Joyride

Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of several books, including The Orchid Thief and The Library Book. In this memoir, she traces her development as a writer from childhood to the present, weaving together her career, personal life, and philosophy about why writing matters.

Orlean opens by noting that twenty-five years have passed since she published The Orchid Thief, and this milestone has prompted her to reflect. She had long dreaded writing a memoir, accustomed to looking outward rather than inward, but she commits to the project, describing her core belief that writing documents the journey from ignorance to knowledge and reveals the complexity of ordinary life.

To illustrate her approach, she recounts the origin of her 1992 Esquire cover story, "The American Man, Age Ten." Editor Terry McDonell wanted her to profile child actor Macaulay Culkin, but she counterproposed profiling an ordinary ten-year-old boy. Through a friend of a friend, she found Colin Duffy in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. After two weeks of reporting, she produced a whimsical lede, or opening passage, imagining married life with Colin. The piece affirmed her conviction that ordinary subjects reward genuine curiosity.

Orlean traces this conviction to her childhood in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy Cleveland suburb that deliberately integrated beginning in the late 1950s. Her mother, Edith, was a meticulous reader who clipped every one of Orlean's published stories into scrapbooks. Her father, Arthur, was buoyantly curious, a talker to strangers whose serendipitous habits shaped her reporting style. Her parents' combative marriage made her hypervigilant to discord. Her mother's family fled Hungary, eventually settling in Cleveland; the relatives who stayed behind perished at Auschwitz. A Life magazine profile of a small-town doctor crystallized Orlean's desire to write about ordinary people, and reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in eleventh grade was transformative. Late in life, her father confessed he had always wanted to be a writer, reframing his persistent pressure on her to attend law school.

After college at the University of Michigan, Orlean moved to Portland, Oregon, where she worked at Paper Rose, a small magazine startup. After Paper Rose folded, she joined Willamette Week, Portland's alternative newsweekly, where editor Ron Buel taught her what she considers the most important lesson of her career: Writing has three steps (report, think, write), and the goal is fairness rather than strict objectivity. She wrote features on Hmong immigrants, prostitution, and a murder/suicide, and posed as a high school student for one story. When Indian spiritual leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh arrived in Oregon and built a commune called Rajneeshpuram, Orlean recognized the story's national appeal and engineered an assignment from The Village Voice. The piece ran as a cover story, and editors from national magazines called, launching her career beyond Portland.

In 1982, she fell in love with Peter Sistrom, a brilliant editor at Willamette Week who had depression, and they moved to Boston so he could attend law school. She married Peter in 1983 despite sensing cracks in the relationship. Through a friend, she met literary agent Richard Pine. After a triathlon book proposal drew rejections, editor Joni Evans at Simon and Schuster asked if that was really what Orlean wanted to write; Orlean blurted out her true desire, a book about Saturday night in America, and Evans agreed.

Saturday Night proved grueling. Orlean reported on a shoestring, dancing polka in Maryland and spending a night in a Wyoming missile silo. After publisher turmoil, Sonny Mehta of Knopf acquired the book for $100,000. Meanwhile, she secured a meeting at The New Yorker with editor Chip McGrath, pitching ideas for Talk of the Town, the magazine's short front-of-book feature series. McGrath assigned her a piece on how Benetton stores trained staff to fold sweaters, and he taught her that stories don't need a concluding flourish; it's better to leave readers falling forward. She wrote her first full-length feature profiling Kwabena Oppong, a Ghanaian cabdriver who served as king of the American Ashanti community in the South Bronx. On the day of her Saturday Night book party, Peter confessed to a year-long affair. Despite the betrayal, she did not leave, and she convinced editor Robert Gottlieb to make her a New Yorker staff writer.

When Tina Brown replaced Gottlieb in 1992, Orlean feared for her position but developed a productive rhythm with the new editor. She traveled with the Jackson Southernaires, a gospel group, through the Deep South, producing "Devotion Road," which she considers the best writing of her life. While flying home from vacation in December 1994, she found a discarded newspaper story about a nurseryman named John Laroche arrested with rare orchids in a Florida swamp. The discovery led to "Orchid Fever" in The New Yorker and a book deal with editor Jonathan Karp at Random House.

Writing The Orchid Thief proved challenging when Laroche informed her the Seminoles had fired him and he was leaving horticulture for online pornography. She spent months in Florida, reporting in expanding circles around the orchid theft. The book was published in late 1998 and became a bestseller. At her book party, she discovered Peter was having another affair; when she learned his lover was pregnant, the marriage ended.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, hired to write the screenplay for a film adaptation of The Orchid Thief, produced a script called Adaptation that made Orlean a character, including a fictional love affair with Laroche. She reluctantly approved the use of her name. After her divorce, she was set up on a blind date with John Gillespie, an investment banker who quoted Faulkner and said "we" when talking about her needs. They planned a September 15, 2001, wedding but postponed after the September 11 attacks, marrying on November 10 at the Explorers Club in New York. Adaptation premiered in December 2002 with Meryl Streep playing Orlean, to wide acclaim.

Orlean next spent nearly a decade writing Rin Tin Tin after discovering that the famous German shepherd was a real dog from the silent-film era, found in a World War I kennel by American soldier Lee Duncan. She sold the book to Little, Brown and received a Nieman Fellowship, a prestigious journalism residency, at Harvard. After years of fertility treatments, she gave birth to a son, Austin. When Little, Brown canceled her contract, her lawyer proved she had been misled, and Simon and Schuster acquired the book. Rin Tin Tin earned a front-page New York Times Book Review and reached the bestseller list. Her father died at ninety-two during the writing process.

After resisting the idea of another book, Orlean visited a Studio City branch library with Austin for a kindergarten assignment and learned about the largest library fire in American history, a 1986 blaze at the Los Angeles Central Library that destroyed 400,000 books. As she researched, she watched her mother's slow decline into dementia and came to understand a Senegalese expression for death, "his or her library has burned." This personal loss gave the book its thematic core: the preservation and destruction of memory. The Library Book was published in October 2018 to enthusiastic reviews. Her mother had died on February 6, 2016, before the book was finished.

In the memoir's final movement, Orlean recounts later developments: writing an obituary column for The New Yorker, joining the writing staff of HBO's How To with John Wilson, undergoing spinal surgery and treatment for lung cancer, and evacuating during the January 2025 Los Angeles fires. She learns that Peter Sistrom has died of a heart attack, and she is devastated not by the loss of their relationship but by the loss of any possibility that he might acknowledge their shared memories. She closes by recalling Chip McGrath's lesson about leaving readers falling forward: Stories never truly end. This one, she writes, "is a river journey we've taken together."