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Just Do It

Daniel Handler


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Published: Sep 25, 2007

Tue., Oct. 2, 8 p.m., $7-$14, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, www.library.phila.gov

Is the alter ego chasing the author, or vice versa? Daniel Handler, creator of the wildly popular A Series of Unfortunate Events children's books, is rhetorically calling his upcoming Free Library talk "Why Does Lemony Snicket Keep Following Me?" We're assuming the implied irritation is a joke, but hey, maybe this studied writer really has a legit reason to be indignant.

Following the completion of his 13-book series — which cheekily related the woes of ill-fated orphan siblings vis-a-vis gothic surroundings, maniacal arch-villains, wry humor and polysyllabic words — Handler has endured all manner of interchangeable, doubtless frustrating post-Lemony queries. Reporters want to know if he's sad to see it end (Sad? Over an ending? Did these people read the books?), or whether he plans to write more children's tales (he does, just not now). Worse, he will probably be referred to as "the alter ego of Lemony Snicket" in parenthetical asides for years to come.

That said, Handler spoke in a Salon.com interview last autumn about a press junket for the Jim Carrey film adaptation of ASoUE, where a hotel bar was decked out in Lemony Snicket decorations, serving story-themed drinks ("Olaf-tinis," perhaps?), but the author himself went by unrecognized and unserved. Whatever impact the stories play on Handler's life, dude clearly maintains a relative degree of personal anonymity, and perhaps is using Snicket for his own wicked devices in keeping his name out there. Still, for the sake of humoring the begrudging "legal, literary and social representative" of some nonexistent Dickensian narrator, let's keep our questions more about Handler's current offering — Adverbs, a novel for grown-ups that focuses on, of all things, love — than about the children's series he offed last summer, eh?