A Conversation with
Daniel Handler

So much of the sexuality of young people is portrayed in either hysterical moralizing terms or in kind of utopian terms. You have a lot of heterosexual love stories where everybody's being really sensitive to one another. And then we also have a lot of stories where there is something really dangerous about sex and the people who are participating in it are punished appropriately by the story. I think sexuality is much more fluid and much harder to pin down than that. So I tried to write a book that was as honest about teenage male sexuality as I could make it.

As a man who writes for young people, I often get asked to come and talk about encouraging young men to read — there's a real, well-documented gender gap. I began to notice that there's a subject we know adolescent young men are interested in, and that's the subject we trim most aggressively from young people's literature. But mostly, the real thing that gave me the idea was a dinner party. A friend was there with his husband. He was about to go visit his small hometown in the Midwest and I said, what do you do there? And he said, I like to look up my ex-boyfriends and their wives. And he said — these are not closeted guys. These are young men with whom I had relationships in high school and college. They were and they are straight. I think they were straight then. It was just that we had a sexual aspect to our relationship as well as hanging out and watching sports.

I was really more interested in young people and adolescence as it's going on now. I meet a lot of young people by the nature of my job. And of course there are many things that are exactly the same from my own adolescence, but there's a kind of access that young people have to one another that was absent from my growing up. If you were interested in someone — for friendship or romance or whatever — you had to call their house. You would get a phone number and then you would call their house and the person you were interested in would probably not answer. You would have to talk to somebody else. And it was very nerve-wracking. Now everyone has a device in their pocket where, no matter what kind of strict paranoid parent one has, you have very easy and explicit access.

It's the same with sexuality online — there isn't one precious magazine being passed around anymore. There's the entire history of pornography for anyone who wants to dip into it. And I think for me, that's really interesting. I don't feel moralistic about it. I have no idea if it's some great boon of sexual liberation or if it's some horrible thing that's warping us all, but I think it's a huge part of adolescents' lives — a barrage of sexual culture and also really unfettered access to one another. So a lot of this book takes place in conversations and in texts and phone calls and all this kind of private talking that was very difficult to do when I was an adolescent. That for me was the real challenge of the book.

I don't interview people. I certainly don't interview young people because you're not going to get any kind of honest answer. But I just listen a lot. I grew up in San Francisco, and I take the same buses that I always did. And now I take the bus and sure enough, I'm completely invisible. Young people are talking to each other. It doesn't occur to them that I'm listening, and I will sometimes be literally between the two people talking. And I'm utterly invisible.

I love it. I'm delightfully anonymous and I love eavesdropping. The way that people talk, the things that I hear and learn from listening to other people — that is where so much of my work comes from. The poetry of everyday conversation and the types of relations that go on is just really interesting to me. I carry a notebook wherever I go. I'm always taking notes on what I see and what I'm hearing, and I'm just interested in the world. And from there, the stories come.

For sure. I think one of the powerful things about being witness to transgender transformation is to see people overcome a source of unhappiness in a very clear and defined way — that can make you think of whatever has weighed heavily on you, whether it's the same issue or a different issue. Adolescence — not to equalize all suffering — but everybody is experiencing some kind of disenfranchisement, some kind of pressure being thrust upon them. And it's difficult to see sometimes when that pressure can be kind of beneficial and when it can be harmful. Cole, the young hero of All the Dirty Parts, gets a lot of conversations about what he ought to do with his sexuality. Some of it is people saying you are hurting people and you need to stop. And some of it is people with horrible advice that would only make it worse.

I love a question. I love being haunted by a book. So I try to write books that haunt people. When I wrote All the Wrong Questions, people said, oh, it's a prequel, what's going to happen? And then when they read it, they said, now I'm even more mystified. I'm even more confounded. And I thought — my work is done. Would you really want the great unknown to be thoroughly known? I'd love to know that the answer is findable, but I'd love to know that for most people it's endlessly frustrating.

Always, yes. I always have a few ideas for books kind of on a back burner simmering, and when it's time to turn my attention to a new book, I look at what's simmering and what looks like it might be ready to cook. I see being a writer as being on a pretty constant quest. The world is continually interesting to me, and to hear people's stories and have them bump up against my own imagination is pretty fascinating. And certainly in the case of All the Dirty Parts, just that first dinner table conversation made me think about the ways in which young men are navigating the world of sexuality in a culture that is so blatantly sexual all the time — and often really misogynist — but also with a kind of growing feminist consciousness that all of us are understanding we need to instill more responsibility.