If you told ten-year old me that this would happen, I would have never believed you.

Lemony Snicket and the world he created where we rooted for the survival of the Baudelaire Siblings was a seminal part of my growing up, to the extent that there was a competition in my primary class to see who could read the series up to the sixth instalment the fastest.

I won. Obviously.

This was something I was all too happy to share with the author, whose real name is Daniel Handler as we sat in -quite literally- a glass box of emotion whilst the Emirates Literature Festival slowly came alive for its second day on a Friday morning. I also had some questions from my students who were also hug fans of the series (we collectively lost our minds when I told them this was happening). However, they discovered it in a different way to how I did: through the Netflix adaptation, so I was also curious to discuss with him the process of ‘discovering’ literature.

He began by mentioning how this was his first time visiting the Middle East, I recommended that he check out Ravi’s, and the rest is a full-circle childhood moment come true:

HL: I know you’re here promoting your autobiography, so I guess what I wanted to start with is why, at this point in your career, you felt it was the right time?

DH: I didn’t really. I tricked myself into it a little bit. I received an email—it was during COVID too—I received an email from a publisher that was doing a new translation of Baudelaire’s poetry, and they wanted to know if I would write a thing for it. It was probably the quickest I ever answered, because I thought, “Quick—before they come to their senses and say, shouldn’t we have a poet?”

And so I started writing about my first encounter with Baudelaire in my local library. I was 12 years old, and I saw a book called The Flowers of Evil. I knew immediately it was a horror novel—I didn’t even have to open it. I took it home, and it turned out not to be a horror novel, but strange poetry.

And I started thinking about that space in which I traffic—when you’re young and you have this curious context, or lack of context, or kind of innocence about reading. You know, I just opened the book and started reading it. I didn’t understand it, of course, but I was drawn to it anyway. I took it back to the library, I brought it back out, I took it back. I had this kind of intrigue with it. But, for instance, one thing that I thought about The Flowers of Evil was that it was too bad that the last half of the book was in French, which I couldn’t read. And I just thought, what kind of author switches halfway through? And, you know, of course, it’s made perfectly clear in the book that it was a translation of French poetry, but I didn’t know that—because I was twelve and I was skipping all these pages.

So, I just started thinking about that space to be in, and then I realized that I wanted to write more about that. And so I called the publisher and said, “Um, is it okay if I write a whole book?” And they said, “Are you still going to do the thing that we asked you to do?” And I said yes.

HL: So slightly off- piste?

DH: Yes! I mean, I’m something of a public writer, but I’m a fairly private person. And it had never occurred to me to write something about my own life. Whenever anyone suggested it, I just thought of kind of tacky memoirs with a line of photographs in the middle, you know?

And I just thought, no one wants that!

but I realized that in talking about different kinds of reading and different ways that you approach literature, I ended up having to kind of explain parts of my life just to illustrate some point. So, before I knew it, I was really writing a whole lot about my own life. It was during heavy lockdown, and so I think that was oddly freeing, because I just thought, maybe the whole world is going to end, so it certainly doesn’t matter what I put on a piece of paper that no one else can enter.

HL: How did you find that process-moving from what you are used to regarding writing-shifting and then writing about the act of reading, but then also bringing in your own life?  Was there a noticeable change in your process, or did it come easily?

DH: Well, it wasn’t a problem of kind of reticence on my part, but I found, just as kind of a craft person, that it was challenging. Because when I write fiction, I have a big, long, redundant draft. It’s terrible. And then I say, “Okay, what is the story really?” And then I kind of throw everything off the ledge that’s not in the story. But when it’s your own life, you know?

And I think I have the relationship that most people have with their own lives, which is that we’re fascinated by it. We think about ourselves all the time, right? We think about our little problems and our egos and things like that. But then it’s also very boring. So I just thought, I don’t know what the real story is. That was the challenging part. It wasn’t so much the personal revelation as: how can I make this not boring?

HL: I completely understand that. Did looking at your own life and weaving it into what the end product ended up being-did it change your perspective on previous works that you had written? Did things start to piece together?

