It's hard to talk about The Basic Eight, Daniel Handler's debut novel and the only one he wrote before publishing A Series of Unfortunate Events as his better-known alter ego Lemony Snicket, without spoiling it. Which is a shame, because it's a book that I hold dear to me, and it's also one that I refuse to spoil. So we're going to open this up with a long, redacted passage, and I'm just going to hope that it can hold its meaning even after half of it has been removed.  

(Emphases, as well as redactions, my own.)

The Basic Eight is a high school novel. It is not aimed at high schoolers, though discovering and reading it in high school was profoundly meaningful for me—albeit disturbing. It was my introduction, in a fuller and darker sense than the admittedly-surprisingly-deep Series of Unfortunate Events, to Daniel Handler's threefold obsessions: moral dilemma, blithe misinterpretation, and combining the two with such a virtuosic and disorienting writing style that reality and illusion intermingle, and it starts to feel like being alive is just a series of the world you thought you knew rippling and changing like a mirage. A card trick that would astound and amaze were it not so upsetting, so menacing, so infuriating and anxiety-inducing, so pit-of-the-stomach nauseating.

Flannery Culp is in jail for murder. The murder she committed was so spectacular that it drew in a media frenzy—enough of one that a publishing company has decided to release her senior-year diary as a true-crime thriller. From her jail cell, Flan—pronounced "flan"—rereads and edits her own story for public release, though she spends just as much time complaining about the media's interpretation of her, particularly where right-wing hacks and pop psychologists are concerned. And she warns us in advance that, should she decide that what she wrote was not what she actually felt, or what she's decided she ought to have felt in retrospect, she'll have no qualms about changing up the story altogether, to serve either her needs or our own.

At times, Flan is as pretentious a seventeen-year-old as you've ever met—insufferably so. At times, she is righteously outraged about the monstrous idiocy (and worse) of the adults in her life, both during this year of her life and after her incarceration. And at times, she is deeply, deeply unsettling, a combination of calculated and furious and cold and vicious and just plain unhinged. What's unsettling isn't that she is capable of being these things. It's that, the more she dips into these abrupt and dark and shocking places, the more you wonder how much of the rest you can believe. The more you wonder how much is happening without your realizing it—how much of her seemingly radical honesty is actually just another layer of manipulation.

Yet despite all that, somehow, you never once walk away feeling like the talking heads might have a point.

That queasy combination is the point. Flan is Handler's Platonic ideal of an adolescent: she's miserable, she's confused, she's feeling all manner of conflicting feelings, and she's surrounded by horrible people, which of course brings out all of her worst and most horrible tendencies. She cannot be trusted to do good. Yet the adults who surround her, the people whose responsibility it is to help her become what she ought to become, betray her in every possible manner: you have the misguided and apathetic, you have the asshole disciplinarians, you have the genuinely predatory, and, finally, you have the ones who mean well and can do well, but who either can't help enough, or who—because of all the worse ones—Flan simply cannot trust.

Daniel Handler is not a big fan of stating his themes or philosophies outright, but one seems to be: it is the job of authority to see clearly, and to act upon that clarity. And abuse of authority begins with an inability or an unwillingness to see others fairly or correctly. It is one thing to act uncertainly, or to have doubts about whether what you're doing is right, because you don't know as much as you wish you did; it is another thing altogether to act with conviction when you're much too foolish to deserve the power that you wield. 

(On some level, this is perhaps a very Jewish way of thinking—Jack Miles' God: an Autobiography revolves around the idea that the Old Testament God tells a tale of an Authority convinced that he comprehends humankind just because he created it, and who slowly comes to terms with the idea that only humanity has the right to tell its own story. Handler's Judaism is always present, invariably stated out loud, but never commented on further than that, in part because it feels like Handler always wants to subvert his own authority as best he can.)

In Daniel Handler stories, there are rarely clear-cut Forces of Good. There are only confused and uncertain individuals, most of whom are capable of doing terrible things, and then there are blindly confident ones, nearly all of whom are guaranteed to do terrible things.

