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-Hello, and welcome to "Book Lust."
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today at Folio in downtown Seattle
is Daniel Handler, AKA Lemony Snicket,
whose new book, a memoir and a guide to creative endeavors,
is called "And Then? And Then? What Else?"
Daniel, thank you so much.
I know you're in England working hard.
I envy you been there. -It's a delight to be here.
I pity the fool who passes up a chance to talk with Nancy Pearl.
-Oh, well, you're too nice.
But I have to say I loved your book.
-Thank you.
-I --
anybody who knows me well knows that I am not a fan of memoirs.
You know, some people love memoirs.
That's highest on their list.
I'm not normally a fan of memoirs.
What I loved about your book,
though, was the way that it was a memoir,
but it was how your life fit in with --
with who you became as a writer and as a creator.
Is that fair?
-Yes, I think that's fair.
I share your hesitation about memoirs.
You know, every so often, over the years,
people have said, "Oh, you should write a memoir."
And I thought, you know, Chapter 1, I am born;
26, somebody heard of me.
You know, Chapter 30, yesterday.
And I just thought, "I never want a book like that."
But I do get interested in books
that are kind of trying to choose several things
over at once and trying to fit themselves in there like that.
So this book began as a -- as an introduction
to a new translation of poems by Baudelaire.
And the editor said, "I think you're onto something here.
You're talking about a million things.
It's too long for the introduction to Baudelaire,
but maybe you can do something."
And that was finally -- I realized, oh,
that's my way in just to talk about a few things
that have been on my mind without, you know,
beginning with a description of the town in which I was born.
-I have never read Baudelaire.
I really had no desire to.
I mean, it just never came into my orbit
or I'd never -- whatever, however you would put that.
But then the way you used your love of Baudelaire
and your discovery of him as really a kid
almost just made me -- and the -- your quotes, you know,
the quotes that you took from him were so evocative
and just seemed to run parallel to everything
that you were discovering and thinking about.
God, I love this book so much.
It was so -- it was so interesting.
It was just fascinating.
All right. So there's a wonderful story
that Beverly Cleary used to tell about
when she would do school visits.
And, you know,
she would talk about writing the book and her books.
And, you know, these were to, like, third and fourth graders.
And one of them, a little boy,
you know, was just frantic to talk to her and kept, you know,
Mrs. Cleary, Mrs. Cleary And, you know, she called on him.
And he said, Mrs. Cleary,
I understand everything about writing,
but where do you get your paper?
And so this is a --
this is a where do you get your paper kind of question.
One of the great thing --
one of the things I loved about the book,
your book is that -- is that you quote --
you have lengthy quotes.
You know, you don't just give a sentence.
I mean, you really give the reader a sense
of who these writers are and what it is about them
that you -- that engages you and maybe will engage the reader.
Was that hard to get -- this is my question.
It's embarrassing.
Was it hard to get permission to quote that much?
Because you had to go to them.
I mean, some of this stuff is in the public domain, but...
-No. I love that question. And I don't mind saying that
I guess it depends what you mean by difficult.
It -- it costs a lot of money. -Yeah.
-And it's -- and that was really important to me.
I'm happy to be in a position where I can afford to,
you know, not make a lot of money upfront
with this particular book.
But, yeah. We had to spend quite a bit of money and --
but, I mean, you know, I have all kinds of ideas
about fair use and things like that.
But, you know, someday when you and I
are having a cocktail together, we can talk about.
But, yeah. It was interesting.
And then it was also -- because of that,
I had to work directly with a permissions person.
And that's just, you know,
one of the umpteen professions
that you don't really hear about,
you don't think about unless it's right in front of you.
And it was interesting to see the sort of person who fought --
who doggedly pursues these things
because some of the quotes are from easily obtainable things,
and some of them were quite the rabbit hole.
-Right.
-So yeah. -Yeah.
It's sort of -- I think
that the permissions person might be a little bit like
the Interlibrary Loan person at the public library,
the person who's getting all the -- you know,
finding who has it and sending in the requests.
And there's all sorts of obscure rules and --
-I was reminded of the continuity person
because I've been on a few movie and television sets.
And, you know, there's someone whose job it is to say,
that coffee cup was not on that shelf
when we were shooting this angle three hours ago.
