Louis Hynes and Malina Weissman in A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Credit:Joe Lederer When Handler started writing Imaginary Comforts, he didn't know what it was. "My father died. The rabbi did a wonderful job, but after she left I thought, what if she hadn't, and then I noticed I'd written 'rabbit' instead of 'rabbi' on the calendar. I wasn't in any state to do any real work, but I could write for, like, 20 minutes a day. When I realised it was going to be a play I had to find a way to break it to my wife because she hates the theatre even more than I do." Despite his qualms - "There's nothing more embarrassing than a bad play" - Handler says the experience has been the best possible. "In many ways it's every writer's dream - I don't think anyone's ever read me as closely as the actors did. I read all my own work out loud to myself so it was really nice to just listen. It made me think, 'Oh, I should always do that. I should just hire people to sit in my living room and read my work aloud' … but I don't think I could actually scam that. Also, I feel so tender about my first drafts that I'd probably have to kill them afterwards." (A note for the process-oriented: Handler writes long-hand on index cards in cafes, then types them up at the end of that day. Is it weird that I want to know what happens to the cards? "I keep the cards … they go in a plastic box and then it goes into a basement for some poor grad student.") Handler is most famous as Lemony Snicket, narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, his 13-volume children's series published everywhere with print-runs to infinity. It's been adapted for screens big and small - the TV series, now on Netflix, credits Handler as writer and executive producer. I came to his writing via his first novel The Basic Eight.

Daniel Handler's books have long gestation periods: "I've gotten very good at putting things away." Credit:Meredith Heuer It might have been classified young adult fiction, had YA been the thing it now is, but there would have been sticking points, namely sex, murder and absinthe. The Basic Eight is voiced by Flannery Culp, affluent snarky teen of my heart. Accused of murdering her crush with a croquet mallet, she is rewriting her journal as a true-crime tell-all. Flan is the queen of unreliable narrators; in her voice I hear Handler's later teen girl heroines: outraged Gwen (We are Pirates) auteur Min (Why We Broke Up) and junior sleuth Moxie (All the Wrong Questions). A Series Of Unfortunate Events is now screening on Netflix and is based on Handler's 13-volume children's series. Credit:Netflix I ask him where he found his authentic inner teenage girl voice: "My sister has always been important to me, and I had a gang of high school friends who were mostly girls - that's probably where it started."

In college, he majored in English literature and American studies, and read a lot of female writers: Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, Lorrie Moore, Maxine Hong Kingston - "I think that was the beginning of a feminist consciousness." Cole, the narrator of All The Dirty Parts, is at the zygote stage of a feminist consciousness. The book is written in short fragments, rants, fantasies, conversations pertaining to what is usually deemed unmentionable. Cole is sex-obsessed, fuelled by porn, going after girls, as well as experimenting with his male best friend. He is alternately funny and offensive and pitiable, but always articulate and real. Handler thought he was writing a young adult novel, his publisher thought otherwise, resulting in a delayed publication. "There's a traditional narrative about sex particularly for young people where it just has to be regretted in some way - not that Cole doesn't end up regretful. People like to talk about how content is policed in the States and that's very true. But I also think there's a lot of writers who just don't want to [write about sex] and that irks me because they're supposedly immersing themselves in the teenage experience." If Handler wasn't real he might have had to invent him. Some fun facts to finish on ... He plays the accordion (with the Magnetic Fields). He has a friend who lives in Dashiell Hammett's old apartment. He thinks adolescence follows a noir trajectory. He lives with his illustrator wife, Lisa Brown, and their teenage son who's showing every sign of following in the family tradition ("We hoped it would skip a generation"). Handler is a regular Iceberger, a member of San Francisco's Dolphin Club, which started in the 19th century.

"I think of it like drinking - anyone who does it less than you is a wimp and anyone who does it more than you obviously has a problem … Everyone who doesn't swim like I do thinks I'm crazy." (Does he wear a wetsuit? "No! Wetsuits are frowned upon. Wetsuits are for dilettantes.") He's never not working, but doesn't see what he does as a job. "It's way easier than making coffee." Speaking of, mine's gone cold and Handler is touching his earlobe, so I press stop on the recorder, draw my last stress asterix, and send him back out to the wilds of the upper Haight. A Series of Unfortunate Events is now screening on Netflix. Simmone Howell writes YA fiction.