Sex and The City star Evan Handler, who plays Charlotte York’s husband Harry, has his second book coming out on May first called “It’s Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive”. It’s full of funny essays and doesn’t follow a typical autobiographical format. In his first memoir published in 1998, “Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors”, 47 year-old Handler covered his successful fight against deadly acute myeloid leukemia in his mid 20s. He went on to beat the disease and become a television actor, but he didn’t come out feeling positive and full of life, but “sad and depressed by what he went through.” He said he eventually came to a place of gratitude when he met his wife Elisa, and that’s what his book is about.

Here’s the book description from his MySpace:

In a collection of funny, off-beat, and poignant autobiographical essays, Handler moves beyond the supposedly “incurable” illness he triumphed over in his mid-twenties – only to bumble through his thirties and forties in search of ever-elusive love and happiness. From bold attempts to rekindle his acting career, through his hapless efforts to run faster around New York’s Central Park reservoir, from bizarre Internet dates, through his twenty-seven break ups (involving only ten women), Handler careens through his against-all-odds existence. Always searching for meaning in his unlikely survival, Handler shares stories of sadistic junior high school gym teachers, bullying wanna-be Hollywood moguls, returned engagement rings, and Europeans’ fascination with American bathroom habits. Picking up ten years after his first book, Time on Fire, Handler again uses what the New York Times calls his “laceratingly funny and revealing” storytelling skills to weave twenty-one new tales into a defiantly unconventional memoir.

[From Evan Handler's Myspace]

The National Enquirer has advance details of Handler’s upcoming book, and in it he talks about his cybersex addiction as he desperately searched for love and affection during his recovery:

In his shocking memoir “It’s Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive”, the 47-year-old actor reveals that actor surviving leukemia, he couldn’t find a girlfriend and turned to X-rated chat rooms to reveal his sexual frustrations.

“Evan writes that he began battling chronic sinus infections, making his believe that his leukemia was back,” divulged a publishing source familiar with the book, due out May 1.

“Desperate for love, Evan said he yo-yoed in and out of failed relationships with women who didn’t want to play nursemaid to him.

“He writes that he turned to sexually explicit Internet chat rooms because ‘I had myself locked down in a prison of my own making,’ adding that he was ‘lonely and sad.’

“Finally, a psychiatrist prescribed medication for Evan and helped him overcome his sexual obsessions.”

After a brief addiction to Internet dating, Handler eventually married an Italian scientist named Elisa.

[From The National Enquirer, print edition, March 24, 2008]

Handler’s girlfriend got pregnant while they were dating and made the difficult decision to have an abortion. Eight months later they were married, and the Enquirer states that Evan wrote that he experienced intense “regret and guilt” due to that decision. The couple now has a baby girl together, Sofia, who was born in January, 2007.

Handler wrote an article published in the Huffington Post after the Margaret B. Jones fake memoir scandal. He noted that his book was being published by the same division of Penguin, Riverhead Books, that got duped by Jones, but that it wasn’t like they were planning on sending him on a book tour like Jones. He said it does matter if details are invented and passed off as a memoir, and that publishers should do a better job at verifying authors’ claims. They should also do a better job at promoting real stories like Handler’s that are full of actual, complicated details of someone’s ife.

Handler’s book “It’s Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive” is available for advance sale through Amazon. [No one has contacted or encouraged us to promote this book.]

Evan Handler is shown on 6/28/04 at the Anchorman premiere in the header image and on 10/16/03 in NY in the image below, thanks to PRPhotos.

Update: Evan contacted us through MySpace and let us know that the National Enquirer piece we quoted predictably distorted his upcoming biography. He thanked us for the coverage and said that “The National Enquirer piece you’ve quoted at length is an extremely distorted – and decidedly smarmy – misrepresentation of the book’s topic and tone.”

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