Daniel Handler, who penned “A Series of Unfortunate Events” under the name Lemony Snicket, speaks the same way his novels read – in a bitingly hilarious, refreshingly honest way punctuated by uncommon wisdom.
The author spoke at the Elliott School of International Affairs on Thursday as part of the University’s Jewish Literature Live program, which brings award-winning Jewish authors to campus.
In a room crammed with students and professors – many of whom brought along personal copies of the children’s novels – Handler offered insight into everything from the origin of his now-famous pen name to the high school prank that partly inspired his latest adult novel, “We Are Pirates.”
The book, published Feb. 3, follows a group of 14-year-old girls who team up with members of a retirement home to steal a boat and become pirates, terrorizing San Francisco Bay – Handler’s hometown. Handler said the book was in part inspired by a time he convinced his entire high school homeroom to write “pirate” as the answer to a career survey.
“That idea stuck with me,” he said. “The idea of wanting to set out differently in the world, to escape from the confines and the surveillance of the culture that we’re in, particularly adolescence.”
Handler also drew inspiration for the novel’s characters from his younger sister – to whom the book is dedicated – who he said was “furious all the time” at age 14.
But “We Are Pirates” is about more than teenage mood swings. Handler actually twists the traditional notion of teenage angst.
“I had an admiration for [my sister’s anger]” he said. “I don’t think it was an irrational anger. I think she felt substantially disenfranchised because young women have the weight of many of an expectation and their confinement of a narrow reality, while being simultaneously told they can do everything.”
Themes of adolescence and the disillusionment that comes with it is familiar to Handler, whose adult novels “Why We Broke Up” and “The Basic Eight” also involve teenage protagonists.
With “We Are Pirates,” Handler said he aimed to capture that feeling of disillusionment, whether it occurs during teenage years or late adulthood.
“It’s also about the sort of people who feel displaced and detached from a culture, or who feel a kind of shaky feeling that you feel when you’re a stranger in a strange land,” he said.
As he spoke, Handler shared anecdotes from defining – and often funny – moments in his life as a writer.
To pass the time at his post-graduate job answering the phone in the computer science department at City College of San Francisco, Handler said he wrote fake letters to the editor for local newspapers under the name “Lemony Snicket” – one of the first times he would use the pen name.
“I would compose, on the typewriter, an outraged letter to the editor regarding the tiniest most harmless thing I could find,” he said. “So if they said, ‘Street cleaning schedules have been changed from Wednesday to Friday,’ I would say this was obviously due to anti-semitism. [Every letter] began ‘How dare you.’”
As for advice for young writers, Handler said his inspiration has always stemmed from the desire to “make something happen.” To Handler, the greatest stories have nothing to do with an overarching meaning, lesson or moral, and instead are built on interesting moments.
“When I was 10, I wanted to read about terrible things happening, over and over again,” Handler said. “I didn’t want to be told what stories meant. I wanted to find out for myself. In other words, I wanted a series of unfortunate events.”
Handler said his favorite novels cannot be “fitted” with a happy ending, which may explain to readers why he found fame writing tragedies for children.
Handler’s stories depict an imperfect world – one he said to which anyone can relate.
“I felt, and I think we can all feel, that we wander through this world like orphans with bad chaperones, desperate and lost of chaos in tumble… a world in which horrible things can happen, again and again and again,” he said. “[The world] is a series of unfortunate events.”
