Hijinks and madness? It’s just not Lemony Snicket

The wickedly funny children’s author, Daniel Handler, tells how he survived a spell in a mental asylum and went on to sell 60 million books.

Jim Carrey as Uncle Olaf in the 2004 film adaptation of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” So Daniel Handler, writing as the enigmatic Lemony Snicket, begins A Series of Unfortunate Events, his inordinately successful sequence of children’s books, which have sold 60 million copies and left me, aged 12, utterly captivated. It is an early marker of just how well Handler understands the minds of children, because few things are going to entice a young reader to embark on a 13-book series more than a warning not to bother.

We are introduced to the three Baudelaire siblings – inventive Violet, bookish Klaus and sharp-toothed toddler Sunny – and by page eight their parents have perished in a fire. They go on to face danger after danger – deadly reptiles, poisonous fungus, leeches, hypnosis, cold porridge – all sent their way by Count Olaf, a distant relative trying to steal their fortune.

The books become increasingly baroque, involving a complex set of interconnected references and secrets, and use language few middle-grade readers would usually encounter, often helpfully explained by Lemony Snicket (“the word ‘incentive’ here means ‘an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don’t want to do’ ”). Reading them, even as an adult, you have the feeling something is just beyond you, that you’re missing some key clue, which makes them horribly irresistible for inquisitive (and the word “inquisitive” meant, in my case at least, “precocious”) young readers.

And then there is the mystery of the author. Deep down, children know there isn’t really someone called Lemony Snicket. That would be ridiculous. No, there must be some other real person writing the books. Could it be “Daniel Handler”, “the official representative of Lemony Snicket in all legal, literary and social matters”, who pops up now and again to add a bit of meta-narrative fun to the books? And if so, who is he?

Daniel Handler in 2022. Picture: Getty Images

Handler was born in San ­Francisco in 1970. His mother was a college dean, his father an accountant and a Jewish refugee from Germany. Handler attended Wesleyan University and is married to illustrator Lisa Brown, with whom he has one child. Those are the key facts, but don’t expect many of them in And Then? And Then? What Else?, Handler’s fascinating, laugh-out-loud funny but rather disorganised memoir.

In it, he touches on his childhood, his path towards writing, his literary influences, a number of traumatic early-life experiences, his time locked up in a psychiatric institution and an amusing anecdote about a randy vicar at a wedding. He is guided not by chronology but by ideas or images, which he connects to his broader life: a balloon with writing on it is the springboard for talking about sexual assault, a singing bus driver launches us into a story of his youthful misbehaviour. Throughout it all you are guided by Handler’s gloriously wicked sense of humour. “My bedroom was in the attic – like Anne Frank, I used to think, another Jewish kid who stayed in their room a lot.” And that’s before you get to the practical jokes. Handler tells us about a wedding he attended where guests were encouraged to write notes on postcards, which already had stamps on them, to be sent to the couple on their honeymoon. Instead of well wishes, he decided to write “confessions, increasingly hysterical in tone, of secret longings, shocking escapades, perhaps even murder”, and fraudulently signed them as if written by friends of the couple.

Handler’s sense of humour is hard won, however. He tells us that as a young child he was sexually assaulted by an older man in a museum basement. “I wasn’t f..ked, just messed with, best he could against whatever frozen, silent resistance I managed to put up. And then it was done, grunting, warm and sticky with me not knowing what it was – my biggest clue to just how young I was when this happened – that was on me.”

In an act of bold honesty, Handler admits that for years he kept forgetting it had happened and that, consciously at least, it had little effect on his life. What has had a much greater impact is the hallucinations Handler has been having since college – figures that are “naked, bald, painted or powdered white”. At first they appeared in nightmares, then, terrifyingly, in real life. Combined with regular seizures, they got Handler taken out of education and briefly admitted to a mental institution, where the other patients were mainly anorexic women or closeted gay men from religious families.

None of the treatments worked and while Handler enjoyed his therapy sessions, which he spent “(speaking) joyously and at length about the homophobia I saw amongst the staff, tracing it to their own Victorian fear of sex and their own bodies – I had, after all, read two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality”, he realised he needed to get out. Handler still has hallucinations – “I’ve learnt to look away, to keep walking, to move through the figures I see, as if they are inappropriate, just staring strangers, not worth mentioning” – but he made them seem more presentable to the staff and soon made his escape.

Thank God he did, because it allowed him to become a writer, first, in 1998, of an adult novel, The Basic Eight, which went relatively unnoticed, and then the following year, The Bad Beginning, the first instalment of one of the most successful children’s series of the past 25 years. Some of the most enjoyable sections of this memoir recount Handler’s interactions with children at book events. He just “gets” them, approaching them on their own level yet respecting their intelligence. He always introduces himself as Lemony Snicket’s representative. “The young people grasped at once that I was somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody.”

One boy, he says, “when I asked if he wanted me to personalise the autograph by adding his name, told me that he wouldn’t want to be associated with such dreadful stories. ‘Just like someone else of my acquaintance,’ he said meaningfully and walked out of the store without looking back”.

Little girls tie their hair in a ribbon like Violet and bookshops have contingency plans in case a child vomits from excitement. Handler’s memoir, although subtle, ironic and full of dry wit, still pulses with that same childlike enthusiasm for books. Read it and you might just catch the bug.

The Sunday Times

And Then? And Then? What Else? A Writer’s Life by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, Oneworld. Lifeline: 131114.