Sex and the City hubby writes a book

Right before Evan Handler had girls screaming his name down the streets of Manhattan, he met… Right before Evan Handler had girls screaming his name down the streets of Manhattan, he met his future wife and retired from singledom.

Go figure, as the actor from HBO’s “Sex and the City” and Showtime’s “Californication” would say, well acquainted with absurdities that have tended to sneak up on him.

Now an author for the second time, he explains it all in his memoir “It’s Only Temporary: The Good and Bad News of Being Alive” From his journey through adulthood to fights with cancer, women and anxiety, the memoir looks at where life has left him at age 46.

With seven lead roles before and during his bout with acute leukemia, his career took a sudden halt. He became an actor whom people couldn’t recognize offstage without a wig.

Handler’s full head of curly, chaotic hair vanished before age 30 leaving him totally bald. Forced to look for parts of middle-aged men, he slowly lost the wigs.

“I lost the years from 24 to 28. I felt a lot had been taking away. When friends and peers were just starting out in their lives, mine was being reduced to an old man,” he said.

He tells people about being the best actor in New York City, recovering from cancer, his 27 break-ups and masturbating while in a hospital bed next to his comatose roommate.

The stories with which he once mortified actor friends are still as startling in print.

Against his will, he played catch-up in the dating game with a string of break-ups with waitresses and actresses and broken engagements. Doctors told him he was lucky to be alive, but he still felt slighted.

Handler’s tumultuous relationships came partly from his struggle with time. “These are issues that every human being deals with. Live for the moment or invest in the future? It’s about feeling grateful or wanting more,” he said.

Handler’s reflection on those years is full of both humor and radical realizations. His stories explore life and love in a subtly philosophical fashion, with questionable contrivances and entertaining anecdotes. In the spirit of sitcom, he includes specific conversations, dates and snapshots of his melodramatic life. “They’re really human stories with heightened circumstances,” he explains. His experiences include: “Frivolous engagement rings, fury at missionary physicians, less than perfect sperm banks. Badly timed kisses, bad behavior in relationships, badly run races.”

He recounts a high school friend’s suicide, a career on Broadway and an understanding of religion that equate to three words: “I don’t know.”

Unsurprisingly, Handler doesn’t subscribe to a particular religion – not ruling anything out yet praying every day.

Through his adventures in filmmaking, courting and recovering, he somehow found a happy ending, easy compatibility even if crossing different cultures, religion and histories. His frustrations finally reside. “Here I’m writing about goofy dating relationships pretty much like what you’d see on ‘Seinfeld’ or ‘Sex and the City,’ ironically, from the point of a guy who eventually finds exactly what those characters are looking for,” Handler said.

He began writing this new work in the hospital after fulfilling his childhood dream of acting. And through recovery, Handler’s literary voice began to show a more hopeful side.

“But now I’m able to turn to a new form of gratitude that’s not forced