E-mail a friendEvan Handler
airdate June 25, 2008
Although he's a seasoned theater actor, Evan Handler is probably best known for his role in the HBO hit series Sex and the City, the follow-up film and Showtime's Californication. His résumé also includes director and writer. Handler's articles have been published in numerous publications, including Elle and USA Weekend. Twenty years ago, the New York native battled leukemia and writes about his recovery and the years since in two critically acclaimed memoirs: Time on Fire and It's Only Temporary.
Actor-author tells Tavis about the life and relationship lessons in his memoir, "It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive." (2:51)
Full Interview. (13:48)
Evan Handler
Tavis: Evan Handler's a talented actor who many know for his role as Harry Goldenblat on "Sex and the City," which from what I hear was made into some sort of feature film this summer? (Laughter) He's also back soon opposite David Duchovny in the Showtime series "Californication." The show is set to return for its second season come September.
But more importantly, he is a cancer survivor and the author of the new book "It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive." Evan, nice to have you here.
Evan Handler: Thank you very much, Tavis.
Tavis: Glad that you are alive.
Handler: Thank you.
Tavis: What's the bad news about being alive?
Handler: That it's only temporary. (Laughter) And it's the good news.
Tavis: That title, it's a cool title. It comes from where? You made this up?
Handler: It's actually one of the stories in the book. There's a friend of mine, when I was complaining about one of my many ridiculous heartbreaks that are told in the book, said, "It's only temporary, Ev," and I said, "Well, yeah, so's everything." And she said, "That's the good news and the bad news, then, isn't it?"
Tavis: Yeah, it's only temporary.
Handler: Yeah.
Tavis: The book, as I went through it, is really about - if I can characterize it this way, I think accurately - it's really about dealing with those things that we can change and those things that we cannot change, fair enough?
Handler: Yeah, I would say so, yeah.
Tavis: Okay. Here's the trick, though. There are things that we think we cannot change that we really can, and things that we can't change that we - things that we cannot change that we can in reverse. How do you know which is which, though?
Handler: It's starting to sound like an Abraham Lincoln quote.
Tavis: Exactly. (Laughter) Can, can't, can't, can. How do you know which is which?
Handler: Look, you got to go with your gut, but one of the things the book is about, and also the first book, because the first book that I wrote some years ago is about the actual struggle to recover from the illness. There are people who will tell you you can't do things that you can, and so part of the mission in my life, just in terms of survival, and then after that in terms of actually doing well in life, have to do with that - not letting other people limit me.
When I was diagnosed 23 years ago, I was told it was an incurable illness and that it would result almost certainly in my death within a few years. It's no longer even categorized as an incurable illness, but that recategorization doesn't happen until enough people defy the odds, part of which has to do with defying the individuals who insist that it is an incurable illness.
Tavis: You had what form of cancer?
Handler: I had acute myeloid leukemia, diagnosed in 1985.
Tavis: Right. You were how old then?
Handler: Twenty-four years old.
Tavis: How does a 24-year-old deal with even getting that kind of news?
Handler: Well, it's horrifying, as you can imagine. It plunges you into a world that you don't know exists, filled with people who might or might not have your best interests at heart, even though one would imagine that they all would. You're facing devastating odds, a really serious illness, treatment protocols that have substantial risks of your own mortality inherent in them, and so it's a devastating journey in terms of not only the physical cost and emotional cost but the rearrangement of your perspective on life and whether you can really trust people and trust the universe.
So obviously it's a very intense story, but I found an even more interesting story, or certainly equally interesting, in the story from the moment declared cured, and the ways that it wasn't automatic that gratitude was the default setting. That I was lucky to be alive, I was set free to enter my thirties, having really had my twenties wiped out, and realized that reintegrating myself into life after where I had been and what I had been reduced to was a difficult task, and it really took many, many years to find a way to appreciate everything that I had, to come to trust again, to be willing to invest in the future as opposed to just living for the moment.
Tavis: I'm mesmerized listening to you talk about now the journey that you have been on, and yet, with all due respect, it's the time, the journey you've been on, the distance from 24 to now, that gives you this perspective.
