As his literary alter ego Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler has made a fortune out of the misfortune of his characters in the children’s book collection A Series of Unfortunate Events. But with fortune comes fame (or is it the other way around?), and now poor Handler can’t seem to shake Snicket. For over a decade, he’s done press and stage shows as Snicket’s “representative”—putting his own success as an author, screenwriter, and occasional accordionist with the Magnetic Fields on the back burner. So who will you get when Handler takes the stage at Benaroya tonight for a Q & A with friend Sherman Alexie? I doubt even he knows.

“Well… I’m really somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody up on that stage,” he told the AV Club in a 2005 interview. “The more I protest that I’m not Lemony Snicket, and that I’m Daniel Handler instead, the more it becomes clear to the audience that I am in fact Lemony Snicket, that I am in fact standing in front of them. I think there are probably too many layers of interpretation there. Certainly there are too many layers for me to interpret them.”

Stage shows don’t get more deliciously deadpan than this. Tickets ($15-$70) for the Seattle Arts and Lectures event will be available at the Benaroya Hall box office from 6pm on. Cash or check accepted.

For a glimpse of Handler’s…no, Lemony Snicket’s new book, 13 Words, watch the clip below.