunch of them aren’t, and we’re trying to figure out how long we can go on meeting because we love meeting, but we are beginning to feel self-conscious about the fact that it’s no longer a necessary thing, necessarily.
I had my first dinner party last week, and it went really well. I thought it might be awkward. We had one scheduled last year just when things were beginning to look strange. We’d sent out this email that said, “We’re still comfortable having everybody over at the house,” and then, like, three days later we said, “Never mind, everybody stay home.” And so we invited those same people last weekend, and it went really well, I’m happy to say.
Was there hugging involved?
I mean, everybody was fully vaccinated, so there was, you know, the hugging and the sipping of cocktails. The only thing that people didn’t want to do, which was funny, was that we said, “Maybe we’ll start before sunset and have cocktails in the garden,” and everyone said, “Oh, please don’t. We’re so happy to be inside the house. Please don’t make us stand out in the yard as we’ve been doing for a year.” And so, we said, okay, fine.
Your new book, “Poison for Breakfast,” has one of my favorite lines about writing in the entire world: “…the history of literature is the history of bewilderment. Writers all over the world and all across history have been bewildered by the world and all the things in it they cannot imagine, which is why they are – we are – writing them down, to try and imagine them.” The pandemic was a bewildering time. Is “Poison for Breakfast” a product of the pandemic?
It was not. There were some last little edits that happened during the pandemic, but it was finished before anyone had any grasp that it could happen. I guess I am a little embarrassed to say that I exist in a state of bewilderment. Pandemic or no pandemic, I never have any idea what’s going on.
You talk about bewilderment a lot. What is that about? Where does that come from?
Well, I think there’s kind of a brainy answer, and kind of an emotional answer.
The brainy answer is that I was asked to write something about fairy tales and their appeal for young people. The usual explanation, the Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey,” never really made any sense to me.
I think that the reason why tales like that appeal to children is that they often have a premise that is completely inexplicable, and that helps young people who are learning the world, think about the world. As in, “Once upon a time there was a king, and he had a daughter and she never laughed, and so he had a contest and whoever could make her laugh got to marry her.” Everything about that is crazy, right?
When you’re young, the whole world has that kind of thing, like, “I’m going to strap you into a plastic seat and we’re going to get into a machine that has wheels going around, and then we’re going to drive and we’re going to get you out of the seat. And, here’s Grandma, an old woman you don’t know!” It’s exhausting being a child – that’s why they’re sleeping so much, hopefully.
I think that when they start hearing stories that are kind of bananas, they think, “Oh this is helping me, I’m learning that even though the world is bananas, there are things you can do.” So that’s how I came to it intellectually.
But I just think in general when I find something strange or I don’t understand something that’s going on that, it’s useful to remind myself that is probably the truest understanding of the world, that it’s good to sit with confusion and bewilderment, and think, I’m confused because the world is confusing.
It doesn’t mean to give up or anything like that. It just means that deciding that the goal should be a perfect understanding of the world is not going to get you anywhere. Instead, sit with the idea that you have no idea what’s going on.
After my favorite quote in the book, you write on the next page this line: “Nobody knows anything at all, we have no idea what is happening. We are all bewildered.” That is, I think, what you’re speaking to right now.
Yeah, I think so. A lot of this book came out of being a parent, because parenting is a constant pop quiz on the world. Your child is constantly saying, “What is this? What is this? What is this?” When my son was really young, I found myself saying, “It’s a mystery,” all the time. I’m not going to reach for a handy sentence to explain this whether it was a tiny thing or a large thing, and particularly if I didn’t know because it was an unknowable thing.
The book also came about because when my son was younger, what he liked to read most was nonfiction. It was very funny because I write the kinds of books I write and my wife is an illustrator of picture books and a maker of graphic novels and this is, like, the one category of children’s literature that we did not do at all. Of course, that would be the one our son would like.
And then so much of the nonfiction offered to children is this kind of very instructional material. You know, it’s either Harriet Tubman and or the lizards of North America. Now, God bless Harriet Tubman, and God bless the lizards of North America, of course, but I think that the kind of nonfiction that so many adults read, that is kind of a personal take on a question, is really not made for children. It’s not entirely absent but it’s not there very much.
So, just between thinking about that I am unable to offer any explanation to anything, but also that there is a drive, at least among some young people, to read something that was exploring the actual world, that’s kind of where this book came from.
You write under the pen name Lemony Snicket and you write as Daniel Handler. When do you know whether a project is for Daniel or Lemony? How is that decided?
That’s never been an issue for me, honestly. Maybe someday it will be confusing to me, but it always seems perfectly clear to me. And although there was much talk on the business end, not really on my end of things, but on the publishing and marketing end, about whether this book is for adults or for children. There was not a question about whether it was by Lemony Snicket or by me. I just know it when I see it. I don’t have a list of characteristics for it, or kind of a boundary line, but it’s never a problem for me. I know pretty quickly what hat I’m wearing.
Speaking of writing, “Poison for Breakfast” is really a lovely meditation on writing and the writing process. I’m curious if you have indulged in the literature about writing – I’m thinking of things like Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” or Stephen King’s “On Writing.” Is there a book you yourself have turned to?
The short answer, which I apologize if it sounds kind of cute, is that I think I learned the most about writing by reading the writers that I loved. What they wrote is what taught me the most. And even when some of my favorite writers have essays or something about writing, I might enjoy them just for kind of commiseration, but I don’t think that they’ve really taught me anything. Here and there, there’ll be some tiny piece of advice hidden someplace. I think in some ways “Poison for Breakfast” is kind of an answer to books about writing that irritate me, that pretend that there are rules that everyone knows, whereas in fact, no one knows anything.
