Orlean’s memoir explores what makes us curious

Tracy Carr
| Special to the Mississippi Clarion Ledger

Susan Orlean’s “Joyride: A Memoir” details her career as a nonfiction writer and her belief in following one’s curiosity.
The book explains how her New Yorker essay “Orchid Fever” evolved into the book “The Orchid Thief” and the film “Adaptation.”
Orlean shares her writing process, including her index card system for organizing information.
The memoir includes five of her essays, such as “Devotion Road” about the Jackson Southernaires gospel group.

Susan Orlean, author of eight books of nonfiction, including “The Library Book” and “The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession,” semi-reluctantly turns her gaze to herself and her decades-long writing career in “Joyride: A Memoir.”

Orlean writes, “I’ve always dreaded the idea of writing a memoir. I’m used to looking outward, not inward; I yearn to bring attention to hidden worlds, not to my own. I’m proud of my work, and I want the widest readership I can muster, but I hate vanity.”

If there is a takeaway from “Joyride,” it’s to explore what makes you curious. She writes of the central tenet to all of her writing: “that anything at all is worth writing about if you care about it and it makes you curious and makes you want to holler about it to other people.”

One day, as she wandered the streets of New York looking for something interesting to write about for a “Talk of the Town” piece, she saw a flyer on a telephone pole for a gospel concert.

She went to the concert and loved it. Later, she saw an obituary in the New York Times for Jackson’s Franklin Williams, a founder of the Jackson Southernaires, a longtime (and still existent) gospel group. She somehow convinced them to let her travel with and profile them.

The experience traveling with the Southernaires was profound for Orlean: “Every bit of cynicism in me dissolved; every cool reportorial stance softened. I was stirred beyond measure. I was reminded throughout the experience how unbelievably fortunate I was to have this entrée into such a range of communities and cultures; this is the single greatest privilege of being a writer.”

The main reason I picked up “Joyride” to begin with was to read more about how the essay “Orchid Fever,” published in the “New Yorker” in January 1995, became the book “The Orchid Thief” (published in 1998) and the genre-bending, thrilling (and kind of insane) 2002 movie “Adaptation,” which stars Meryl Streep as Susan Orlean herself. (I recommend all three versions of this story.)

Orlean devotes a good chunk of the book to this, including her initial horror at the wild direction the screenplay went and her eventual softening. Look, if you’re going to be portrayed having a fictional affair with the subject of your book, at least Meryl Streep is the one doing it. “Adaptation” was nominated for four Academy Awards, and won one (Best Supporting Actor for Chris Cooper’s portrayal as the titular orchid thief, John Laroche).

As a bonus, the appendix contains five of the essays she refers to, including “Devotion Road,” the essay about the Jackson Southernaires. I find it difficult to read about an essay (or a song or a movie) and not immediately go experience that thing for myself, so this was a welcome surprise.

“Joyride” also contains solid writing advice, including a detailed account of Orlean’s index card system for organizing facts and quotations for a piece. She writes, “Writing is a mysterious practice, so it feels important to me to apply logic and methods whenever I can, an armature on which to hang the creative part. I know I can’t produce a perfect sentence using a system, but I hope to set up an environment in which the likelihood of being able to produce that perfect sentence increases.”

“Joyride” combines a writer’s work and life in a way that is incredibly honest and authentic. I have no doubt that Orlean in real life is the person the reader encounters in the book. About her career, she writes, “I felt called, I really did, to describe ordinary life in a way that revealed its complexity and poetry — to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious about the world, and how much joy can be found in letting yourself be surprised.”