What Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, says about terror

Daniel Handler [00:00:00] I ended up on a psych ward. And, you know, I'd seen enough movies where the insane asylum is the end of the movie. And I didn't want that to be the end of the movie.

Sophie Bearman [00:00:25] You're listening to "Life In Seven Songs." From The San Francisco Standard, I'm Sophie Bearman. Joining us on the show this week is Daniel Handler, or Lemony Snicket, as you may know him. He's the author of some 30 books, including the 13-book series for young adults called "A Series of Unfortunate Events," which has sold around 70 million copies worldwide and been turned into a successful movie and TV series. In much of Daniel's work, terrible things happen to people. And today we're eager to dive into, well, why? And as a heads up, there is some discussion of sexual assault in this episode. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.

Daniel Handler [00:01:10] Thank you very much for having me.

Sophie Bearman [00:01:11] So for listeners who maybe haven't read "A Series of Unfortunate Events," there's a character, Count Olaf—

Daniel Handler [00:01:16] Yes. Terrible person.

Sophie Bearman [00:01:17] Evil, distant relative of the Baudelaire orphans, the main characters.

Daniel Handler [00:01:21] Supposedly.

Sophie Bearman [00:01:22] And he just attempts a series of terrible schemes. And it's not just that series. The first book you ever published, "The Basic Eight," a high schooler murders one of her classmates.

Daniel Handler [00:01:32] Yeah, well, she has a crush on him, and he doesn't like her back. What is she supposed to do?

Sophie Bearman [00:01:35] Right. So why are we writing about all these terrible things?

Daniel Handler [00:01:39] Oh, I just think they're automatically interesting. I mean, nobody wants to hear a story where nothing goes wrong. And also, I just think I automatically wander the world thinking "I wonder what terrible thing will happen?" I mean, I don't know how revealing you are in terms of the own circumstances of this podcast, but we're in like a somewhat creepy, windowless room, like if you passed out and you woke up and you were in this room, you would think, "Oh, I guess this is the last room I'm ever going to see." It has black curtains. It has an alarming number of electrical cords curled up on hooks.

Sophie Bearman [00:02:15] I see a couple of lovely chairs, a nice table, a glass full of water. But, you know, to each their own.

Daniel Handler [00:02:21] You know what? Lovely. I'm gonna call you out there. I think a lot of people might walk into this room and not immediately go into a nightmarish abduction narrative, but that's just, I think, the shape of my mind.

Sophie Bearman [00:02:33] So you've always prepared for the worst case scenario? How come?

Daniel Handler [00:02:38] Well, one answer is that I was raised in an extended Jewish family, and we were very close to each other emotionally, but we were not particularly close on a family tree in a lot of cases. And that was because so many people were slaughtered by Nazis. And to grow up and hear the stories of people who made it, to hear the stories of people who didn't make it, and to understand that that's not a reliable narrative of reward and punishment. You know, everybody who made it, they weren't the best people. They weren't the bravest. They weren't the smartest. They just happened to survive. But I also think even if you're not raised in that particular way, I think just the inherent injustice of the world occurs to you pretty early, both in a large way, but also kind of little ways of like, "Oh, the teacher told us all to be quiet, but I wasn't making any noise." And I think you begin to have a sense that we've put a layer of meaning on the world that is not entirely convincing.

Sophie Bearman [00:03:38] Is there a song that takes you back to your childhood?

Daniel Handler [00:03:41] Yes. So one of the things I grew up with was classical music. My parents were big listeners to classical music, and we had a stereo in my living room with speakers kind of in corners of the room, and I would go over there and stare at the speaker or listen to the music as closely as I could. And one favorite was the Eroica, Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Scherzo movement in particular, because it's quick and peppy. And we had this version conducted by George Szell, the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, and that was something that I listened to over and over and over again. It's funny, whenever I listen to it in adulthood, it sounds a little fast to me, and I think it's because my copy was on cassette and I listened to it so many times that it kind of slowed down a little bit. So, you know, it's really just absolutely the kind of music that we listened to at home. And I think because my parents listened to so much opera, the idea of a super melodramatic story of people poisoning each other and going mad and being in disguise and, you know, running away for 20 years, but actually just living in a cottage at the edge of a forest, all that really fed my imagination and fit very nicely with fairytales and folktales that I'd read. But even as time went on with kind of Star Wars and other kind of archetype stories where everyone's talking strangely and it's very melodramatic.

