Once, I was at a party that was particularly bad. It was held in broad daylight, at a house in a desirable community reached via highway, so real estate and traffic were the mandatory conversation topics, and I moved quickly through clusters of people talking about square footage and new exit ramps, trying not to let my eyes roll into the back of my head. I made it all the way to the back porch, where some children were hanging around bothering the plants. One, the maybe-6-year-old son of someone I knew, was sitting near the ice chest. I said hey and asked him what was up, in the hopes of a better conversation. I got it.
“Last night I dreamed I was a horse,” he said.
All my life, I get told I’m a child. Of course, it was true for a while. But when my height and weight made adulthood undeniable, it was something still tossed at me in one form or another. I’m a child at heart. I never really grew up. Childhood, whatever precisely that is, should have departed from my mind, and instead, here it is. When I was actually a child, my mother, who remembers this differently, told me what to do if our house caught fire in the middle of the night. This probably would not happen, she said, but if it did, the last thing I would want to do would be to open my bedroom door. Instead, I should press my hands against it, to feel if it was hot. If it was, I should jump out the window. I might break my leg, but breaking my leg was better than the alternative.
I don’t know how many times I went to my bedroom door in the middle of the night to see if I should jump out the window. I never jumped—a small miracle for an imaginative child. I moved my legs in bed, twisting them best I could into broken positions I had learned from cartoons. I couldn’t really bend them like the coyote’s legs, because mine weren’t broken, not yet. I would groan weakly, hoping to attract the attention of the firefighters, the orange glow of my burning house illuminating the poison berries on the lawn. They lay there fallen on the grass all the time, and I used to think about putting them in the blender with some water, or orange juice to mask the taste, but I didn’t really have anyone I wanted to poison, nor could I imagine how to get them to drink it. It did occur to me, though, that one or two of the berries could roll their way into my mouth when I landed there, already broken-legged and now poisoned, too. Still, even then, better than the alternative. This is what I think of when people say I am still a child, moving my legs around, thinking about poisoning people and houses burning down.
One series of children’s books I wrote begins with a poisoning; the other starts things off with a house on fire. Naturally, I get asked why I think such things are suitable for children. This is very easy to answer. It is because I found them interesting as a child and because I still find them interesting now. All the best literature has such things happening. Texts that have survived for thousands of years, which weren’t typed up but inscribed, memorized, or even carved into stone, are about enormous, strange, frightening things. If you had to sum up lasting literature in a single sentence, you could do worse than “I dreamed I was a horse”—prophetic dreams and animal transformations appear much more frequently in the old epics than, say, which neighborhoods have the best schools, for the same reason that it makes better conversation. I like talking to children not because they are children—indeed, that aspect sometimes makes it more difficult—but because they generally have a firmer grasp on what might be interesting to say.
When I started writing books for children, I know what interested me: terrible things happening, like in all the best literature. But I wasn’t sure it would work—that is, that anyone would agree that this was what children ought to read. The first professional person with whom I shared my idea—terrible things happening over and over to orphaned children—was an editor in a bar at the violet hour, and when she said she liked the idea, I was very embarrassed for her; I thought she couldn’t hold her liquor. A few days later, in broad daylight and stone sober, she offered me a contract for four volumes, and I thought at least one of us had gone mad. “Four books?” I said in disbelief to my agent, who reassured me, sensibly, that they’d never publish all four. They published all 13 volumes, and then many more, but I’m still not sure any of us was wrong.
When The Bad Beginning was done, the editor asked what I thought should go on the back of the book, to recommend it to readers. I could not imagine. I walked to a large chain bookstore, squintingly lit, and looked at the backs of all the perky titles children were being offered. Even the good books had smiley sentences on the back, full of exclamation points. I remember looking at the word zany, in zany type, and feeling my heart sink. It was not until I stopped at the pharmacy on the way home, and my eyes fell on all the dire warnings on medical packaging, that I realized the Snicket books didn’t need exclamation points luring readers toward zaniness. They needed deterrents. Before long, The Bad Beginning was published with a pearl-clutching letter from Lemony Snicket on the back, warning readers away: “In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.” This packaging has since been described as sarcastic or, less rudely, reverse psychology, and there’s something to that. But just as one can enjoy a bad movie for reasons other than its badness, the Snicket warning isn’t sarcastic, as surely as it isn’t sincere. It is in that space, or at least I hope it is, in which the hysteria of the sentences, like the melodramatic tropes of the plot, live in mysterious confluence with whomever might be interested.
This is something I return to when I feel pressured to explain or categorize my work, despite being uniquely unqualified to do so. When I look at anything I’ve done, all I see is the stitching: the cribbings of things that inspired me, the countless parts I wish I’d done better, and a few passages that seem like the best I could have done and, even if unshabby, not quite as good as I’d like. The writers I admire most are, of course, much, much better than I am, and I can’t excuse my bouts of ill-fittedness on some deep-set peculiarity—that is, I can’t claim to be as bonkers as Ed Wood or Baudelaire. I am, perhaps, more like the Brothers Grimm, who, of course, did not write any of their tales but wandered around collecting them so that other people might look them over. My novels feel the same to me. I send them out into the world for people to see—young people, mostly, usually the best readers—as if telling them a story, or maybe even just some weird premise, which, if they like, they can carry with them. Last night I dreamed I was a horse. You don’t say. Tell me more.
Excerpted from And Then? And Then? What Else? by Daniel Handler. Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Handler. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
