Life is a turbulent journey, fraught with confusion, heartbreak, and inconvenience.

This book will not help. Many collections slap together the wit and wisdom of certain authors in the hopes of inspiring a reader at a crucial time in his or her life.

This book contains a bouquet of alarming but inescapable truths from the work of Lemony Snicket, along with selections from his unpublished papers and remarks he has made at dinner parties and anarchist riots, in order to remind the reader that even the loftiest of inspirations contains a sharp, bitter kernel of dread - and vice versa.