Sophie Bearman [00:05:15] So in "A Series of Unfortunate Events," the adults are all pretty disappointing.

Daniel Handler [00:05:22] Yes.

Sophie Bearman [00:05:23] The orphans seem to learn over and over that these adults are morally weak. They're rule following to a fault. They're unwilling to believe the warnings of children until it's much too late. Is that a lesson you personally had to learn at some point about adults?

Daniel Handler [00:05:37] I mean, I think it's a pretty early lesson. I mean, most of us are born crying. There's something we want right away. We're hungry or we're uncomfortable or we're in pain, and that's not helped as quickly as we want it to be helped. And so I think to have that acknowledged in a children's book seems pretty crucial.

Sophie Bearman [00:05:58] I think, personally, that lesson came a little bit later, and it's a good lesson to know, like, oh, my parents are actually just human. They're people. It's a lesson everyone has to learn.

Daniel Handler [00:06:09] I mean, because then you grow up and maybe you become a parent. I am a parent. And then you think, oh, yes, I'm completely unreliable.

Sophie Bearman [00:06:15] What am I doing wrong?

Daniel Handler [00:06:16] Yeah. I'm, you know, unleashing a largely accidental reign of terror upon an innocent young person. I mean, I think the journey of the Baudelaire orphans in "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is the journey from childhood to adulthood. And part of that is beginning to recognize your own unreliability, your own failings, and how they mimic the ones that have so terrorized and frustrated you, when you were a child.

Sophie Bearman [00:06:43] You did have some scary things happen to you in real life. And there's a chapter in your memoir titled "Why Did I Keep Cutting This?" Can you tell me about it?

Daniel Handler [00:06:51] Yeah. I was attacked sexually as a child in the basement of a museum where I was early for a class, and it was a very frightening experience that was not witnessed by anybody, that I can't imagine that I told anybody. And my memory of it is that it was interrupted by more people kind of coming down the stairs and coming into the space, and so it stopped. You know, it's worth noting that I always had a resistance to labeling it in such a way that it became a defining moment for me. But in writing this book, I also thought like, well, it's a thing that I'm willing to be honest about. And I've been on tour and I've met a whole lot of readers now who say, "Thank you so much for writing that, and for proposing the idea that it's possible for something like that to happen to you and that you don't carry it with you as a horrible weight all the time," feels also a necessary part of the conversation.

Sophie Bearman [00:07:43] Yeah, it feels important to have shared it.

Daniel Handler [00:07:45] Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a careful conversation because it's obviously something that happens often and it's something that happens so disastrously and so dramatically to so many people. And, no one wants to appear to brush that aside. I think also, though, it happens in such a way that it's not a disaster. And I think that's worth thinking about, too.

Sophie Bearman [00:08:06] So pivoting back to your music, what comes next for you in terms of songs that shaped you?

Daniel Handler [00:08:12] I mean, to this day, I'm behind on a generation of pop music that people's parents listened to, so I never heard any Barbra Streisand. I never heard any Neil Diamond, I never heard any Aretha Franklin. I never heard a bunch of artists, you know, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. I didn't hear them until I was much, much older because those records were not in my house. But there was a small stack of vinyl from, like, my mom's swingin' single days in San Francisco, and I found those in the back of a closet when I was about in middle school. And one of them was this album by Julie London, which is called Lonely Girl. And that was—it was such a mysterious thing to me. She has such a low and breathy voice and we'll hear it now, but I would invite listeners to imagine the kind of layer of staticky crackle on your mom's old vinyl that laid on top of it, that made it sound even more mysterious.

