Daniel Handler Photo: ULF ANDERSEN
For 25 years, Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, has taken young readers into a mysterious and wonderful world of his creation in books like A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Now, for the first time, Handler pulls back the curtain to welcome readers into his own world to show us how his life-long love of reading and respect for the curiosity and openness of children led him to become a writer.
And Then? And Then? What Else? is a celebration of books and of words and of imagination.
Handler has been entranced by books and reading since he was a child, he tells RNZ's Afternoons.
"The first book I bought with my own money, and by my own money, I mean, of course, money my parents gave me for no good reason was The Blue Aspic by Edward Gorey. I walked into a bookstore called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco.
"I held that book in my hand. I was completely mystified by it, and I bought it, and I took it home, and I read it over and over again."
This "strange, obsessive" book established in him a taste for literature with "melodramatic plots and a strange, dark tone".
It would be "difficult for me to overstate the importance of reading in my own life", he said.
"I think that to connect oneself to the endless current of transcribed consciousness from the history of literature has always been powerful for me.
"And so, in a time of joy, I like to read a little bit before I go to bed, and a time of sadness, I like to maybe not leave my bed until reading a book has made me feel better, and there's always something new to read. There's always something new to discover."
Feature interview: Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket
His latest book is billed as part memoir, part inspiration for aspiring writers. Although a large part of what he does, and why it works, remains mysterious, he said.
"It's like a locked-room mystery, I'm right there, but I don't necessarily know how it works."
Handler's bestselling series of 13 novels A Series of Unfortunate Events as Lemony Snicket is about three orphaned children who experience increasingly terrible events after their parents die and their home burns. Snicket acts as the orphans' narrator and biographer.
He believes part of the books' appeal is their being rooted in reality, he said.
"So many works of children's literature come from a pedagogical, from a kind of moralistic, preachy place in which when you behave well, you'll be rewarded. And anyone who spent, you know, 30 seconds on planet Earth will know that that's not actually how things go."
Although raised in America, his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
"I was raised with an understanding of the world that is chaotic and troubled, and I wouldn't know how to convey the world otherwise in a book."
As his Lemony Snicket books grew in popularity, he would appear at more and more signings he said, the book stores all had a "vomit plan", he said.
"I would get there, and they would say; 'here's where you're going to be sitting during the signing, here's where we're going to keep the books, and here is the bucket of sawdust that we have in case a child vomits'.
"I thought what a weird thing, and then the fifth time a child vomited and the bookstore didn't have a plan, I began to think, you just have to have this. You have to have it like you have to have rags in a restaurant."
He is a heavy user of the notebook, he said, cheap pharmacy ones, not the flash leather-bound kind.
"I'm intimidated by fancy notebooks people give me all time. Writerly notebooks that they think are interesting. And when you have that leather cord that you unwind, and then you open it and there's parchment paper, it feels like it's made from human skin sometimes.
"I don't think I've been given one, I should add, that has been made from human skin, but that just gives me that paranoia."
Whatever pops in to his head goes in the notebook, he said.
"When the notebook is full, I type it up into a document and then, this is the very sad, spooky part, I print out the document, and I cut out all the individual things, I put them on index cards."
These cards are then spread out on the dining table and arranged into some kind of structure, he said.
"Then I take little stacks of them with me to libraries and to cafes, and I sit and put them in order and try to write something kind of touching all those bases.
"And that's how I work. I can't imagine that this information is helpful to too many people, but I do think it's fun to keep a notebook and to write down what occurs to you or what you overhear, even if you're not a writer, even if this is not something you're doing for some process, I think the idea of keeping track of things that your mind is noticing feels like a kind of wondrous and restful activity to me."
Handler has an affinity with New Zealand, he said.
"I think San Francisco is perhaps the closest in America one can get to certain aspects of New Zealand. We have a foggy culture, we have a seaside culture, and we have the same kind of stubborn artists who like to make their thing, and they're not that interested in how many people like it.
"And I think that has drawn me to the music of New Zealand in particular, but even your literature, Janet Frame - who doesn't like Janet Frame?"