DH: I think so, I mean, part of it, I think, is just getting older. And I’ve met so many writers, and you just begin to understand that the work of so many people that you admire, it is as much their own psychological thumbprint as it is a work of art. So, you know, that—I think that’s just something that I’ve noticed over the years, is that I’ll say, “Oh, in their new novel, the marriage falls apart… I’m guessing they’re in a divorce.”

It made me think, oh, I have been wrestling with these things. Because writing doesn’t feel like therapy to me, but I thought, oh, I was—somewhere, there was part of my consciousness that was instead doing that kind of activity.

HL: When speaking to other writers and gauging that, do you find you have your own personal literary canon? I know it’s a phrase that gets bandied about a lot. As somebody from the UK, ‘canonical work’ is thrown at us at school as we’re growing up. What is your take on that phrase and do you think it’s changed in any way?

DH: The memoir is a lot about building one’s own personal canon. And it’s something, when I—I will teach little writing classes here and there, or talk to a class, and that’s when I talk about it most. It’s when I say that you have to take the work that you admire and figure out kind of how it ticks, so that you can make work that you admire, and you hope other people admire in that same way.

And I had very good mentors for that when I was young and starting out. For me, that feels like kind of the big figuring out of writing: how to start taking what you know and what you love, and having that be paramount. And then I think there’s also—I mean, I think there’s a very necessary conversation about the literary canon, you know?

I think it matters who’s anthologised in The World Anthology of Poetry or something. I think it’s important what you’re taught. I think it’s important what you see represented and what you don’t. I just also think when it’s your own mind—and it’s important to you—you know, your mind is not fair, right? You’re not going to have as many people from this part of the world as you do from this part of the world. You like what you like, what you admire.

I think there’s this level of pretense and performative-ness and self-consciousness around literature that is a blockade. I’m sure you notice this in your teaching, right?

It’s like—nothing looks more boring than a classic work of literature. If you say, “This is a classic,” that is a great way to have almost the entire class fall asleep!

HL: Oh yes! On that then-when you’re working with people now, younger people in your workshops or even adults-how do you think the act of reading has changed or is evolving, especially with the advent of the world being in our pockets now?

DH: I think that for young people, reading is increasingly indistinguishable from other things they’re consuming. It all kind of goes into the same stream. And yes, there are concerns about that—about attention span or what grabs your eyes more—but just on an individual level, when I talk with young people, I like that there seems to be a little less snobbery and protection around literature. You know, I think the reason why works are classics is because people loved them—not because they got into some elite club of being called ‘classics’.

So, when you read Toni Morrison’s Beloved—which is one of my favorite books in the world—and you see it packaged somewhere in a store with a sticker that says “The Absolute Classic Novel,” part of me thinks: “Yes, but it’s really good. It’s scary. It’s searingly moving’

HL: So is it a case of the word “classic” almost becoming reductive?

DH: I think it’s important to poke holes in the kind of armor that literary culture puts around itself. And in some ways, our broader culture is helping with that. There’s increasing transparency about how other things are made—when a movie comes out, you’ve instantly got behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, commentary. You get a fuller sense of the process. When I was growing up, I had no idea what a showrunner was—now everyone knows what a showrunner is.

You’ll hear young people say, “Oh, the second season lagged a bit, but the third really picked up”—that’s a new kind of understand of how things are made. And I like that. I think we can begin to think of literature in the same way—not just this sacred text that fell from the sky. Someone sat down, probably in a library, and worked really hard to make it. It’s not the most interesting to watch, but it’s good to remember.

HL: But with the act of reading, I feel like there’s a particular period, and I don’t know if you feel this, where people just don’t want to read and then they sort of pick it up again. Have you noticed that?

DH: That there’s a particular age when people do—sort of like many things that are really required of you when you’re young. You know, you’re taught to write thank you notes, and then you say, “Why do I want to write a thank you note?” And then you move into an age where you think, “Oh, I’m very grateful to this person and I wish to let them know,” you know, or “They’ve sent me a gift and I want to say something nice.” It’s like muscle memory.