You have to move it. I took a photograph.
We have to move it right back into place.
And that was the sort of --
I would be so terrible at that job.
And so --
but I remember when I've met continuity people, you know.
And I just wanted to test them.
I wanted to, like, throw a deck of cards
up in the air and say, "Okay.
Which one did I just catch?" or something, because their eye
and their organizational mind was really supreme.
And it -- and it's also one of those things
that you imagine that, when they were nine years old,
the parents said, "Oh, they're very organized.
And they have a great visual sense.
But I don't know where this is going.
What are they -- what is this mind?
Where can this mind find a home?"
And then to just see, ah,
they're running continuity on a set.
That's perfect.
-You're working with Ben Affleck.
-Yeah. They're telling Ben Affleck
that his sleeves were not rolled down.
He'll have to roll them back up.
-One of the things --
So, the book "And Then? And Then? What Else?"
that you've -- in that book,
a lot of it is almost like a --
it's almost like a how I write from the way
that you organize and the way that you think about things.
And one of the things that I was very taken with
is that you talk about how you have little notebooks
that you write down passing thoughts
or, you know, references.
Do you have all those notebooks? -I do.
I have a basement full of plastic bins of notes and things
for the duration of my literary career.
I pity the poor grad student
who might someday have to paw through them.
But they feel -- I mean,
all I can say is that it reminds me
of something beloved you might have in your kitchen.
You know, just that wooden spoon that always does the job.
It's quite mangled and things like that.
Or, you know, just that brand of red pepper
that is better than any other brand of red pepper.
That's what it reminds me of.
And if you were to go through all these bins,
you would say, Oh, look.
He got into these notebooks for a while.
Now he got into these notebooks for a while.
But, yeah.
There's -- I don't -- I mean,
I don't think I will ever look at any of them again,
but I can't imagine throwing them out.
-Yeah. -Sorry to my heirs.
-Do you date -- do they have dates?
I mean, when you start one, do you put the date?
-I usually do.
I'm not super methodical about it.
There's something that feels a little arrogant
about being too methodical,
as if I'm saying, Oh, of course.
Posterity will be very, very interested in
when I first noted this thing.
And I don't think that, and I -- and I --
so I don't like to prep it.
But I -- but I try to,
and I liked going down to that basement sometimes
and looking at all the bins
because that feels like the real work.
You know, the book is a kind of published,
finished version of this thing.
But all of the legal pads and the notebooks and all that,
all that is the -- that's the stuff of the work.
That's the real work that I'm doing.
-For me, I just have notebooks of favorite poems,
you know, and some quotes or some just by the way things.
But I'd love the idea of just pulling out --
you're not doing in on your cell phone or anything.
You're just, you know.
-Yeah. No.
I -- I don't -- I'm a hopelessly analog person.
I held out against having a cell phone
for absolutely as long as I could.
And I don't -- it feels hostile to me.
And, in fact, I was just a couple of days ago
on Etsy looking to see
if I could find a case for my phone
that says something that I could personalize
that would say something like,
"Take out your notebook instead."
Or, "Are you sure you need to look at this right now?"
Something that would even further remind me,
because I already have a distaste for it.
And just every so often I don't like the way it intrudes.
I don't.
And so every so often,
if I'm sitting someplace or on a train or something,
I'll start to take it out.
And, before I know it, I'll be upset about something.
I'll be angry about something,
I'll be overwhelmed by something that I remembered I had to do.
It's the opposite.
And paper feels like the opposite to me
where I just get to let my brain unspool
and get itself in line if I need to.
So, yeah.
I'm not a -- I'm not a phone person.
-So you and I are, you know, obviously much -- we're --
first of all, we're different people.
Second of all, we're different generations and all of that.
But when I was reading your book, the books that you --
many, many, many of the books that you loved are books
that I loved, too.
And so I had this on my bookshelf.
Can you see it?
It's Kit -- It's Kit Reed's second novel.
-Oh, my goodness.
-Talk about Kit Reed, because she taught at Wesleyan
where you went to your undergrad.
-She did.
-And this is like a first edition.
This is one of my all-time favorite novels.
Have you read this one? -It's a wonderful novel. Yeah.
-It's a wonderful, wonderful novel.
And it's long out of print.
