As a writer Susan Orlean reigns over the quirky, the odd, the overlooked. She’s built a career out of chasing her own curiosity.
This pint-sized redhead once waded through Florida swamps to research an article that later became the book “The Orchid Thief,” which then became the movie “Adaptation,” which then won an Academy Award.
She took her son to the Los Angeles Central Library for a research project and ended up finding her own project that became “The Library Book.”
Her childhood obsession with the TV show “Rin Tin Tin” led her to do a book examining the life of the star German Shepherd. She has written about cults – and Tom Hanks and Nicolas Cage, too. She traveled the South with gospel singers. She once wrote an obituary about a tree.
But there’s one subject she never believed was that interesting: Herself.
“I thought, who wants to read my memoir? Like, who cares?” Orlean said in a recent interview on the webinar Bookish, a virtual program on books and authors produced by the Southern California News Group. “My strength has always been to be pretty fearless about looking into unexamined worlds … So this felt peculiar, out of my universe of what I write about.”
This longtime New Yorker staff writer has seven bestselling books to her credit, and an Emmy Award nomination for the HBO series “How To with John Wilson.” But when she did finally consider doing a memoir, Orlean turned the tables on herself, hiring a fellow journalist to interview her to help get started writing.
“It allowed me to shift my posture into looking at myself as an interesting subject,” Orlean explained.
The resulting ”Joyride: A Memoir,” which came out Oct. 14 from Avid Reader Press, delivers on the interesting part. For writers, it’s a master class in the art of nonfiction storytelling, and a nostalgic look into a bygone era of American journalism where magazines and alternative weekly newspapers still flourished. Yet the intimate narrative also illuminates how Orlean’s upbringing, relationships and personal experiences braided through and informed the choices that created her much-lauded career.
As she writes in “Joyride,” “The story of my life is the story of my stories.”
The reluctant memoirist
Orlean had planned to write a craft book about writing, but she feared it would be “pedantic and boring.” Her solution? Dissect one of her most famous stories, “The American Man at Age Ten”, the Esquire cover story from December 1992.
It’s a perfect example of what has come to be her signature style: Her editor had wanted a standard celebrity profile of Macaulay Culkin, then a child star at the apex of his fame, thanks to his role in the “Home Alone” movie franchise. Instead, she reported on the life of Colin Duffy, an average kid in an average suburb in New Jersey, and in the process upended reporting conventions, delivering unique insights into ways popular culture was impacting young men.
Orlean picked that story to dissect in order to show “how the sausage was made,” but said her first stab felt flat without the context of what was going on in her life at the time and what motivated her to make that choice: “I thought, in a void, this doesn’t have the impact that I really feel it needs to have, and as I drew the camera back further and further, suddenly I’m in my childhood bedroom.”
Another important thing to know: All this was happening during the COVID lockdown. “I really think most people got very ruminative, thinking about what mattered, what was meaningful in our lives.”
At that point, she realized memoir was the only form that made sense for what she wanted to convey.
Why she’s like this
In any good tale, the reader gets backstory to understand what shaped the main character and motivates her to do what she does.
Memoir is no exception.
In “Joyride,” readers are brought into Orlean’s formative years growing up in the Shaker Heights neighborhood of Cleveland, and we learn that she many times eavesdropped on her parents’ “fractious” marriage.
As she writes in the book, “If I could say something valuable came out of this miserable pastime, it would be that I became adept at listening while staying out of sight, which seems like good training for a future writer.”
In our interview, she added, “The optimist in me wants very much to always see the good that comes out of something challenging.”
That optimism and being “a listener and observer” both would become hallmarks of her writing career — which, by the way, her father tried to talk her out of. He wanted her to go to law school instead so she’d always have something to fall back on.
“Relentless, relentless,” she said with a laugh. “Well, you know, as a writer, parents have this total fear that you’re [not going to be able to support yourself]. Like, if my son said to me, ‘I want to be a writer,’ I’d go, ‘Maybe you should go to law school!’ Now that I’m a parent, I understand it completely.”
But, said Orlean, “what I found funny is when there was concrete, material evidence” of her success as a writer – a staff position at the esteemed New Yorker, bestselling books – his refrain was the same: “You could go to law school…”
“What can I do?” she shrugged.
Life lessons
But for all her father’s talk of law school, Orlean said she discovered only when he was aged 90 that her dad himself secretly had wanted to be a writer. She credits him with exposing her to ideas and experiences that influence her still.
For instance, Orlean tells of him taking her and her siblings to impoverished parts of Cleveland in 1966 during a period of racial unrest so they could understand firsthand life outside of their relatively affluent bubble.
“My dad was an amazing person,” she said. “At a time when that was not typical behavior, he said, ‘We’re going to drive around and see the neighborhoods where this was going on.’”
As she writes in “Joyride,” this seeded her lifelong curiosity about other lives and subcultures: “My father trained me … to be inquisitive, to be comfortable in settings that were unfamiliar or even strange. Without saying it explicitly, he trained me to think like a writer.”
There’s one more key element readers learn about how Orlean’s background impacts her even today: Orlean drew from the Talmud the idea that “Each person contains an entire story, an entire world.”
Call this the guiding ethos of her work: “If every person is really interesting and has a wonderful story, wow! We are living in a world of literally billions of wonderful things to discover.”
To watch the recording of the complete interview, go to Bookish. To see Orlean in person or on live stream, catch her in conversation with Madeleine Brand as part of the ALOUD series on Tuesday, Oct. 28 in the Mark Taper Auditorium at Richard J. Riordan Central Library.
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