And so I think similarly, you know, reading is taught so badly, so often, there’s so much in school that—and I loved school, and I was a big literature nerd even as a child—but lots of people aren’t. I think they learn, “Oh, a book is something boring.”

I mean, nowadays for young people in America, I think it’s often, “A book is something that is scolding you about some sociopolitical issue about which you, a fourth grader, can’t do anything.”

And if you think that’s what literature is, why would you ever read again?

So, I think it would be nice to have pleasure and enthusiasm remain at the centre of the literary experience, because that’s really what it is, right? I mean, we have these festivals because we read books when we were young, and we grew up to be educators and creators and publishers and all these things. When we start talking about it like that, it has nothing to do with it—that doesn’t feel like a good move.

HL: Is there a book or a piece of literature that you picked up in the past where, at first reading, it either went over your head or you didn’t feel like you connected with it-and then you went back and you thought, “Oh… oh, I get it.”

DH: Yeah, yeah, all of that, yeah. I think, particularly, my generation—we didn’t have a lot of literature that was made for us as teenagers. There wasn’t a YA category when I was growing up at all. So if your reading comprehension was good enough to pick up an adult novel, but your emotional strength and your cultural experience and all these things weren’t there – for example I mean, I remember when I was in fifth and sixth grade, I was reading Agatha Christie, and there were so many things I didn’t understand about, the appearance of adultery, or blackmailing, or all these things that I didn’t really get. I just thought, “What? I don’t get why he murdered that man.”

I mean, that’s the fun of literature. When I was young and I read Madame Bovary, I thought, “Oh, this is about how you should place passion above all else.” And then the older you get, you think, “Oh no, it’s actually about how reckless that is. And how it’s all about money.”

You know, all these things that when you’re young, you think there’s nothing-money is not at all relevant to a love story. And then when you get married, you think, “Oh… it is, actually.”

That’s-I mean, that’s another way in which I think a book can become a classic: you read it and you have a certain kind of appreciation for it. I think children’s literature certainly works that way, definitely. You know, you read these things and you notice things you never did before.

HL: Do you find that people who have read A Series of Unfortunate Events say the same thing– Have people said the same thing to you about the series-like, “Reading it back, I noticed this and this and this”?

DH: I mean, many, many young people are introduced to at least the names or ideas of different authors and literary things through the original Series of Unfortunate Events, so that makes me proud-that there are more children picking up literature when they’re 12 than I did.

And yeah, I mean, it’s… it’s difficult to talk about without sounding very corny, but it has this kind of deep honour to be part of that corner of the mind, you know? That people think about me, and then they want to reread me ten years later and see what they think about it.

DH: Well, I mean, I’ll be honest-I’m one of them.  I grew up absolutely loving A Series of Unfortunate Events. There was a competition in my school to see who could read all of the books the fastest. And I remember-I felt so bad for our librarian- we were mobbing her every day because I think they only had books one to six-

DH: Oh, my goodness….

HL: Honestly, we would go in every day and say, “Where’s the next one? Where is it?!” Actually, when I went back and I reread them in preparation for this, the ones that I had-I thought, this is really dark.

Then I thought back to my own reading for the first time as a child. I think I was just so desperate to find out what was going to happen to the siblings that I was like, “That person’s passed away, this person’s passed away, that person’s had a horrible thing happen to them.”, I don’t remember registering it that much. I mean, is that a common thing?

DH: I think it’s quite common. And I think part of it is that you’re young, and so-just as you didn’t pay too much attention to the adults in your life and what might be going on in their lives-you know, it’s not until you’re older that you think, My mother made me lunch every day for years and years. When you’re young, even if you’re taught to say thank you, you don’t have a grip on that.

And I think similarly, even though the narration is by Lemony Snicket, you’re at child-level things. And so those things-yeah, people don’t notice them.

