Handler's speech went everywhere, from a pair of oddly matched Seattle Times articles (about a mugging and a dim sum place in Edmonds) to a Dear Abby letter that served no practical point to a fan letter to Lemony Snicket from a young girl named Brandi:
I read your books. I enjoyed them so much. I am always curious when something happens.
Handler also railed against stories with points, and how he found it charming that people would wait hours in a book signing line in order to complain about his books to his face. (One woman asked him why he would tell children to lie, and asked him to point out any time when lying is the appropriate thing to do. Handler's response: "Nice sweater.")
The Q&A between Alexie and Handler was full of off-the-cuff brilliance. They discussed book-banning, and Handler said that one cranky parent trying to get a book pulled from a county library is not the same thing as violating the First Amendment. (By way of example: Try as he might, Handler couldn't get Henry Miller on the shelves in his middle school library.) He said he liked it when authors had fun with those kinds of attacks on their books, citing a time when Alice Walker's The Color Purple was banned from a library and Walker showed up in town with a flatbed truck full of copies of Purple and gave them away to everyone.
Alexie riffed on how when you become an adult "sexy" and "sad" become synonyms. Handler paused for a moment and said, "A bunch of Prince songs just got worse." An audience question about a kid who was getting poor grades in English ended with Handler saying that "English and success never go hand-in-hand." Handler also said that more books by Lemony Snicket will be published in a few years, but that it will be a new series and not related to A Series of Unfortunate Events. There presumably will be no point to this new series, either.