In A Series of Unfortunate Events, adults are just as destructive in their ignorance; even the good ones, invariably, fall short. And while the Baudelaire orphans at the center of the series start out seeming like the intelligent, charming, well-intentioned foils to the rest of the world, they increasingly find themselves needing to make morally ambiguous decisions, often hurting innocent people and loved ones in the process. Towards the tail end of their saga, they increasingly find that they, or their parents, or their noblest guardians, resemble the worst of the villains they've encountered. The series culminates in an amazingly nuanced retelling of the Garden of Eden, in which original sin is replicated, a poison sweeps across humanity (to which an antidote may or may not have been provided), and the Baudelaires sail into the unknown, more aware of the buried secrets and tragic legacies and ethical uncertainties inherent to life than they've ever been before.

This is as close to a moral as Handler has ever come—likely as close to one as he'll ever get. It is impossible to ignore how difficult and how hard it is to be human, he suggests, so the only resolution is to simultaneously pursue wisdom and accept that you will never be wise. So it's fitting, or perverse, that The Basic Eight tells a somewhat inverted version of the story in Unfortunate Events, in which things only get worse and worse for a young woman until she commits the worst of all possible crimes, and we are left as uncertain as she is about the nature of her actions. The only interpretations we are left with are conspicuously wrong. 

There is another theme running through the center of the story, however, which mirrors its obsession with tragic operas. The Basic Eight is a book about betrayal. And it is Handler's deft knack for portraying it, and the relentless way in which he returns to it again and again, that makes him so good at getting us to feel outrage—joyful outrage at his own stylistic trickery, and furious outrage at each and every character who does one of his protagonists wrong. (If there's a single thing that got people invested enough in A Series of Unfortunate Events to make it a spectacular bestseller, it's the way that the miseries it inflicts are so unfair that you find yourself hellbent on letting these kids see some fucking vindication.)

Betrayal sometimes takes the form of lies and manipulation, concealed emotions and hidden schemes. It sometimes means characters acting with disregard for one another, and knowingly allowing each other to come to harm. Perhaps the profoundest form of betrayal is self-delusion, a person's inability to come to terms with themselves, in a way that winds up screwing with reality itself. (Handler is not at all Lynchian, but the plot of Lost Highway—in which a man murders his wife and then goes into such denial about it that he literally transforms into another person—feels like it could have easily come straight from a Daniel Handler novel.) But the form of betrayal that Handler returns to more than any other, the one that defines both Unfortunate Events and The Basic Eight down to their core, is the willful replacement of a real person with a false narrative, sometimes for Machiavellian or ideological purposes but oftentimes for sheer convenience's sake.

As a child, I struggled painfully with my sense of self—not just with knowing or understanding myself, but with my fear that my private experiences and feelings were somehow false or misleading and inaccurate, and that other people's shallowest interpretations of me were truer than my own experience of myself. As an adult, I have learned that this remains one of my deepest struggles: to trust myself enough to know when to ignore what other people think of me and when to listen, and to recognize that people's motives color their perception of me, sometimes to the point of bad faith.

It is hard to be vulnerable and inarticulate and uncertain and still trust yourself. It's hard even when you have people in your life who believe in you, who trust you, who encourage you to have faith in yourself. It is vastly harder when you are confronted with people who are as confident as you are doubting, as strident as you are vulnerable, as articulate as you are wordless, and whose main point is: you're wrong. And there are countless types of people who treat others this way: the arrogant blowhards who are so certain of their rightness that they see "conversation" as a way to pick a fight; the narcissists who think of others purely in terms of utility and convenience; the nihilistic and power-hungry sorts who couldn't care less about the truth, and care only about what they can get away with. Until you've encountered something better, it's hard to believe that something better could exist, because even your hope for "better" is dependent on trusting yourself enough that you let hope matter. And coming to that place of certainty gets trickier with each and every person who'd rather keep you UNcertain, because it makes you easier for them to handle.