HL: Do you find that it was sometimes a challenge to balance the darker elements of what happens to your characters- particularly the Baudelaire children – was it difficult to strike the balance between what happens to them in a traumatic sense versus their sense of adventure and curiosity, and the fact that they all have aspects that they’re passionate about?

DH: I mean, I like to think that I have spent enough time in the world of those books to kind of know what their boundaries are. And so I don’t think—you know, I’m asked this a lot: Were there three hundred things that you wanted to do to these children that they wouldn’t let you?  I know that wasn’t what you were asking, but it’s quite related to it.

And I think, you know, there are lots and lots of people who think some book or other crosses some line. That hasn’t ever happened to me. It never crossed my line, and it was never difficult for me.

HL: Within the digital age, what do you think about the way storytelling is approached now, in the world we’re in?

DH: I don’t really think about it in terms of my own work. For me, the delight is that there are still people who are excited about my work. That’s a rare privilege—to be a writer and to meet people you don’t know personally who have read your work. It’s a rarity for most writers.

And I’ve had this very strange experience of getting to go to the far corners of the world—and by that I mean as far from my own world as possible—and to sit down and have anyone be interested in what I’m interested in. That’s a thrill.

So, I don’t know that I can really translate that into the broader question of modern storytelling. But I love going to places I don’t know and seeing what people are up to. For example, I went to a poetry reading last night that was part of the festival. And even though it was in a language I didn’t understand—and I can’t pretend I had any deep appreciation of it—I still enjoyed it. I liked how it felt familiar, as someone who’s attended a lot of poetry readings, and also how it felt unfamiliar. I liked thinking about all of those stories bumping together.

Dubai is a very dramatic example of new things coming to a place, but that’s happening all over the world. And I love that. I love that we can now be influenced by things previous generations would never have had access to. That’s pretty exciting.

HL: Are there any literary festivals or events you’ve been part of that really surprised you? Either in the sense that you didn’t expect to connect with the local or national literature in the way that you did-or just places you really enjoyed?

DH: It’s all delicious to me! I like feeling like an outsider. I like work that is off-putting in some way. So last night, I didn’t mind that someone was reading out loud in a language I didn’t understand at all. It’s nice to be reminded that the world isn’t just for you. And I think, particularly if you’re from the region of the world I’m from, there’s a lot of catering to American and English interests. I like being outside of that. That’s a thrill to me.

And then I also like taking whatever literature I can find and bringing it home. I’ll probably leave here with seven or eight books by authors with whom I’m unfamiliar with-and I’ll dive into those. Meeting them, reading their work-that’s really interesting to me.

HL: I feel like a lot of young people now are discovering A Series of Unfortunate Events through the Netflix series first and then coming to the books afterwards. I was wondering how you feel about that shift compared to those of us who read the books first, then saw the film, and later the series?

DH: I think people have very different experiences with the series, and that’s one of the reasons I love literature so much: it’s so individual. Some young people read all the books straight through as part of a school contest. Some read a couple and then move on with their lives, and may return to them. I’ve met many families who said, “We made sure everyone read the books before watching the show,” and others who had never even heard of the show, but picked up the books and fell into them-and that’s such a joy.

All the ways that can go are interesting. For me, what is especially gratifying about the television show-and I was involved with it for a while-was to meet families who said, “Every Thursday, we’d watch a few episodes together.” That felt akin to reading, in the sense that it became a shared experience. But watching a show you all love with your friends or family is also a beautiful cultural experience. It’s not really a literary one-but it’s still meaningful.

So it was fun to be a part of a different kind of cultural appreciation.

HL: How did you find the process of shifting from being the author of the series to then being involved with the Netflix series, and then bringing it to streaming?

DH: It was really hard! It’s difficult, television and film is really expensive. Like, the content of it is expensive in a way that it just isn’t in a book. You know, if you rewrite a scene or you say, “Well, now I’m going to put them on top of the mountain,” that doesn’t cost anybody any more money. And television has a certain kind of system which they’re used to.