Daniel Handler [00:09:26] That sounds so lovely, but. when I was a child, it was also so mysterious. She sounds like she might be like some kind of a vampire or something. And the whole record is just her and a guitar. It just sounds so stark.

Sophie Bearman [00:09:38] It's like a poem. Most songs are, but it reads like poetry to me. It's mysterious. Were you reading poetry at that age when you were listening to that, or writing poetry? I know that you were a voracious reader pretty early.

Daniel Handler [00:09:49] Well, so when I was 12—and this was kind of the moment that began the book for me—when I was 12, I was at the West Portal Public Library, and there was a book on the shelf that was called "The Flowers of Evil." And I knew right away what it was. No one had to tell me. It was obviously a horror novel like Stephen King about killer plants. I couldn't wait, and so I took it home and I started reading it, and it was, and is, a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire about, you know, staying up too late at night in Paris with nefarious women and men and ingesting chemicals and feeling lonely and horrible but kind of loving it. You know, they don't give you a lot of Baudelaire when you're young in school, and your sense of poetry is kind of rhyming poems about talking animals, maybe. And so I was very unnerved by it. I returned it almost immediately to the library, but then I also kept going back there over and over again, taking it out again. And it was something that I reveled in. And I really like thinking about the space that you're in when you're young, reading a book like that.

Sophie Bearman [00:11:02] So we've talked about two tracks that you found at home, basically music that your parents listened to. When did you discover your own music and what was that?

Daniel Handler [00:11:13] Well, when I was in middle school, I had a friend, and he was concerned about me because of my classical music upbringing. That this would not get me, you know, a ton of girls. And so he gave me some music that, you know, I needed to go home and listen to. And I think in a not dissimilar way from reading Baudelaire, listening to Prince was another thing that was like—it was upsetting. It was alluring. It was like nasty. But it felt right. The first record I heard of his is called Dirty Mind and he just looks filthy on the cover. And I was just at the age where you're just being chastised for a dirty mind all the time. You know, you're a boy and you're that age and someone's eating a hot dog and you go, like, "he he he he" and they say, that's bad, you should not be thinking like that. And so when Purple Rain hit, I was ready. And I think I was most intrigued by the opener "Let's Go Crazy," which, you know, begins with like the sound of an organ and a kind of church sermon that leads to like a big kind of thrashy dirty thing.

Daniel Handler [00:12:34] And I have such a memory of hearing Prince say "at least you got friends" and thinking what a wonderful thing to say in the middle of all the turmoil and chaos of that song.

Daniel Handler [00:12:51] There's so many pop songs to say, like, "let's get wild tonight!" And it just sounds like, oh, it's Saturday night, we're all going to have a fun time. And he sounds like, let's lose our minds, which is a different vibe. And yeah, it was super powerful for me.

Sophie Bearman [00:13:03] In your memoir, you write about Dirty Mind and and subsequent Prince albums, and you even say you felt like Prince was telling you something explicitly, honestly, in a way that other adults weren't.

Daniel Handler [00:13:13] Yeah. I mean, I remember my high school tried unsuccessfully to ban his music, and I remember thinking, when you see the movie Footloose, do you understand that Kevin Bacon is the hero of Footloose, that dancing is supposed to be good? And, you know, this is a high school in San Francisco in the 80s. Like, you know, maybe they should have been more concerned about AIDS, just offhand.

Sophie Bearman [00:13:38] "A Series of Unfortunate Events" was banned, right?

Daniel Handler [00:13:42] Yeah a little bit here and there. I would never put myself up against Prince or in the same category at all. But I think that reaction of "We can't quite say what we don't like, but it's obviously not a good idea," is an interesting reaction to culture.