This -- this is 4 -- it cost $4.50
and originally in hardback.
-A bargain at 10 times the price.
-And it's a first -- it's a first printing.
And this was a book -- so when you talked to --
-That broke my heart. -Yeah.
Me too. I loved -- I loved that book.
And the other -- -Did you know her at all?
Did you know her? -No.
I wrote to her about the book,
but I didn't know her.
But my daughter,
you talk a little bit about your experience at Wesleyan.
And my daughter is a professor there in the theater department.
-Wonderful.
-And -- and you have one paragraph about living
in Middletown, where Wesleyan is,
which I called my daughter to read her that.
And she just started laughing
and totally, totally felt the same way.
And it's that kind of personality, your personality,
I think, comes through in this book
in a way that I think, first of all,
you talk about the reading experience and what reading does
and what reading does for kids
in such a -- such an evocative way.
And, in a way, reading your book did that for me.
I mean, I felt like I was in a different --
in a different place,
but there were these touchstones.
Like "Four Frightened People," I have that book too.
And, you know --
-Oh, yeah. -And loved that book.
I have the original Virago black cover, you know.
-Yeah.
-And just those -- and then your Wesleyan connection,
in a meager little town,
I believe you described; and the Peter Pan bus,
taking it to New York and Boston.
And your two experiences taking
or wanting to take a creative writing class
and ended up taking Kit Reed's, could you talk about --
because I know people are always interested in the -- in the --
that they want to write,
but the techniques of writing or -- talk about that.
-Well, I mean, I think there's such a mythology
attached to writing and to being a writer that --
that it can get in the way of so many people's
experiences of trying to write or wanting to be a writer
or wanting to be just involved with literature.
And it feels like a cliché to complain
that some of it is about creative writing classes,
but some of it really is.
And when I arrived at Wesleyan,
there was a very famous writer whom I won't name,
who's not at Wesleyan anymore.
And you could take her class, and you had to have --
you had to submit materials and have a meeting with her.
And I had a meeting with her, and she was very harsh.
First of all, she told me --
we were supposed to bring our -- anything
that we published anyplace,
and she told me that my credentials were really bad.
And I was 18 years old.
You know, I hadn't --
I don't know how many 18-year-olds she had who
had just been published in The New Yorker,
but I wasn't one of them.
You know, I had been published
in my high school literary magazine
and a couple of other little things,
you know, for high school students.
And she made me feel like I was already behind.
I was already a failure.
And then she was going to assign me a poem to memorize
and that we were going to meet all of us outside
and recite our poems.
And I have no -- there's nothing wrong
with memorizing a poem and reciting it.
I've -- at the time I was 18,
that was kind of my primary seduction technique.
Not an effective one, I should note,
for anyone who stood by it.
But -- and I was really -- I was put off by the whole experience.
I thought, oh.
I'm interested in writing and reading.
I'm not interested in being demeaned
and being assigned things to memorize.
None of that seemed like what I wanted to do.
And I really -- I say this in the book.
I said, I felt like I walked into medical school
on the first day and fainted at the sight of blood.
I thought, oh, I guess I'm not a writer,
because I'm not interested in this.
I don't know what this is, but I can't do it.
And it was quite a shake-up for me,
because that was kind of my plan was to become a writer,
and the class by the famous writer was not good.
And then I met Kit Reed, who I'd never heard of.
And she told me she taught a writing class
and that her writing classes
that you turned in 10 pages every week
and that you met with her alone in her kitchen to discuss them.
You, in fact,
only met the other people in the class --
there was like a little first gathering.
And then there was a midway kind of lunch,
and there was a party on the last thing.
That was the only time you met the other writers.
And she gave you very individual attention.
She gave you very individual advice.
I would run into other students from time to time and say,
oh, I bet Kit made you read this that I'm reading.
And they would say, No.
She made me read this whole other thing
because she had this wonderful,
wonderful kind of open mind and open heart
about what literature is and that it was boundless,
that there was innumerable traditions
that you can belong to or not belong to,
that you can take things from that you can synthesize,
that she was so open about, like,
bona fide diversity of writing,
not just kind of the individual profiles of the writers
but all of these traditions from all over the world
that you could sink into.
She was not a snob.
So there were people who are writing, you know,
kind of trashy genre stuff.
