Susan Orlean has spent nearly half a century writing about fascinating people, starting in the late 1970s at Portland’s Willamette Week and eventually making her way to The New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 1992. She’s written multiple bestselling books, on topics ranging from the Los Angeles Public Library fire to celebrity dog Rin Tin Tin to orchid poaching in Florida. And I’m obligated to note in this opening paragraph that she was once played by Meryl Streep in a movie. And now, she’s taken on perhaps the most challenging topic in her career: herself.
In her new memoir, “Joyride” (out now from Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Orlean irresistibly walks us through her charmed career (yes, there’s some fun backstage-at-The-New-Yorker stuff, and a fair bit of dish about the publishing world) and shares her generous philosophies about writing.
“I wanted to demonstrate that the world was complex and revelatory and unexpected; that the ordinary was divine and luminous; that familiar things examined closely were magnificent; to show that a scrap of a story in a Miami newspaper about flowers was actually a portal to the timeless tale we all tell, of what we are passionate about, of what moves us and enthralls us, of what choices we make about how we live,” she writes in “Joyride.” “I wanted to tell the age-old story of who we are and how we abide in the world.”
On a friendly Zoom call last month from her home in Los Angeles, Orlean said that writing “Joyride” was an entirely new experience, very dissimilar from her many years of journalism. “Obviously, some of the most basic principles of writing, of pacing, of structure, remained constant, but really on the page it felt very different.”
As is often the case with books, “Joyride” was originally meant to be something else, but transformed on its journey. Orlean said she’d been thinking about writing a book about writing. “And then I felt that it was just not that interesting to write a book about writing. I had a lot of things to say about it, but the actual process of writing seemed not very interesting. I then thought, ‘Maybe what I could do is take one story and really break it down and pull it apart.’ And then inevitably, doing that, I broke it down further and further until it really began, like ‘Tristram Shandy,’ with the moment of my conception.” Suddenly, she was writing a memoir.
But while “Joyride” is populated by the many interesting people in Orlean’s life, its main characters are her stories. “The American Man at Age Ten,” which Orlean wrote for Esquire magazine in 1992, is at its center: Orlean begins her book with the story of how that piece — a portrait of a very average yet charming suburban 10-year-old boy — came to be, and how she came to live inside the world of a 10-year-old.
“I dove into the imaginary adult world as he envisioned it and tried to convey what it might be to live in it with him,” she wrote, “a universe in which childhood folded into adulthood, in which being married mostly meant you had matching superhero notebooks.” The completed piece is included in the book’s appendix, so we can travel with Orlean from the initial idea to its irresistible lede to its completion.
If you’ve been reading Orlean over the years, you’ll enjoy how her stories make cameo appearances in the book — an early Village Voice portrait of the Bhagwan settlement in Antelope, Ore.; a road trip with a traveling gospel group; a look into Tonya Harding’s hometown; a profile of a group of Maui surfer girls. And we get the full story of her book, “The Orchid Thief,” which began as a New Yorker portrait (called “Orchid Fever”) of a Florida man obsessed with poaching rare “ghost orchids,” and later became a 2002 movie, “Adaptation.”
In “Joyride,” Orlean writes about how when she first read the script of “Adaptation,” she thought it was “a little insane and a little incomprehensible.” But she’d been imagining a more straightforward version of the book; the one scripted by Charlie Kaufman actually places the book inside a surreal story about making a movie from the book, with Orlean herself as a character. Though initially reluctant to agree to such exposure, Orlean eventually had a change of heart. (“I began to feel like I had been offered a ticket to a very strange amusement park ride,” she wrote, “and that I might regret it if I didn’t try it.”) And then she found out who was cast to play her: the legendary Streep.
“I couldn’t believe it when they said she was going to take the part,” Orlean said in our interview. “I thought they were joking around … She got cast fairly early on, and I remember just thinking, ‘This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.’ I’m not sure I totally believed it until it was truly undeniable.”
In the book, she notes that in more than 20 years, she still hasn’t come up with a tidy answer for what it’s like to be played by Meryl Streep. “It was weird, it was disorienting, it was nerve-racking, it was fun, it was great,” she wrote. “It was like riding the sidecar of a fast motorcycle.”
Some parts of “Joyride” were especially difficult to write: personal details of her parents’ marriage, her own divorce, illness. “I’m a pretty private person,” Orlean said. “It was a whole new way of thinking about writing and about intimacy and privacy and openness that I had never really experienced before as a writer.” Her husband, John Gillespie — “my most loyal reader” — helped her in determining “if it was too far or not far enough.”
Though she’s determined that “Joyride” will be her one and only memoir, Orlean is already at work on another book, the topic of which she can’t currently reveal. Her story as a writer goes on.
“Stories don’t conclude,” she writes in the last chapter of “Joyride,” “but they do have consequence. They are documents of our humanity, shimmering trails of time spent alive.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