Sophie Bearman [00:13:58] We've been talking a little bit about who you were becoming in high school, and we mentioned your first book, "The Basic Eight." It's kind of loosely based on the crew that you hung out with. Tell me about them and how you adapted that group for your book.

Daniel Handler [00:14:11] Well, we mostly met doing plays and we fancied ourselves very sophisticated. There was a hotel we went to downtown. There was a kind of rooftop bar that was obviously not our purview. We weren't old enough and we didn't have the money. And so we would get off the elevator one floor below, where we knew about a fire escape that we would just sit out on and just feel glamorous. It was a fun crowd to be part of. I'm still close to most of that gang, and as I was writing "The Basic Eight," I just got interested in those kind of dynamics and also describing this imaginary world that we kind of fancied ourselves in.

Sophie Bearman [00:14:52] I should also mention it was in writing your first book that you came up with your pen name, Lemony Snicket.

Daniel Handler [00:14:56] Yeah, it was after college and I was working on "The Basic Eight," and as we said "The Basic Eight" is about this murder that happens in high school, and then part of it is about kind of the media frenzy that happens as a result of it. And I was really interested in the way that narratives get put on a crime like that, or any kind of upsetting event right away. And it was the first time I kind of realized think tanks and other right wing organizations actually look for incidents like this and use them to kind of push their own ideas. And so I would sit in my office job and I would call these right wing organizations, and I would ask them to send me material. And one woman said, "Okay, sure. We'll send you our materials, what's your name?" And I thought, "Oh, I shouldn't be giving my name any more, so just say something else." And I said something which was "Lemony Snicket." And then there was a pause, and I thought, she's not going to believe you, because no one is stupid enough to believe you. But it was a right wing organization. And so she said, "Is that spelled how it sounds?" And I said, yes. And it became a name that my friends and I would use if you were ordering a sandwich. I wrote letters to the editor of small papers and it would be signed Lemony Snicket. So for that crowd, which had a lot of overlap with "The Basic Eight," but kind of my post-college crowd, they're the people continually most astonished by what has happened with the Snicket book. They're like, "that thing that we used to do that was like a stupid joke—that's become your whole life?"

Sophie Bearman [00:16:33] To put a cap on your high school years, what are you listening to as you're being sophisticated with these group of friends?

Daniel Handler [00:16:39] Yeah. Our absolute favorite record was Savage by Eurythmics. And this was a big late night listen. And I think the kind of archness of Annie Lennox's tone, particularly in the opening song, "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)" was something that we just found wondrous to hear.

Daniel Handler [00:17:23] That mannered talking of Annie Lennox and then the singing right on top of it. The way the music sounds kind of intentionally shoddy, maybe. The whole thing was really interesting.

Sophie Bearman [00:17:34] And the music video.

Daniel Handler [00:17:35] Yeah. She was a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, which had kind of these interesting layers to it.

Sophie Bearman [00:17:40] Yeah, it's an incredible music video. Listeners should go watch it. You have a housewife who's just going crazy in the monotony of her life, and starts to see a little girl and then see a kind of drag—

Daniel Handler [00:17:54] It's like kind of John Waters, but it's also like, kind of Wes Craven, almost. It feels bonkers.

Sophie Bearman [00:18:02] Yeah, it really does.

Sophie Bearman [00:18:06] And now it's time for a quick break. When we come back, Daniel opens up about a secret that he kept for decades, even from his closest friends. Stay with us.

Sophie Bearman [00:18:15] So you go to college, and I do want to talk about those years as well, because there's a kind of different terror that starts to chase you in nights and then daytime.

