Susan Orlean’s writing career would be impossible to replicate today: ‘I have always been ready to be lucky’
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On the Shelf
Joyride
By Susan Orlean
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster: 368 pages, $32
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“I think asking the question ‘who cares?’ is part of any writing project,” Susan Orlean says over coffee on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills. In her delightfully written new memoir, “Joyride” — personal stories with a bit of writing advice — she admits that charming people into reading about esoteric subjects is essential to her work. It’s also one of the larger projects of journalism — finding overlooked stories and telling them well.
Orlean is one of the New Yorker’s most high-profile writers, having been portrayed by Meryl Streep in “Adaptation,” a heavily fictionalized version of her book “The Orchid Thief.” She’s been on staff at the magazine since 1992, logging articles about a road in Bangkok, Thomas “painter of light” Kinkade, a touring gospel group — the list is impossibly broad and long. She does even deeper dives in her books, such as 2018’s “The Library Book,” about libraries in general and the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in particular. Recently, she and her family had split their time between California and upstate New York, but now she’s made her home in L.A.
“I always felt like there was a quality of play in life in L.A. that New York didn’t have,” Orlean says. (Don’t tell her NYC friends; she lived there for 17 years.) “You could say to people, let’s meet at 3 for a taco, and there would be five people ready and willing to go.”
Here I should mention that we’re sitting down the hill from her house, designed by architect Rudolph Schindler, but I’m worried that will evoke so much envy that you’ll stop reading. To make her more relatable, I could start with the part of our conversation where she got a little emotional, talking about when her first husband told her he was having an affair — on the day of her first book party.
How you begin a story is something Orlean has thought about quite a bit. Writing is her calling, her career, her vocation. She was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb, and went to college in Michigan. Then she drove off to Portland, Ore., where she forestalled her father’s hope that she become a lawyer by eventually landing a job at alternative newspaper Willamette Week. “Report, then think, then write,” she learned from her editor there. She writes fondly of this period, in the last days of the 1970s — a group of avid young journalists, friends and colleagues, living off their small salaries in an affordable city.
In the early 1980s, Orlean wrote a witty story about spiritual leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s compound-in-progress, placing it at the Village Voice, the New York-based king of alt-weeklies. That provided her the first step to move back East; she found a job at the Boston Phoenix and then the Boston Globe Magazine, and started writing for the glossies. Her father was still hoping she’d become a lawyer, but she had her eyes on the New Yorker. Which was indeed her destination.
To recent college grads and younger writers, affordable cities and ready journalism opportunities must seem like science fiction. “I hate thinking about all the magazines and newsweeklies and newspapers that have shuddered to a halt since I began working,” Orlean writes. The steps on her path simply can’t be followed now.
If you want to get Susan Orlean riled up, just ask her about the economist who suggested the government could eliminate public libraries and “save taxpayers lots of money” now that we have Amazon for books and Starbucks as a gathering place.
At the same time, Orlean had a habit of pressing forward. She cold-called editors and mailed out clips when she had no chance — and chances emerged. Regarding her career successes, she concedes in the book, “I have always been ready to be lucky.”
After her first marriage ended, she met John, her second husband. They have a child, now in college. She writes swiftly and adoringly about her family, turning the focus to her work.
Over coffee, I did, too, asking her about a single sentence in her book: As a young girl, she writes, “I worried that life wooshed by, and that no matter how intense or profound or exciting or sad a moment was, it was gone in an instant, dissolving as if it had never happened and never mattered.” Of course, writing is a way to capture a moment, to stop time, but I was curious about “wooshed.”
“First of all, I love onomatopoeic language,” she says. “I do think that those words have the capacity to give texture and animation to a sentence. That is fresh in the middle of a sentence that felt kind of heavy, and purposefully profound and somber. I liked inverting that by using a word like ‘whoosh.’
“I think one of the most important things in writing, from a craft perspective, is to make sure your reader’s still paying attention,” she continues. “I feel like I have a natural tendency to poke people at regular intervals with something surprising, a sound they hadn’t expected, like ‘whoosh,’ or an image that they hadn’t ever conjured before.”
Orlean, who is so carefully attentive to her responsibilities that we interrupted our interview so she could feed her parking meter, made headlines in 2020 for tweeting with no filter. Like many writers working alone, she had used Twitter as a virtual water cooler. One night in July, deep into the COVID-19 pandemic, she posted one word: “drunk.”
As her book explains, after overindulging at the house of a neighbor who had a newborn colt, she then tweeted about it with existential despair: “He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy.” Despite a worried check-in from John, her drunk tweeting continued. “I accidentally captured some widespread feeling of outrage, exhaustion, annoyance, discontent, hysteria, mania, worry, and the desire for candy,” she writes, explaining why the next day she was making media appearances about it.
Orlean writes of facing health scares and losing people, but she emerges sunnily from them. Luck has beamed onto Orlean’s life — she certainly wasn’t alone posting drunkenly during the pandemic, but she went viral. Apart from being a paean to Twitter’s better day, it’s notable that this success is, also, about words. She posted just text (and typos) in a zippy rhythm, crankily.
Susan Orlean went on a drunken Twitter whirlwind Friday night — or was it real? Here’s what the author tells us about her Twitter escapade.
“I’m very conscious of the rhythmic quality of what I’m writing,” she tells me. She means her memoir, not social media.
I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to meet her at her house, partly because I would love to see a Schindler. I’m also curious about what moving means to her.
“I would never say, ‘Gee, let’s move every couple of years.’ But I’ve always felt a little titillated by the newness, even the dislocation,” she says. “I haven’t moved houses a million times, but I’ve never deeply resisted it either. It’s that feeling of, well, this is something new. And there’s a way in which the super mundane, ordinary stuff tickles me — going into the grocery store in a new place. I always do that when I’m in foreign countries.”
She continues: “I always have been a weird combination of being very rooted and very domestic and very house-proud, and at the same time, I’m always curious.”