And there were people who were writing very highfalutin stuff.
And she was open to all of it.
She was enthusiastic about all of it,
and it was really contagious.
And then, also, she made you write a whole lot.
You couldn't hide behind your own pretension
or your own beautiful vision of
how wonderful it was going to be when you published
and you had a great photograph of yourself on the cover.
She wasn't interested in that.
She wanted you to get better and better and better.
And, you know, it's been said by many, times --
I feel it's often credited to Malcolm Gladwell,
so I'll credit him now, that to be a writer you have to write,
you know, a certain number of terrible pages first.
That was not how it was presented to me.
But I think that is the idea that Kit just said, Yeah.
You're terrible because you're young and you're learning.
So let's try to write as often, as much as possible.
Try to get this nailed down.
Try to learn all this, and then you'll get better.
Let's get rid of the bad part of your writing,
you know, as quickly as possible.
And she became a real mentor for me,
not just in writing but just in kind of approaching life.
And, you know, and it -- just at the perfect age,
because, you know, 18, 19, 20,
that's when you can be the most insufferable,
snobbish person you'll ever get to be in your life.
And I was plenty insufferable.
It wasn't like she managed to vanish that.
But it was really wonderful to have someone to just remind you,
this thing that you're having trouble with is part --
is a problem that many people have had.
This literature that you're reading
is part of a long tradition.
This literature that you want to write is part of a tradition
you want to be thoughtful about.
And she was just so endlessly generous in that way.
And I really, really miss her.
She died a few years ago,
and hardly a week goes by
that I don't have the urge to pick up the -- bona fide urge
to pick up the phone and say, Oh,
I just read this thing or I have a funny story for you
or something like that because she was endlessly enthusiastic.
Fans of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" will notice
that there's a character named Kit Snicket
who was named after Kit Reed.
That was kind of the best thing I felt I could do for her,
you know.
I think, you know, other people
who are lucky enough to be successful
who have a mentor want to buy them a yacht or,
you know, a case of champagne or something.
And I knew that Kit would just be tickled pink
to find her name in a book.
And that was just, yeah.
We just had a really, really wonderful time.
I feel so lucky to have known her.
Her husband, too, was kind of another kind of mentor for me.
And sometimes I think it probably looked to some people
like they were almost parental figures,
but they weren't because they were friends of mine.
They took me seriously at my age.
They never indicated that I was tiresome
in some undergraduate way,
even though I was tiresome in every undergraduate way.
And I'm -- yeah.
And then I love meeting her readers
because that's a whole other kind of secret club.
-Right.
-Her own writing really defied genre in a lot of ways.
When I'm in a used bookshop, I most often see her in sci fi.
-Yup. Me too. -Science fiction magazines.
And she was one of the few women --
you know, you often see, like,
Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert and then her or something.
And she was often, you know,
one of the few women
or the only woman in some anthologies and magazines.
And some of her work definitely can comfortably fit
in that category.
But she was really interested in just kind of the strangeness
of life and how it happens to people and --
-Just what you're interested in.
I mean, that's just what you're interested in.
-I mean, it's just what excites me.
And also just, like,
kind of all of my favorite writers and artists,
there's something where you say they're not quite that.
They kind of go in this category, but they're not.
And I always think that's when you are reminded
that literature is real and that categories are false.
-Yeah. Yeah.
You talked about being so lucky to have met her.
And I wanted to ask you,
you've had a lot -- it seemed to me reading this book
that there --
that many things in your life came about as a result of luck,
you know, that -- is --
isn't that interesting that we don't -- I mean,
because you met Kit Reed at a dinner party
I think is what you said.
And luck -- -Kind of college dinner.
Yeah. -Yeah.
You were sitting next to her. I mean, that's luck, you know.
It was -- -Yeah, yeah.
-I mean, if there was other instances or the books
that you picked up.
I mean, one of the things that I was so --
that I --
that I so much enjoyed reading in your book was
how important reading is to becoming a writer.
And that's what Kit Reed did for you, you know,
that she -- you know, she'd say, "Well, this is -- you know,
this reminds me of Muriel Spark.
You should read more Muriel Spark and things like that."
I mean, so it wasn't -- it was --
you talk about reading as taking you away from where you are.
But, in some ways, it -- it cements you in
where you are in all the best ways, I think.