Daniel Handler [00:18:39] Yeah. Almost immediately upon arriving at college, I started to have nightmares on an increasingly regular basis, and they felt like a kind of different kind of nightmare. And it was very difficult to talk about. Really the only people who knew were anyone who happened to be sleeping over with me, just kind of crashing on my floor. And they just kept happening. And they were really exhausting me, and they were changing my consciousness in a way of really, really not getting enough sleep and beginning to kind of dread nighttime as they approached. And they proceeded into a kind of seizure and then hallucinations. And eventually my last year in college, I had a huge seizure. And when I woke up, I could not read or write or speak. And I was taken first to the hospital in the town where my college was, and then eventually to a hospital at Yale. I ended up on a psych ward, which was just awful. And, it was very terrifying. It was terrifying for my parents. It was terrifying for my sister. It was bad for my friends. I was treated in a variety of ways that did not work. So I had a lot of testing. I had a lot of therapy, and it was really a huge shadow that was being cast over that whole time. You know, I really began to feel like, oh, is this the end? Like, you know, I'd seen enough movies where the insane asylum is the end of the movie, and I didn't want that to be the end of the movie. And I've learned, which was never suggested to me the whole time that this was going on in college, that the seizures come on when I don't get enough sleep. And so it's something that continues to happen to me. I hallucinate on a pretty regular basis. I have a seizure maybe a couple times a year. I mean, it's something that I carry with me and it's something that is so difficult to normalize that I just don't tell very many people.

Sophie Bearman [00:20:45] Would you describe these nightmares if you're willing.

Daniel Handler [00:20:48] Yeah, I mean, the nightmares were about figures, bald and naked and painted white, who would come to the window of my dorm room and they would take me and they would show me kind of terrible scenes of violence. And sometimes I would kind of be participating, or they would, or sometimes I would just be watching. It's all blurry, the way it goes in a dream. And my hallucinations are naked people painted white, just standing around kind of staring.

Sophie Bearman [00:21:17] How frequently do you see that?

Daniel Handler [00:21:19] I mean, every day. And it's just not—it's not something I think the world can accommodate. And so you just have to kind of walk through them sometimes or, you know, turn your head the other way. Every so often someone will say like, "Are you—what are you looking at?" And I'll be like, "Oh, what? No, nothing." A friend of mine wrote and said, "You know, sometimes when we're talking and you're not making eye contact, now I'll be wondering if you're staring at..."

Sophie Bearman [00:21:55] I mean, this room is the perfect environment. As we've established for...

Daniel Handler [00:22:00] No. It happens when I'm not focused, so it tends to happen when my mind is kind of more adrift, when there's a space, I think, for them to enter. Yeah.

Sophie Bearman [00:22:12] We should make space for the music. It's high time. So, college, what are you listening to as all of this is happening?

Daniel Handler [00:22:19] This is all an introduction to the music of Sun Ra. I mean, I was at a party and someone was playing a Sun Ra record, and I thought it was two records playing at once. But to discover it was one record, that it was both a record that sounded like jazz and a record that sounded like, maybe children in a percussion class was interesting to me, and I just became a huge fan of Sun Ra's music.

Sophie Bearman [00:22:42] Okay, let's take a listen to Enlightenment.

Daniel Handler [00:22:59] Like, I love how this little hi-hat at first sounds just kind of rhythmic, and then you realize it's not quite on and there's nothing else going. He's just sitting there hitting it. And that's more like a seven-year-old who has been handed a drumstick.

Sophie Bearman [00:23:13] It's playful.

Daniel Handler [00:23:14] Yeah.

Sophie Bearman [00:23:15] Tell me about becoming a parent.

Daniel Handler [00:23:18] Well, when a man loves a woman very much.

Daniel Handler [00:23:25] I want all the listeners to lean in. This is unavailable information.

Sophie Bearman [00:23:28] Okay. I walked right into that.

Daniel Handler [00:23:32] About being a parent. I mean, it's a constant pop quiz on the world. Suddenly, everything that you have wanted explained to you your whole life, you are suddenly in a position to explain, and you have not learned anything for the most part about how that works. In fact, when you do know something pretty well and your child asks you, you have this pure delight that makes you realize that the rest of the time you have no idea what you're talking about. But every so often you're able to say, "Oh yes, it's a caterpillar and it goes into a chrysalis. I know this!" But the rest of the time you don't know anything.