There's a reason why the language we use to describe emotionally unhealthy relationship revolves around flavors of misperception and betrayal. Gaslighting is the most flagrant example: to not only lie to someone, but to convince them that they can't trust their own perceptions, is to shatter whatever genuine feeling lies within them, replacing something messy and formless and true with a paper-thin falsehood that persists simply because it's concrete. If someone tells you that your memories are wrong, that your senses are wrong, they are throwing down a gauntlet: agree with them, no matter how upsetting their version of "the truth" seems to be, and you get to share reality with them. You get to believe that at least you two live in the same world, and that they fundamentally do love you and care about you—or at least mean well. Disagreeing with them requires you to simultaneously accept that you may never see the world the same way as them, or agree upon a singular interpretation of events, while positing that they are actively, perniciously, constructing a narrative which they know to be fake, for the singular purpose of hurting you or destroying your sense of self.

It's the implicit meaning behind the classic child-abuser line: "No one will ever believe you." People won't believe you because your abuser, not you, holds authority. They, not you, have the ability to put forth a seemingly-authoritative truth. They have the right to declare what's true and what's not, whereas you are too misguided or too ignorant or too untrustworthy to know what's true from what isn't. You have no choice but to accept their authority, accept their judgment, accept what they decide should and shouldn't happen... and accept, beneath all that, the idea that you should not trust yourself, because you don't deserve to be trusted. Not even by you.

(A friend and I were discussing, recently, twisted logic of abuse: the way that "I'm punishing you because you don't understand me because you don't care about me" is a Möbius strip that posits the victim as the abuser; the way that an abuser gets upset at you for having been upset by them; the way that calling them out immediately yields I just had a bad day, is that not allowed, but calling them out tomorrow yields Are you still on that? Why can't you let things go? On some level, these are narratives wherein one person's feelings are honored while the other's are disregarded, but on another level, these are all cases where one person's clear-cut lie negates the other's messy truth. And it leads, in all cases, to intense doubt on the part of the person being abused, to the point where they often start to feel anxiety just for feeling upset at all, hating themselves for daring to imagine a story that contradicts the party line.)

The line that Daniel Handler likes to the, the tightrope that he tries to walk over and over, is where a difficult and unflattering truth meets a simple and unflattering lie. It's not that the people he writes about are good people, or that they haven't done terrible things. It's that, whoever they are and whatever they've done, there is still a truth to them—however unfathomable or unknowable or just plain unknown—and lies, at the very least, won't help. Adolescents are fucked-up and confused and awful and scared... and you can either see them truthfully, you can at least attempt to perceive who and what they are and why they do the things they do, or you can reduce them to something simple enough that judging them or punishing them or solving them becomes simple too, and in the process do more damage to them than you can possibly fathom. 

The Tanakh or Old Testament is, in part, a tale of judgment: a series of stories about what it means to judge, about the right to judgment, about what happens when judgment is too swift or too harsh or too unwise. Learning to distinguish good from evil is what makes humanity deserve punishment, for they are now able to comprehend the consequences of their own actions; however, the potential to distinguish good from evil is different from knowing how to do it, which leads to a saga of people doing terrible things to one another and making terrible decisions, even as their creator gradually realizes that destroying cities and sending floods is not really his call to make. The right to pass judgment is a terrible thing; it is what makes us godlike, the Tanakh said, and it is also the root of every awful thing that we will ever do (and it's why God too can be terrible).

Handler's second novel, Watch Your Mouth—by far the oddest thing he's ever written—starts out as an opera, then transforms into a twelve-step program halfway through. It's about incest and murder and Jewish golems, but it is just as much a story about a young man trying to make sense of his life, and of a traumatic experience so bizarre he can scarcely comprehend it, and who can only think to reduce it to a well-known narrative structure, no matter how melodramatic or facile. It is a story about stories, about interpretations, about the idea that every story is an attempt to interpret something that might not be interpretable. Just as The End, which is the final volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is really about how narrative endings are untrustworthy and arbitrary, Watch Your Mouth starts off as the kind of outrageous story that your friend tells you, over drinks, about their summer, and ends on a more ambiguous note:

I tell myself sometimes that Daniel Handler is perhaps my favorite novelist simply because he manipulates language in ways that continue to astound me.¹ I sometimes disregard how deeply they affect me, or how much their messages and ideas have set in. In part, this is because Handler is so playful and tangential with his meanings that I don't take them at face value, or don't notice them for what they are; in part, it's because his books are so blatantly entertainments that it feels like taking them seriously, or reducing them to... well, exactly what I'm reducing them to here... is missing the point.

