bad advice for good people.

Here's what I love about Daniel Handler: He sneaks up on you.

I've been reading You're a Horrible Person, But I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice. This is an excellent book for summer days when you are too hung over or otherwise affected to muddle through a novel, when all you really want is something hilarious to read out loud to your companion as you loll around on a beach towel and pour yourself in and out of the water. All your favourite funny folks are here: Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Rainn Wilson, Samantha Bee, Janeane Fucking Garofalo, AND MORE. And they each have a whole lot of awful advice to dole out to their unwitting audience. It's like reading Dear Abby if Abby had been drunk and cranky, which is pretty much my idea of journalistic heaven.

Anyway, Daniel Handler's section starts out sort of disappointingly. He spends most of the chapter giving snappy answers to stupid questions. Example:

Dear Daniel,
Now that we have a black president, is it okay to be racist again?
Terry R. Eureka, CA

Dear Terry,
No.
Love,
Daniel Handler

It goes on like this for several pages. And yes, it's funny, but it's one trick pony-ish. And then. Just when you're starting to get a little annoyed, he just whips it out.

Dear Daniel,
How do you break up with your boyfriend in a way that tells him, "I don't want to sleep with you on a regular basis anymore, but please be available for late night booty calls if I run out of other options"?
Lily
Charlotte, NC

Dear Lily,
The story's so old you can't tell it anymore without everyone groaning, even your oldest friends with the last of their drinks shivering around the ice in their dirty glasses. The music playing is the same album everyone has. Those shoes, everybody has the same shoes on. It looked a little like rain so on person brought an umbrella, useless now in the starstruck clouded sky, forgotten on the way home, which is how the umbrella ended up in her place anyway. Everyone gets older on nights like this.

And still it's a fresh slap in the face of everything you had going, that precarious shelf in the shallow closet that will certainly, certainly fall someday. Photographs slipping into a crack to be found by the next tenant, that one squinter third from the left laughing at something your roommate said, the coaster from that place in the city you used to live in, gone now.

...Handler goes on for another page or so, and it's all so heartbreaking and evocative that you just want to crawl inside it and die a little. It's especially poignant because is it ever NOT what you expected in a book this funny and pointless. You'll be so overcome you might tumble right into the campfire, I'm warning you. A Betty Draper-esque fainting couch may be in order. I'm not sure if they make an outdoor fainting couch, but they ought to.

Hang the DJ.

I think Daniel Handler might be one of the most overlooked writers of our time. You might know him better as Lemony Snicket, and up until a couple of years ago that was how I knew him too. I didn't hate the Lemony Snicket books, but I sure didn't love them like so many people did. And then a colleague told me I should read The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, who, it turned out, was Lemony's alter ego. (or vice versa?) I loved The Basic Eight. It had all the themes I always look for--private school ridiculousness, intense highschool friendships, murder, psychological damage, sarcastic upscale jokes, croquet, heroines named Flannery. You really should read it. The prologue to his novel Watch Your Mouth is also required reading for all librarians: you will never think about LC Subject Headings the same way again. I think he's one of those too clever for his own good kind of writers, the kind that might stumble a little from time to time, but when they're on, they are ON, you know?

Anyway, I just stumbled on him again in Heavy Rotation, an essay collection of pieces by writers writing about the albums that have meant the most to them. Handler, God love him, writes about Savage by the Eurythmics. I could take or leave the Eurythmics (whenever I hear Here Comes The Rain Again on the radio I'm always certain, for the first eight bars, that it's actually going to be Sunglasses At Night), but the way he talks about what music can mean to you when you're young just got right into my heart:

"When you're seventeen you can drive around at midnight listening to anything and your life will change. You will quit your job or your lover, dance with someone or miss them, see someone for the first time or the last time, realize that you're not alone or you are, that you're connected or dis-, that you aren't the person you thought you were, or it turns out you are, or someone else is or nobody is or everybody, which means the world isn't fair and life isn't worthwhile or it is and it is, and all the while it's a classic or an obscurity, a gem or an embarrassment, cred or poseur, Ocean Beach or Ocean Rain, Giant Steps or Little Creatures, OK Computer, Computer World, The Freewheelin' Suzanne Vega, Achtung Baby it's Cold Outside, and then it begins to seem like a joke after all."

SWOOOON.

Heavy Rotation is totally worth a gander for a handful of lovely essays like Handler's. Also my secret writer husband Joshua Ferris talking about Ten, by Pearl Jam, because he feels exactly the same way I do (and probably the way all my friends do too): angry they sold out even though we knew they would all along, and wildly, passionately nostalgic.



Awwww, 1992 was a banner year.