HOUSTON — Evan Handler almost died.
"It's important to work that information into any story I tell," he wrote in his memoir, "in the hope it might excuse whatever behavior I confess to later on. And after two bouts with leukemia, four brutal rounds of conventional chemotherapy, two bone marrow harvests, and a bone marrow transplant, I just can't seem to ever stop talking about the illness anyway. Did I mention it was twenty years ago?"
On Showtime's "Californication," Handler plays the unsavory best friend and agent to David Duchovny's wayward novelist. But Handler is the real-life writer, currently on a 25-city book tour to promote his second memoir, "It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive." (He'll appear at the Festival of Jewish Books at the Merage Jewish Community Center in Irvine tonight.)
But never mind all that. "Most of you know me as one of three things," he said at a recent tour stop in Houston. "The Jewish lawyer from 'Sex and the City,' the bald Jewish lawyer from 'Sex and the City,' or the bald, naked lawyer from 'Sex and the City.' "
Laughter spilled from the room full of ladies, and Handler smiled. He knew his audience and didn't seem to mind it, either; perhaps because after being told at 24 that he would probably die of leukemia, he is now glad just to be seen, to be known, to be 47 years old.
"Until 'Sex and the City' came along, that illness had defined not only my own identity, but my identity to just about anyone who's known or heard or read anything about me," he told the audience. "That's an interesting experience, to reemerge after disappearing."
So he wrote about it. About restarting his acting career and his love life, about his 27 breakups involving only 10 women, about therapy and antidepressants, about an abortion and about the sense of doom that has shaped his world to this very day.
"Every day I think I'm having a heart attack," he wrote. "Every time I cross a street I imagine an approaching car smashing into me, tearing me apart. Every time. Cancer. Every day. Aortic aneurysm. A steel beam from above, if I'm walking under one. Melanoma. Neuroblastoma. . . ."
There is a little light within the gloom, however.
One day Handler received a call from an ex-girlfriend in New York. She was a writer on "Sex and the City" who had "overheard a conversation between Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon, both of whom I'd known slightly over the years, in which they'd both agreed I would be a great choice for a new role being written into the show."