Handler: Absolutely.
Tavis: Take me back to 24 and tell me when you couldn't articulate all that you've just offered us now how you navigated that period, those twenties.
Handler: At 24, recently diagnosed, I was terrified and enraged. I considered what had happened to me to be unacceptable, and a lot of the treatment that I ran into - look, I was treated at a world-renowned facility where the IV poles, the wheels didn't work, they were like broken shopping carts, where you couldn't push it, and you were attached 24 hours a day for one and two months. There were people who actually carried them around with them as opposed to rolling them.
There weren't enough sheets and pillowcases to go around. Being mis-medicated and medicated hours past when the drugs were due were common practices, and complaints about these things, upon which your survival depended, were met with scoldings and veiled threats.
So I saw it as a real wartime existence, and that it was my job to defy those authority figures and make my way out of there and be able to tell the story of where I had been, and then found a real new purpose in my life, which is of really - I became really fascinated with the importance of telling one's story, and the ways that the telling of a personal story over time and over years and eons advances a civilization.
I'm a real believer in the form of memoir writing, and always feel a little badly when it's disparaged and pushed aside.
Tavis: I'm glad you raise that, because I was just literally in a conversation not 24 hours ago with someone about this very thing. I'm with a book company that for years have been pushing me to tell more of my personal story - one of 10 kids, grew up in a three-bedroom trailer, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I've been blessed to do all that I am doing now.
So my book company kept pushing me to do it, and one of the reasons I resisted is because I did not want to be laughed at. I didn't want folk - and I've sold some "New York Times" bestsellers. But this particular book I didn't not want to do, Evan, because I didn't want to be laughed at, because I think that memoir ought to be reserved for those persons who have accomplished something, who've lived a long time - certainly your story is worth telling.
But I'm fascinated now by your point about how civilization is advanced by the telling of stories.
Handler: Well, I read something some time ago in a book that talked about the revealing of the self, and how the intersection of a personal story and the community, and when people eons ago used to gather and tell the story of where they'd been and where they found the food and what the rain did to the crops that day, and that it's the combination of the personal story and the collective community that interweaves themselves together and leads to the advancements of communities, and it was very powerful for me.
Especially I read this after having experienced what I experienced, and it set me on a journey of saying, "Well, I'm not real good one-on-one with people." My response when people come to me and tell me about their diagnosis or a loved one's diagnosis, I'm much less optimistic about their chances than I was about my own.
But there is a value to simply standing and existing and letting my story be known, because then it can be taken by those people and incorporated however they want to incorporate it, through their own optimism, and seizing upon the facts of my life. And I think it's just an important thing to do.
Tavis: And amazing for me, of course - this is obvious but it bears saying - each of us has a story.
Handler: Exactly.
Tavis: Every one of us. I have not had - there have been a couple times on airplanes when I thought it was over, and I'm saying my prayers, there's no way this plane's going to land in this weather.
Handler: That's me pretty much on a smooth flight, yeah. (Laughter)
Tavis: You don't like to fly, I take it?
Handler: No. I have trouble sometimes trusting when I'm walking around. (Laughter)
Tavis: I got the walking thing down.
Handler: I think the airplane's going to land on me.
Tavis: Oh, wow, yeah, see, I'm not quite that bad, but a couple of flights I've been on that I thought this may be the end, and it's a terrifying ordeal, if anyone's ever experienced that, to feel that way. I raise that only because my sense is, and I've not been as close to death, at least not to my knowledge, thank god, that you have been, but my sense is that life - how might I put this - that life is perhaps best lived when one has had a near-death experience. Perhaps best lived when one has an appreciation for how fragile life really is. Am I completely wrong about this?
Handler: Well, I'll only speak for myself. I've heard lots of people say that a cancer diagnoses was the best thing that ever happened to them. I don't subscribe to that at all. I'd gladly go back and give it up. There's some insight, certainly, that's been gained, but for me personally I'd gladly give up the insight if I could give back the trauma.