Very early on, they came and they said, “You know, television shows always have a hero set.” You know, it’s the bridge of the Enterprise, it’s the police station, or it’s the diner where they hang out. It’s the apartment of the hero. They’re there all the time.

And we said, “Well, in this story, they go to a new place, and they don’t go back there.” You know, it’s not always destroyed in their wake, but they don’t return. And that’s a much bigger problem. No one at my publishers ever said, “Why don’t they go back to the Reptile Room? You made that Reptile Room.” You know? But Netflix said, “So we’re going to build a huge room full of reptiles, and then we’re just going to show it for a couple of hours, and then we’re never going see it again? That’s not how we do things here.”.

HL: Is it mad seeing your iterations come to life in that way?

DH: Yes, it’s very strange, because everyone’s working and you’re not in charge, you know? There’s people who know how to do things that you don’t know how to do. So just to watch people running around, you know, with branches of a tree or fixing the sleeves on somebody’s costume.

HL: And just trusting them with the aspects of your story as well?

DH: You just have to. Right? There’s no other choice. You can’t do everything yourself!

HL: After reading the books for me, the film came out and I know that you were involved from script writing side, but I wanted to ask if you had any input with the casting. Because I watched it back and the cast for the film is insane!!

DH: I know!

HL: I mean, you had Meryl Streep, you had Billy Connoly, Timothy Spall, Jim Carrey!

DH: Casting is a tricky conversation. It’s fun to be in that room. And it’s – I mean, I find it personally always fun about other movies to learn, “Oh, it was almost this person until the last minute.” You know, this detective was a big thing with this entirely different actor. And that was a fun part of the scriptwriting process, too.

In the film, for instance, there was a part that was going to be taken by Emma Thompson, so we wrote it so it would be attractive to Emma Thompson. Then she couldn’t do it, and so then for a while it was going to be taken by Queen Latifah.

HL: No way?!

DH: Yes! Then we had to take all these lines designed for Emma Thompson, you know, and none of them sounded good with Queen Latifah. And it isn’t because one of them is better than the other or something- they’re both strong actresses. Then neither of them were in the film, so there was a lot of that going on. Casting is fun, I think I’m impressed with good casting people. Having done now a bunch of projects, that’s fun when someone walks in and then they list an actor and each way you think, “Oh, it would be like that if they were in it. It would be like that.” Like, that feels like a fun competition.

HL: Is that something that you would want to more of, depending on what other projects come up?

DH: What was important to me in the film—and it was important to me in the television show, and it was almost impossible in the film, and it was difficult in the television show—but the Baudelaires are never described visually very much.

And, in fact, some publishers use different illustrations of them-Brett Helquist-and it’s often so that the people look more like the people who are living in whatever country that we’re in.

I really wanted the cast to be as diverse as possible and for the first season, there was a stronger dedication to that, and it kind of petered out. It was a surprisingly uphill battle, but I kept saying, everyone in the world now has relatives who have a different skin tone than maybe-which is no longer anything unusual, it’s no longer anything remarkable.

No child is going to say, “I don’t understand how that could possibly be the uncle.” You know? No one’s going to say that.

So, if there were ever another adaptation, I mean, to make it look as much like a world of fluidity as possible, I think, would be exciting.

HL: And lastly, what is next on the cards for you – in terms of projects or things you’re excited about be it with literature or just in general?

DH: I’m working on a Snicket stage project, which I’m very excited about. And then I’m also working on a big fiction project for adults. I spent most of last year at Oxford on a fellowship, doing research for this project. So I did all this research in beautiful libraries, and now it’s just beginning to kind of come together. That’s waiting for me.

HL: I bet Oxford was beautiful!

DH: I mean, it was an incredibly dreamy experience.

HL: It’s like being in a time capsule, isn’t it?

DH: Yes – And to think about how beautiful old buildings filled with books kind of make you into a better reader. I was just spending five and six hours a day in the library reading and taking notes. I hadn’t done it like that for a long time. And to just think, “oh, this is like a complete immersion into what I like to do”-it’s very delightful.