Like any good reporter, Susan Orlean did extensive research for her assignment. She interviewed sources, studied published writings, and even visited an archive—only this time, it was her own: the Susan Orlean Papers, at Columbia University.
While the sources may have been past colleagues, and the archival papers her own work, Orlean set out to be exhaustive and exacting in charting her personal history. Joyride: A Memoir is the book Orlean said she would never write, even avoiding “saying the word ‘memoir’” for as long as possible, until she finally relented to pursue this “mission.”
The film Adaptation, inspired by her best-selling 1998 book, The Orchid Thief, may have infamously described her writing as “that sprawling New Yorker shit,” but Orlean has decided now to take a more direct path. The memoir, which reckons with her own life story and lessons for mastering reportage, weaves intimate disclosures with durable writing advice to make an ebullient, and often edifying, read.
Aside from two temp jobs, Orlean has been writing since 1978, a career that started with short music reviews. Reading Mark Singer’s article “Supers,” in The New Yorker—a magazine she deified—during her college years galvanized her to pursue the reporter’s path. A big break came when, in the 1980s, she visited Rajneeshpuram, a utopian town built in rural Oregon by followers of the controversial cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and wrote about the cult’s wild festival. National attention soon followed the story, including offers to write for Glamour and Rolling Stone.
More lucrative assignments came, such as interviews with Joan Didion for Vogue and Tom Hanks for Rolling Stone, but her dream job continued to elude her. One barrier was the fact that The New Yorker never published a masthead, so it was as “impenetrable as the Kremlin.”
Orlean would learn through the grapevine, however, that the weekly was seeking contributors for the Talk of the Town section after so many veterans fled when William Shawn was fired. The stars were in alignment, and a small Talk of the Town piece on Benetton saw Orlean make her debut in 1987. (She became a staff writer in 1992.)
The editorial advice first dispensed there was that sometimes stories don’t need neat endings. Readers can sit with uncertainty, her editor Chip McGrath advised, where they can “finish the tune in their heads.” It wouldn’t take long for Orlean to carve out a lane of acclaimed reporting that would cover the news obliquely—writing on child beauty pageants after the JonBenét Ramsey murder, and trailer parks in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing—to illuminate our understanding of a story bigger than the event itself.
The mythology of writing The Orchid Thief, her best-selling book on a man purloining rare orchids from the Florida Everglades, is retold with self-deprecation and wry humor. Failed ledes for the magazine story are dissected along with confessions of some vain moments, like believing Meryl Streep would want to interview her. “I assumed I would meet with Streep so she could study my mannerisms,” Orlean writes. “I finally called.... [Streep] had created the character on her own. I was crushed.”
A through line of Orlean’s output is obsession, one she continued to pursue again in Rin Tin Tin and The Library Book, chronicling people who believe their singular preoccupation can center their life and abate time’s cruel melt. Even so, writing each book proved “a rapturous form of insanity, a miraculous delusion,” which she recounts in generous and jocular detail. Her Rin Tin Tin biography alone, which involved countless editors and publishers, took 10 years to complete—an obsession in and of itself.
What makes Joyride an exhilarating experience is the pleasure of so accomplished a reporter dispensing instructive advice, while also making many private admissions of failure. Rejections, criticism, and missed deadlines have all afflicted Orlean, from New York magazine’s outright rejecting her application to unreasonable demands from publishers to deliver an ever delayed manuscript. It’s confidence that determines if you bounce back: “You need swagger to be a writer at all, to be convinced that readers should listen to you.”
Orlean may sometimes diminish her own biography in favor of the stories she has written, but this is an ineffective gesture. “[A] small life, when sympathetically examined, could burst effloresce,” she writes about The Orchid Thief. There is nothing small about Orlean’s life, and Joyride blossoms beautifully.
Nathan Smith writes about books and culture
