Low Budget Superhero

Dear Evan Handler,

I finished your latest book, Memoir Redux (Hey I Didn't Die!). I jest! I am of course referring to It's Only Temporary: The Good News and Bad News of Being Alive. I must say it's a compelling read. Inspired by your charming appearance on Craig Ferguson last summer, I ordered two copies online even before the commercial break. One for me, one for a dear friend of mine who is a lot like you.

Follow up:

This friend of mine, he's a smart and talented fella, but he thinks too much, except when he's not thinking at all and does something boneheaded, usually while drunk. He's not bad looking, women think he's cute and want to take care of him -- but he has zero "psycho radar" so he keeps ending up with batshit crazy chicks. He's mildly neurotic. He has a gargantuan ego, but is always putting himself down. He handles his life as though it's a screenplay in which he's his own unreliable narrator. He's the artist and his "art" comprises the actual days he lives, and what he does with each one. He's also something of a fatalist, constantly expecting bad news, braced for the worst-case-scenario. When I call him, he greets me with a tense "Is everything okay?" For him, there's a doomed fortune cookie in every take-out order, a grassy knoll around every street corner, a terminal disease in every ache and pain.

You two should get together and compare notes.

Does it make sense if I remark that, while I don't know quite what I expected from It's Only Temporary, it delivers more than I expected? Maybe I thought it would be mere entertaining fluffery, not something quite so poignant. It's confessional, self-deprecating, funny, raw in parts. It's the kind of book I know I'll re-read, quote from, and recommend to my friends.

Perhaps most surprising, it's also inspirational. With all due respect, a certain self-centeredness comes across in the writing (well, you ARE an actor!) and that does not portend that you're the kind of writer who deliberately aims for "inspirational." But through telling your own story in which you search for answers to your own life's mysteries, you pose universal questions that we all should be asking ourselves, beginning with "why am I alive?" That's provocative. In fact, it took me just about a calendar year to read all of the essays. Unstructured as it is, I found myself reading one or two essays at once, putting it down to ruminate for awhile, picking it up again a few weeks or a month later and reading a few more.

The unstructured style also allows you to approach the same subject matter from different angles, so the stories are like interlocking rings -- where in one essay you mention in passing your relationship with a very young, very dramatic Australian actress, later in a different essay you fearlessly go into great detail, droopy balls and all. Told in this way, your quirks become familiar to the reader, so that by the time you get to the real love story, we're really rooting for you, as crazy and neurotic as you are. In fact, you make us adore those personality quirks, as they're probably the very same facets of your personality that make you a good actor.

You're a lot like the late, brilliant, Spalding Gray in the way you seemed to spend your 20s and 30s living like you're gathering movie material. Also like Spalding, you're kind of a self-sabotage expert. Beset with actual troubles, you magnify and exacerbate them by inviting demon troubles. Like it's not hard enough to maintain a healthy relationship, you make it even harder by cheating, then cheating on the woman you cheated with? Like surviving leukemia doesn't stress your body enough, you take up running? Like making it in New York as an actor doesn't present enough of an uphill climb, you have to be an asshole to the director who compliments you on your talent? Your Patricia is Spalding's Renee.

One last observation. I have to point out something about your celebrity status. In the book you imply that few had ever heard of you until Sex and the City. Just so you know, I'm a thirty-something woman of style, something of a pop culture maven, and I've never seen an entire episode of Sex and the City. I'm sorry but I just can't stand more than five minutes of listening to any of those women nattering endlessly about shoes and closets. I don't get HBO, but once the show came to regular cable, I tried. I did. But all I've ever been able to handle is letting them get maybe twice around the lunch table, and I'm all set with their one-note characterizations of, supposedly, chicks like me. Yeah, yeah I get it, the blonde one is a slut, the brunette kind of prudish, the redhead...I don't know, something about cake and sex, right?

My point is that I'm sure I'm not the only TV viewer who barely registered the fact that you were on that show, but in your book you tout it as your break-out series. Maybe, but I do absolutely remember you from It's Like, You Know. That sitcom wasn't bad. You were funny. Lots of people remember that show, because Jennifer Grey made the godawful mistake of a lifetime getting that nose job and therefore decimating every spark of character.

Speaking of character, you possess a lot of it. Loved you in West Wing, and then, of course the oh-so-short-lived but totally brilliant Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In short, it is this writer's opinion that Sex and the City was the DUMBEST piece of TV you've yet done. No offense. I recommend that everyone out there who ONLY knows you from that show read this book and get to know the real Evan Handler.

I'll be checking the imdb.com for what you do next. And I'm going to keep trying to find those few episodes of "It's Like, You Know" because my boyfriend doesn't believe that it could be all that good if it got canceled. He hasn't yet learned that EVERYTHING I like gets canceled!

One last thought. My friend, the one for whom I bought the second copy of your book, also really liked it. I knew that he would, if only because of the habit he has of reminding himself not to get too wretched during times of stress: he takes a big, deep breath and tells me, "Only 40 more years." It's true. It is, after all, only temporary.

Kind regards,