But on some level, I think, Handler writes the way he writes because he believes what he believes, and tells the stories that he tells because they deal with his suspicions about certainty and storytelling, big-picture ideas and capital-T Truth. His characters are storytellers and liars; they are hurt because of the stories others tell, and because of the stories they tell, and because of things which aren't stories that they turn into stories anyway.

Flannery Culp is a wannabe novelist whose pretensions mask insecurities and who tries, over and over again, to make sense of her life by the way she writes it down. She rejects one sort of trite simplicity—the trite academic slogans, the songs that sound like "greeting cards with guitar solos"—while pursuing love and romance, "real experiences," and above all panache, her best friend Natasha's main love language. What she's looking for, she's aware, is itself trite and too-simple, at least the way that she envisions it—but what she's experiencing is so overpowering and incomprehensible that she simply can't make sense of it in any other way. The more it overwhelms her, the more her story splinters, and the more every stray emotion becomes the sole story to her, for as long as it possesses her to act upon it. If the story stops making sense, it's because it can only be understood in fragments, with the understanding that these pieces only add up because they are the pieces that were there.
 
I think about the way that children are increasingly expected to be online, increasingly interact with their peers via semi-public social media personas, are monitored in increasingly-invasive ways, in a world that increasingly threatens to reduce them to a narrative, whether that's via the insane algorithms by which academic progress is judged or via the kind of digital drama that can lead a million strangers to hate you simply because there's nothing better to do. I think about how early I went online, and how quickly the Internet led me into spectacularly vicious fights with friends and strangers alike. I think about how young I was when I started to think of myself as something perceived, which happened plenty before the modern digital era kicked in, because youth is a hell of judging and being judged.

And I think about reading The Basic Eight in my local library for the first time, feeling such relatable outrage at the people who were belittling and ignoring and reducing Flan to talking points, at the friends who fucked her over even as she was busy fucking them over, while at the same time feeling increasingly unsettled and disturbed and afraid of her, unsure of how exactly to process what I was feeling about her. I remember finishing The Basic Eight and sitting there stunned, mute, struggling to find a simple narrative to impose upon what I'd just read, and gradually realizing that I couldn't. Among other things, it feels like a book that was designed to upend its readers' attempts to reduce it to something simple; it's only now, a decade and a half later, that it hits me how fundamental this is, both to why it meant so much to me and to what Handler, as a writer, seemingly seeks to achieve.  
At the very start of The Basic Eight, Flan sends three postcards from Italy to Adam State, the boy who she will later murder. They are, conspicuously, love letters. At first she describes the dread she feels at returning to school—"Is this what next year will be like? Do I have enough around me of interest, or will I find myself with nothing to do in a country that doesn’t speak my language?" Then she has an experience with Michelangelo's David:

"It wasn’t until [later] that I thought of my experience metaphorically," she goes on to say. The metaphor she intends, of course, is of David to Adam, and of art to love—a fatefully misguided interpretation that leads to death and incarceration. But it also, in retrospect, feels like an apt descriptor of what Handler strives to achieve within his novels. The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth only have themes inasmuch as they deal with the futility of trying to "look at the entire thing;" past that, his books seem to increasingly become about complex, unknowable things and people's attempts to reduce them to something simpler and false, and the various flavors of tragedy that ensue. 

"When you hear the new explanation all the original ones slip away, intangible..."

The stand-up comic Daniel Kitson has a show—After the Beginning, Before the End—that revolves around a friend's telling him a story about himself that doesn't seem to have any bearing on reality. Somehow, either because Kitson forgot about it or because the friend got something errant in her head, a disconnect has emerged between the story and the truth. Over two hours, Kitson talks about his relationship with fame and his relationship with himself: the strange lies he's heard strangers tell about him, but also the lies he realizes he's telling himself, and his disturbing realization that his idea of truth, his idea of reality, is built upon layers and layers of stories that he's ingested without realizing it, some of which were told to him intentionally, some accidentally, and others merely conclusions that he reached completely mistakenly and entirely on his own. Not only can he not control other people's ideas about him, he concludes, but he can't control his own idea of himself—because he's not sure he can trust himself any more than he can trust a total stranger.

