After over 25 years of publishing novels for both adults and children, including the beloved A Series of Unfortunate Events as his alter ego Lemony Snicket, author Daniel Handler is taking readers into a new world: his own.
However, on the heels of releasing And Then? And Then? What Else? Handler tells The Daily Beast that he never set out to write a memoir. In fact, he had never wanted to write about his life at all.
“I had a reticence about it because I felt that I wasn’t ready to talk about some of these things,” he admits. He had an idea in his head of what a memoir was, and no interest in sticking to the formula. But when he started writing an introduction to a new translation of his favorite poet Charles Baudelaire, he found himself overwriting, sharing stories of encountering Baudelaire for the first time as a child and his “path through peculiar literature.” That exercise evolved into And Then? And Then? What Else?, the title itself a Baudelaire reference.