Sophie Bearman [00:24:06] So earlier on, we talked about this kind of radical honesty that's important for kids. Adults being vulnerable, telling the truth, discussing the realities of the world. Did your views on that change at all when you became a father?

Daniel Handler [00:24:19] I became more sympathetic to a wider variety of views, which I would like to think would have happened anyway as I grew older. But when I was first starting out publishing children's books, you know, there were a lot of people who are upset by the books. They didn't always ban them, but they didn't like them. And I just always thought, I don't get it, leave me alone. And that is still my conclusion about how we should be treating children's literature and how we should be treating libraries. It's not that we should all be going in there and reading them and then if a book upsets us to remove it. But I understand that urge more. I understand that when there's a noise in the middle of the night, you want to say to your young child that it's nothing and it's fine, and that you're not going to say, "For all we know, we're going to die tonight." That is not, you know, that's not a kind of radical honesty that you share with children. I just—I still don't reach the conclusion of—so we need to do something about it. I just think it's okay to be upset.

Sophie Bearman [00:25:18] We've touched on this a little bit, but why write for kids?

Daniel Handler [00:25:21] I mean, children's literature is so often run in a pedagogical way where kind of dangerous and mysterious material is just automatically suspect. It shouldn't be upsetting. It shouldn't be something that you're struggling to figure out. It shouldn't be alienating. And I think all those things are part of literature and an important part of literature. For instance, a great disappointment to me in "The Flowers of Evil" when I was 12 is that the second half was in French. And I just thought, what a weird choice. And, by the way, I can't read French. And, you know, I was old enough to read whatever it says on the book. I have a copy of that edition and it's pretty clear that it's translated and that the original French poems are in the back. That's not a mystery. But when you're that age, you just skip all those pages before chapter one begins. And so, I like thinking about the kind of naivete, sophisticated enough to try to tackle those poems, but then just naive enough to not even understand what they were. And that is such, I think, a wondrous space. And I think it was really informative for me, not only as a child and a reader, but then to start to write for young people and to think about that space in that way. I really wanted to recreate those kind of magical experiences I had when I was young. And a young person who picks up "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is holding something mysterious.

Sophie Bearman [00:26:50] So we've spoken quite a bit about your writing, but you're also a musician. How have you fit playing music into your life?

Daniel Handler [00:26:56] I mean, most of the music that I play is with The Magnetic Fields. I play the accordion and I get to sit in with that band. And for me, that's really about being near Stephin Merritt, who is the songwriter and leader of the band, and to get to watch someone else do a thing that they do really, really well. When I first met Mr. Merritt, I was just starting "A Series of Unfortunate Events," and he was just starting 69 Love Songs. Both those things are celebrating their 25th anniversary, and both of them took us on a kind of wilder and larger adventure than we thought would happen. And this is one of the songs you can hear my accordion on. And when I listen to it, I think of when we debuted 69 Love Songs. We played four sold out nights at the Knitting Factory, which is a club not that much bigger than the room that we're sitting in now. And we just thought it was the ultimate—we just thought, this is amazing. And then a year later, we were at Alice Tully Hall, and I think of the night when we played the song and what a delight it's been to be working with him.

Sophie Bearman [00:27:58] You chose "The Night You Can't Remember."

Daniel Handler [00:28:00] "The Night You Can't Remember."

Sophie Bearman [00:28:18] Big smile on your face.

Daniel Handler [00:28:20] I just—it makes me remember, I mean, not just performing it, but 95% of that record was recorded in his studio apartment. And I had to be careful when spreading the accordion because the apartment was so cramped that more than once I would kind of spread it open and then I would hit percussion instruments hanging on the wall, and that was not good for the recording process. But yeah, it was, that was a magical time.

Sophie Bearman [00:28:43] So we're coming to a close. We've talked a lot, actually, about your memoir.