-Yeah. I mean, I think it can -- you know,
it can center you as a person.
I think there's a reason why -- you know,
even people who don't read very much, they're --
what they're probably doing is reading before bed.
You know.
I think the reason why you read to your child before bed --
you know, there's plenty of other times
you might read to your child, but, like, definitely that.
And that, you know, I think it --
I think it works in a way
that we can probably measure chemically in the mind.
But I think to really feel that --
that the landscape of literature is boundless,
that there's really a place for everyone in it,
whether as a reader or as a practitioner or both,
and that -- I think that is just so powerful.
And, I mean,
as you said, I'm here in England for a few months.
I'm in Oxford,
and there's not enough hours in the day
for me to describe the joy of the libraries there.
But I just went into London when a friend of mine was visiting.
And I took him to my favorite bookstore in London,
which is called Daunt Books. -Me too.
-Kind of into the back,
and it's arranged by country of origin.
And so you -- the novels and the poetry and the history
and the guidebooks, you know, you -- you can get all that.
You can just say, Oh, I'm going to Kyoto.
And it's like here's the 16th century, poems About Kyoto.
Here's the novel about Kyoto that came out last year.
Here's a history of Kyoto.
And here is a map of all the best places to go in Kyoto.
And what I love about it is that it's a bookstore
that makes you feel like you have not read anything,
because you walk in,
and there's whole literary traditions,
whole regions of the world, that you have not explored.
-So what are you reading now?
-Right now I'm reading a novel called "Suddenly Slowly,"
and it is by a -- he writes in English,
but he -- it's --
he started writing novels in English
after publishing several volumes of Persian poetry.
And I found him at Daunt Books completely randomly.
I thought, What is this? And it's -- it's a --
it's about kind of young people trying
to figuring out their lives.
It's not a startling theme, but it's presented really well.
And I don't know if I'm just coming to it
through the prism of already knowing what
this author is about.
But I feel that I can sense a kind of multicultural lens.
You know, it's about a very ordinary Western experience.
But there's something where I think,
like, I'm --
I really get a sense of what you find universal
and what you find foreign just as you're looking there,
which is really fun for me to read
because I'm here in England.
You know, I'm fluent in the language.
I'm not confused by what England is.
But there's so many cultural differences.
There's so much mystery.
And so I'm loving reading this. Yeah.
-Wow.
-Poetry, I've tried to read poetry all the time.
And there is a new book of poetry by Katie Peterson,
who's one of my favorites from America.
This is called "Smoke and Fog."
And a lot of it is about the pandemic time, which I think,
as you said, with memoirs, I wouldn't --
-Yeah.
-That wouldn't be my first choice.
But she's -- she's so sharp and smart about it,
and she's so good at illuminating the ordinary.
And I don't have it here, and so I can't read it to you.
But one of the poem ends, how do we survive this?
We got married.
And it's about her long-term marriage.
It isn't like she had a wedding during the pandemic.
But I -- it was such a sharp idea to say, Yeah.
You gather the people you love most in your household.
That's how we all got through this,
all of us who got through it, right.
We got through it with the people who are closest to us
with our little circle.
And I thought that was a really beautiful idea.
-I have one question.
And then, unfortunately, I think we have to stop.
But a quick question.
So, one of my favorite poets is Stephen Dunn, who recently died.
Do you -- did he --
did he speak to you in a not literal sense but just --
-No. Yeah. I liked his work, for sure.
Yeah.
-Well, I wish we could continue.
I mean, I would love it if we were, indeed, you know,
sitting next to each other or having a drink or something,
just to keep talking.
-We'll continue, and I'm sure.
-Okay.
-We won't continue on this screen, but I know --
-All right. I would love that.
And I think I'm going to go home and reread "At War as Children."
So -- and thank you for your new book.
It's coming out in May, I believe? May?
-Yup.
-And it's "And Then? And Then? What Else?"
which is from Baudelaire, right?
-It is, yeah. It's a little quote from Baudelaire
that always stuck in my head.
-Yep. Okay. Thank you so much, Daniel.
I just love talking to you.
-Ms. Pearl, it's always a pleasure to talk to you.
And I'm so thrilled to be in conversation with you.
-Oh, thank you. Bye-bye.
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