Perhaps wisdom, perhaps being older, means coming to terms with this, and accepting it, and letting go of your stories about yourself as much as you let go of your stories of others. And perhaps we don't do this because of all the stories we've read or the shows we've seen or the social media we ingest and regurgitate. It's in our nature to tell tales, however sincerely or insincerely. And there's no singular way to become knowledgable or wise. (There's a whole culture of people who fetishize "science" and "research" and "data-driven" and "logic" who are totally unable to differentiate meaningful information from bullshit, just as plenty of atheists recreate the worst dogmas of faith and plenty of "radicals" accidentally rebuild traditional conservatism. If wisdom is inherently nuanced and doubting and above all hard, then it follows that any straightforward or confident or simple path that claims to lead to it is by definition not going to be very wise.)

If all that's true—and it feels true—then perhaps it explains why The Basic Eight means as much to me at 32 as it did to me at 16, and why I feel like some of the things I struggle with the most still feel like they have their roots in that novel. When I worry about trusting others, it's partly the fear that they'll take what I reveal to them and use it as ammunition against me, excuses to judge and condemn and misinterpret. When I struggle with how I treat other people, it's partly a worry that I've misinterpreted them somehow, whether too harshly or too kindly, and partly a worry that I am misrepresenting myself, feeding them a story that I know they want to hear. The things that most outrage me are not necessarily the worst or the most brutal or even the most evil—they're the things that feel the most unfair, the most bad-faith, the most intended to deliberately misrepresent. I have moments in which I am wise, and moments in which I am adolescent, determined to be the sole interpreter of who I am, determined to deny every unfair or inaccurate thing which is said or believed about me, determined to set the story straight—even as the story falls apart in my own mind, and every detail suggests that either I don't remember it as clearly as I believe or never understood it myself.

I don't know how Daniel Handler does it: how he writes stories that feel like halls of mirrors, each part reflecting the others so kaleidoscopically, every trope and archetype finding a way to betray itself while somehow suggesting that that precise betrayal was the point of the cliché all along. His stories are all so simple yet so elusive; they end so surprisingly early that it takes a reread just to work out how they walloped you. He writes sentences that undo themselves, uses words and phrases that are so deliberately vague and imprecise that they somehow land with tremendous precision.

It's fitting that The Basic Eight's language is as close to "writerly" as Handler ever got—and that his narrator is a teenage wannabe writer. (Ever since then, he's sprinted rapidly away from "writerly" in every conventional sense.) And it's fitting, too, that The Basic Eight is a story about someone who uses storytelling and language, in part, as an attempt to craft her escape from everything that makes her suffer—and who is undone, in ways both metaphorical and literal, by the stories others tell, and by the stories she tells herself. There is the story told about Flan, the story Flan wants to tell, the story Flan does tell, and the story Flan knows she should tell but can't—either because she can't bring herself to look at herself that way, or because she doesn't trust us, the mass-market reader, with a story that meaningful and that volatile. And then there is the real story, intangible and unspoken and likely unthought, and the whole story, which is all of these at once and more. The story as it might be told by other people, though they too might accidentally get it wrong, or purposefully get it wrong, or who shouldn't be telling this story at all, or simply won't, or simply can't.

 
 
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¹ Ironically, given this essay, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth are the two books of his that feel cruder and plainer, and whose word games are more frequently fun than sublime. His follow-up Adverbs was the one that blew my mind, and kept me blown ever since. Which isn't to say that The Basic Eight doesn't pull a few dizzying moves, or that Watch Your Mouth isn't ongoingly spectacular—just that before Adverbs, I could never have conceived of Handler as my or anybody's favorite writer, and that ever since Adverbs, I have struggled to conceive of any other writing meaning as much to me as Handler has.