Daniel Handler [00:28:47] We have talked a lot.

Sophie Bearman [00:28:49] Which is good! As we should. Was it scary to write?

Daniel Handler [00:28:53] It was a good kind of scary to write. It was largely written during Covid, and so that just felt like a reckless time in that way of, well, I guess maybe we're all going to die so it certainly doesn't matter what I'm going to write on this piece of paper in this room—

Sophie Bearman [00:29:08] Which was divulging a lot of new things.

Daniel Handler [00:29:10] It was. Yeah. I mean, so many things I haven't talked about publicly and some things I haven't talked about privately, really, except to the people very close to me. And, yeah, but it felt like the right kind of scary. I thought, this is where you want to be. And I think you want to be a little scared when you're writing is always what I think.

Sophie Bearman [00:29:29] What music marks what you listen to today, or even when you wrote that book?

Daniel Handler [00:29:35] I listen to a lot of movie soundtrack music when I am working. It's very evocative. And it always has something a little missing from it because it's meant obviously to accompany something else. So this is the "Main Title" from Anatomy of a Murder. A great movie for anyone who is interested. If you ever wondered what the fuss is about Lee Remick, you will know what the fuss is when you will see this movie.

Sophie Bearman [00:30:00] This is the 1959 courtroom classic drama film right?

Daniel Handler [00:30:03] Yeah. And the music is by Duke Ellington. And this is something I listen to all the time.

Sophie Bearman [00:30:10] This is "Main Title."

Daniel Handler [00:30:27] You can hear that it doesn't make sense right away in the music, but it's because you will be watching these beautiful Saul Bass titles and so that's—you're beginning to get a grip on it—as the music kind of gradually finds its way in.

Daniel Handler [00:30:39] Duke Ellington, man. I mean, he's someone I admire and I think is kind of approachable from so many angles that we've talked about in terms of the creative process in this conversation. He was very workman like. He did a million things. He made so much music.

Sophie Bearman [00:31:04] I think you've said your first novel was rejected like 37 times or something in that range before being published. So, do you have any advice for someone who has maybe faced—you're going to hate this—a series of unfortunate events, terrors? But seriously, you know, how do you persist? What's your advice?

Daniel Handler [00:31:25] I mean, my heart goes out to anyone who is in the early part of their creative career. You know, the way that art has tried to fit into capitalism has always been iffy. And I just think you have to try to disassociate yourself from that struggle as much as you can. You're going to have to do some kind of business work. But, I mean, the center of literature and of all art making, I think, is delight. It's enthusiasm. And I think, you know, you have to be loving what you're doing and you have to love it no matter how many people tell you that it's not good. Because, actually, if you are lucky enough to get to a place where you have some visibility in the culture, way more people than 37 people are going to tell you that they don't like it. A lot of people are going to tell you. And so I think that's what people forget, is that it's like, you don't hit that state and then rejection is gone. You hit that state and rejection is courted. And so you have to have delight in what you're doing.

Sophie Bearman [00:32:27] Daniel Handler, thank you so much for sharing your seven songs.

Daniel Handler [00:32:30] Well, thank you for having me.

Sophie Bearman [00:32:31] It was a pleasure.

Daniel Handler [00:32:32] It was.

Sophie Bearman [00:32:58] Life in Seven Songs is a production from The San Francisco Standard. This episode was produced by me, Sophie Bearman, and our senior producer, Jasmyn Morris. Our executive producers are Griffin Gaffney and Jon Steinberg. Nate Tobey is our creative consultant. This episode was mixed by Michelle Lanz. Our theme music is by Kate Davis and Zubin Hensler and Clark Miller created our show art. Our music consultant is Sarah Tembeckjian and our studio engineer is Sean McKenna at Pyramind Studios. You can find this guest's full playlist at sf.news/spotify. And, as a resource, know that you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or message them anytime at rainn.org. That's R-A-I-N-N.org. Thanks for listening and see you next time.