Lemony Snicket's creator saw his first novel rejected 37 times
Before he became Lemony Snicket, narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler wrote a satirical novel about a teenage girl so dark that publishers turned it down 37 times. The San Francisco writer, who also plays accordion, grew up adoring Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl.
Handler was born in San Francisco in 1970. His father, an accountant, had fled Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1939; his mother became a dean at City College of San Francisco and is distantly related to the novelist Hugh Walpole. He describes a fairly standard Reform Jewish upbringing, went to Lowell High School and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1992. An avid reader from childhood, the first book he ever bought was Gorey's The Blue Aspic, and he also admired William Maxwell.
Under the Snicket pen name he wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events, filmed in 2004 and adapted by Netflix from 2017 to 2019, and the follow-up series All the Wrong Questions. Under his own name he has published adult fiction and a play. The Basic Eight finally appeared in 1999. His second novel, Watch Your Mouth, is structured like an opera, complete with stage directions, before switching halfway to the shape of a 12-step recovery programme. Why We Broke Up, from 2011, earned a Michael L. Printz honour, and We Are Pirates in 2015 follows a modern pirate longing for the old-fashioned kind.
Music runs alongside the writing. He has played accordion in several bands and appears on The Magnetic Fields' album 69 Love Songs. He lives in an Edwardian house in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, whom he met at college, and their child. Uneasy about his wealth, he gives regularly to charity; the couple donated $1,000,000 to Planned Parenthood. He calls himself a secular humanist and more or less an atheist, and he founded Per Diem Press in 2016 to reward young poets.
He has also faced criticism. At the 2014 National Book Awards he joked about Jacqueline Woodson and watermelon, invoking a racist stereotype. He apologised, gave $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books and pledged to match donations up to $100,000; Woodson responded in The New York Times that the joke came from ignorance.
Source: Daniel Handler