Yes! As you say in the book, there are three rules to writing, but nobody knows what the third one is. I wanted to ask about San Francisco. What I mean is San Francisco plays a part in some of your books – I’m thinking of “Bottle Grove” in particular – but the aesthetic of San Francisco is always kind of with you, in your works. Do you think that’s part of your DNA as a writer, where you’re writing from?
I think it can’t help but be in many ways. I really, really grew up here. I didn’t grow up anywhere else. And I have a pretty hysterical love for the city. I’m often saying things like, “Oh you can’t get this anywhere but San Francisco!” And someone will say, “That’s wrong. That’s green tea and it’s actually from Japan and you can get it anywhere.”
But I think there’s something about the physicality of the city, the terrain and the weather. And then also it’s kind of its…spirit, for lack of a less corny term. I think I grew up in a city with a really strong political base. I think I grew up in a city in which many different cultures and subcultures were bumping up against one another and all trying their best. I grew up in a city that was very open about love and sexuality.
And yeah, I think that’s all very, very much part of who I am and so it must be very much a part of why I write. I think because I look like a square white guy and am sometimes dressed up, I think there’s often an assumption that the set of values I’m holding are different from the ones I’m actually holding.
Like those beautiful Victorians in San Francisco. Pretty straight-laced on the outside, but what’s behind the door… . I want to ask about actually seeing your work on screen and having it adapted. Is it still your work when you see it translated? What is your relationship with your work once it goes off the page?
The big difference is that for something, particularly for something that is as enormously and lavishly done as in the Snicket media, it’s very collaborative. It helps to be collaborative, you know? I mean, not just the writing of the screenplays, but there’s people acting out words and there are people building the sets and there are people composing the music and playing the music and recording the music – every little piece of it is immensely collaborative, and so the whole thing is very collaborative.
I’m always really interested to see what people are doing. It was really nice to go to the set of Netflix and talk with some of the costume designers just about how happy they were to get to make things up. You know? One of them said, I’ve done so many cop shows. I’m so tired of sitting in a room and talking about what sweater a famous person is going to wear, just the idea that now I get to build these ridiculous things is what I’ve always wanted to do. And that kind of makes me happier than anything involved with me about it. I just think, oh my God, here’s an opportunity for this person who loves to make costumes to make something ridiculous, to make exactly what they want to make. That’s really fun for me.
I was tempted to give the answer, “No, it’s not my work anymore,” but that sounds more negative about it than I feel. What I feel is I love to see people run with things, and who have thought a lot about what the source material is and take it from there. And some people are more positive than others, and then sometimes the results are not as lovely as I would hope for, but I just think watching people make hay with it is the most interesting part for me.
Yes, it becomes an avenue for other people’s creativity. Just a side note – I’m going through the film option of one of my own books, and it’s kind of bewildering, to use your word. You sit in a room and invent things by yourself and nobody really cares. And then suddenly five people, six people, 10 people, are talking about your work in a different way.
Well, congratulations! Yeah, you should enjoy this part – the part where it’s all possibility is great. Right now, there’s a possibility it will be the greatest movie ever made. It will never be as good as it is right now.
Ha! I will take that note and hold it close. Just one more question: So, if you had to assign people something to read over the summer, what would you want them to be reading?
Oh my goodness. If I had to assign … I mean, one of my favorite things to do is to hook people up with books like I’m a matchmaker. And as with a matchmaker, it’s very specific. A matchmaker wouldn’t ever say, like, “Everybody ought to go with that guy.” So it’s kind of hard to think of a book that I think everyone will love.
Well, what are you reading now?
Hmm … I would say right now some books that are important to me are two books by a poet named Dorothea Lasky. She is the author of several books, but there’s a book of her poems called “Rome” that I have read before and I’m rereading. And then she has another book – and maybe this is actually an answer to a prior question – about poetry and writing poetry, it’s a tiny little book called “Animal.” I’ve had that by my side and I find it really gorgeous to read.
If I were to translate your question to a more general recommendation, it would be that I think everyone ought to have a book of poetry close to them. Poetry can be intimidating if you don’t read it normally and you think, “I have no idea who to read.” So, I always tell people when they ask me this question – which is not as often as I want them to ask me, I want them to ask me all the time – I tell them to start with Poetry Magazine, which I think is often very marvelous. They also have an app and other people have an app that will, like, send you a poem on your phone every day if you want to start there. That’s nice.
But there are a million poets I’d recommend. I put a poem just about every day up on Instagram [@authordanielhandler] by someone, so you can always find something there.
I think poetry is a great way to interact with your own brain and your own consciousness. And so, I’m always reading a book of poetry alongside whatever novel or whatever else I might be reading. I’m a big proselytizer of that. I would encourage people, as we get to go out, to go to a library or go to a bookstore – which will be so exciting to be in again – and to just grab a book of poetry, almost impulsively. They’re pretty little. They’re pretty cheap. Keep it alongside whatever else you’re reading.
I was just doing my first work with other people in a long time, and I took a book of poetry with me because when we took a break it was so much better to read one or two poems than to check my email. When you’re waiting outside for your kid, when you’re in line at the grocery store, to just have a little moment with a poem is going to be a powerful thing. I think that this summer is still going to be so fraught and so nerve-wracking, so that’s what I’d recommend.
I have one recommendation for you. If you haven’t read Amy Gerstler’s “Index of Women,” do.
Everybody’s crazy about it and I have purchased it, but I have not yet cracked it open. But I’m so glad you said that because you’re literally like the 28th person who has told me to read it.
