{"id":2121433,"date":"2025-10-28T22:28:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T22:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2121433"},"modified":"2025-10-28T22:28:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T22:28:25","slug":"susan-orlean-takes-readers-through-charmed-career-in-memoir-joyride-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/susan-orlean-takes-readers-through-charmed-career-in-memoir-joyride-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Orlean takes readers through charmed career in memoir \u2018Joyride\u2019 | Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

Susan Orlean has spent nearly half a century writing about fascinating people, starting in the late 1970s at Portland\u2019s Willamette Week and eventually making her way to The New Yorker, where she\u2019s been a staff writer since 1992. She\u2019s written multiple bestselling books, on topics ranging from the Los Angeles Public Library fire<\/a> 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\u2019s taken on perhaps the most challenging topic in her career: herself.<\/p>\n

In her new memoir, \u201cJoyride\u201d (out now from Avid Reader Press\/Simon & Schuster), Orlean irresistibly walks us through her charmed career (yes, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d she writes in \u201cJoyride.\u201d \u201cI wanted to tell the age-old story of who we are and how we abide in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a friendly Zoom call last month from her home in Los Angeles, Orlean said that writing \u201cJoyride\u201d was an entirely new experience, very dissimilar from her many years of journalism. \u201cObviously, some of the most basic principles of writing, of pacing, of structure, remained constant, but really on the page it felt very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

As is often the case with books, \u201cJoyride\u201d was originally meant to be something else, but transformed on its journey. Orlean said she\u2019d been thinking about writing a book about writing. \u201cAnd 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 \u2018Tristram Shandy,\u2019 with the moment of my conception.\u201d Suddenly, she was writing a memoir.<\/p>\n

But while \u201cJoyride\u201d is populated by the many interesting people in Orlean\u2019s life, its main characters are her stories. \u201cThe American Man at Age Ten,\u201d which Orlean wrote for Esquire magazine in 1992, is at its center: Orlean begins her book with the story of how that piece \u2014 a portrait of a very average yet charming suburban 10-year-old boy \u2014 came to be, and how she came to live inside the world of a 10-year-old.<\/p>\n

\u201cI dove into the imaginary adult world as he envisioned it and tried to convey what it might be to live in it with him,\u201d she wrote, \u201ca universe in which childhood folded into adulthood, in which being married mostly meant you had matching superhero notebooks.\u201d The completed piece is included in the book\u2019s appendix, so we can travel with Orlean from the initial idea to its irresistible lede to its completion.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n \n
\n
\n
\n \n <\/div>\n
\n

Headlines, puzzles and death notices from the Valley delivered to your inbox 7 a.m. daily.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

If you\u2019ve been reading Orlean over the years, you\u2019ll enjoy how her stories make cameo appearances in the book \u2014 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\u2019s hometown; a profile of a group of Maui surfer girls. And we get the full story of her book, \u201cThe Orchid Thief,\u201d which began as a New Yorker portrait (called \u201cOrchid Fever\u201d) of a Florida man obsessed with poaching rare \u201cghost orchids,\u201d and later became a 2002 movie, \u201cAdaptation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cJoyride,\u201d Orlean writes about how when she first read the script of \u201cAdaptation,\u201d she thought it was \u201ca little insane and a little incomprehensible.\u201d But she\u2019d 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. (\u201cI began to feel like I had been offered a ticket to a very strange amusement park ride,\u201d she wrote, \u201cand that I might regret it if I didn\u2019t try it.”) And then she found out who was cast to play her: the legendary Streep.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it when they said she was going to take the part,\u201d Orlean said in our interview. \u201cI thought they were joking around \u2026 She got cast fairly early on, and I remember just thinking, ‘This is the craziest thing I\u2019ve ever heard.’ I\u2019m not sure I totally believed it until it was truly undeniable.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the book, she notes that in more than 20 years, she still hasn\u2019t come up with a tidy answer for what it\u2019s like to be played by Meryl Streep. \u201cIt was weird, it was disorienting, it was nerve-racking, it was fun, it was great,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt was like riding the sidecar of a fast motorcycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some parts of \u201cJoyride\u201d were especially difficult to write: personal details of her parents\u2019 marriage, her own divorce, illness. \u201cI\u2019m a pretty private person,\u201d Orlean said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d Her husband, John Gillespie \u2014 \u201cmy most loyal reader\u201d \u2014 helped her in determining \u201cif it was too far or not far enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though she\u2019s determined that \u201cJoyride\u201d will be her one and only memoir, Orlean is already at work on another book, the topic of which she can\u2019t currently reveal. Her story as a writer goes on.<\/p>\n

\u201cStories don\u2019t conclude,\u201d she writes in the last chapter of \u201cJoyride,\u201d\u00a0\u201cbut they do have consequence. They are documents of our humanity, shimmering trails of time spent alive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Susan Orlean has spent nearly half a century writing about fascinating people, starting in the late 1970s at Portland\u2019s Willamette Week and eventually making her way to The New Yorker, where she\u2019s been a staff writer since 1992. She\u2019s written multiple bestselling books, on topics ranging from the Los Angeles Public Library fire to celebrity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2076437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2121433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Seattle-Jazz-Fellowships-Monday-night-jazz-jam-draws-all-ages-crowd.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2121433"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2121434,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121433\/revisions\/2121434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2076437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2121433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2121433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2121433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}