This is a book that's about - well, like that airplane flight you described, I lived that way essentially for five years in my twenties, and it's not that easy to give up that kind of anxiety, even when you've been told okay, now you're safe. So this is a book about how do I come back and enjoy life and reinvest in life? How do I enjoy life now that I know that someday I'm going to have to surrender it, whether it's short-term or long-term?
So sorting out that stuff and coming back to a kind of calm existence where I could really just laugh easily and have a good time was a long journey and took a lot of struggle and effort, and yeah, there's tremendous insight that's been gained, but I don't consider it the preferred way to exist.
Tavis: I accept that. You talk about it in the text, but since we're in a conversation on television, tell me one or two of those insights, those revelations that you have learned because of this ordeal.
Handler: Wow. I should have them on the tip of my tongue, I suppose. I try not to get too upset about small, insignificant things. I try to remember that you only go around once. But mostly I was able to succeed at that stuff very late and recently, and it had to do with meeting my wife and finding a mate and finding a very comfortable place to be.
The book is filled with a lot of the mistakes I made along the way. I tell about my 27 break-ups, which were spread over only 10 relationships. There was a lot of (laughter) back-and-forth action. That's a symptom of a guy who doesn't know how to live and whether he should be here in the present or looking to the future.
So for me, I guess it's been - and it's why the book concentrates on stories of love and relationships - it's been about finding love and being willing to really be present with one person. And now we have a baby whose conception is another miraculous happening - supposedly impossible, statistically. And being able to be really gloriously grateful and experience gratitude, which is, I suppose, the lesson of the book and the answer to your question, is to be engaged actively with a sense of gratitude.
Tavis: I suspect the answer to this last question, Evan, may have something to do with the answer - maybe connected to the answer you just offered, but how did you - back to the beginning of the story - get beyond the bitterness?
Handler: A lot of it has to do with time. For me, I was able to come back to a sense of trust. I talk a bit in the book about faith. I speculate on religious faith, which isn't something that I personally ascribe to very much, but if you want to say faith just as trust - trust in your safety, trust that your life has value, trust that the things you engage in every day are worthwhile endeavors.
Time had a lot to do with that. Time, changes in perspective, and I think having the active drive to work to shed a lot of that anger.
Tavis: I said that was my exit question; I lied. Let me close with a really unfair question, but I think if anybody can answer this unfair question, it's probably you, which is this: for those who will pick up this book and read it or may not want to pick up and read it because they lost someone to cancer, back to this title, "It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive." You say what to those persons who lost an Evan in their lives to some form of cancer?
Handler: The only thing I could say to those people is that my heart goes out. I can't - one of the things I talk about in the book is that I'm no sage because of what I went through. It's easy for people to approach me that way, but one of the chapters is called "I Don't Know," and it's about the questions that I get asked, and I get come to for advice.
I know my story. I consider myself lucky, I feel very humbled by my great fortune in being able to escape a difficult situation. To people who've lost loved ones, I have to assume that their battle is similar to the one that I faced in them finding a new attachment to life outside of what they had come to depend on, that relationship. It's a book about finding gratitude.
I think it has a lot to offer. I don't think this book would be that painful for people. The other book is probably a tougher read, in its way, because it's in an institution, it's in hospitals, it's fighting and clawing to survive. But I'm always aware of that and concerned, like you, with your potential memoir. I'm concerned that aspects of this can come across as gloating, that it seems like maybe I take things too much for granted because there's a lot of humor in the book.
And I'm sensitive to those things, but I have to be who I am and tell my story in my way. I hope it has something to offer those people and wouldn't cause pain.
Tavis: Indeed it does. The book by Evan Handler is called "It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive." We can't really push in any closer on that photo, but the book is worth getting just for the photo - those two photos. I won't tell you more. When you go to the book store and see the book, the two photos, top and bottom, will make much more sense to you. Evan, nice to have you on the program.
Handler: It's a pleasure, Tavis, thank you very much.
Tavis: My pleasure.
Back to June 25, 2008