Author interview: Orlean’s open approach provides rich insight into storytelling world

'Joyride' is a hugely entertaining and engaging account of Orlean’s adventures in writing written in her own imitable and impeccable style

Susan Orlean: ‘The New Yorker’, between the print magazine and the website, has more readers than it ever did. That gives me hope. Picture: Noah Fecks

• Joyride 
• Susan Orlean
• Atlantic Books, £20.00

Susan Orlean didn’t set out to write an elegy for journalism when she began working on her memoir, Joyride. 

However, it’s hard not to look back on the years when the celebrated US writer plied her trade in a bygone era when expense accounts were generous and deadlines more elastic.

As the title suggests, the book is a hugely entertaining and engaging account of Orlean’s adventures in writing, working for legendary publications from Rolling Stone and The Village Voice to The New Yorker, written in her own imitable and impeccable style.

When Orlean started out, narrative non-fiction was in its heyday, and she was picking up the baton from writers such as Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe. 

There are too many highlights to list but up there is her encounter with a cult leader for a Village Voice piece and The New Yorker article about a charismatic orchid hunter which led to her being portrayed on screen by Meryl Streep.

“When I was writing it, I didn’t think, well, I want to capture this past world of largesse when everybody had time and everybody had money,” says Orlean. 

I didn’t think of it as a nostalgic kind of reflection, but the reality is the way people consume information has changed so radically. 

“When I started at The New Yorker, they didn’t use photos, now, they have this huge website with video. And the loss of so many local newspapers, a huge swath of journalistic output is gone.

“I think the book does capture a moment of time that probably will never be repeated.”

In Joyride, Orlean says that writers fall into two categories — those who have something they want to say to the world, and those who believe the world has something to tell them. 

She is very much in the latter camp, beginning with intimate vignettes that she skilfully expands into stories that illuminate a whole world.

“I have very strong opinions, believe me, but that wasn’t the writing I wanted to do.

“I wanted to discover parts of the world and ways of being that I wasn’t familiar with, and then report on that to my readers and say to them, ‘look at this wonderful, astonishing thing that I’ve uncovered’, even if it’s something very familiar, I’ve just looked at it in a new way.”

Orlean’s career is festooned with brilliant gems that make the mundane seem magical. 

Her first published article in The New Yorker was a piece about how Benetton staff folded clothes, while her celebrated article A Gentle Reign was a fascinating look at the life of Kwabena Oppong, the king of an African tribe who worked as a New York cab driver. 

Susan Orlean: 'I have very strong opinions, believe me, but that wasn’t the writing I wanted to do.' Picture: Corey Hendrickson

The intro (or the lede in US journalistic parlance) to her 1992 Esquire cover story The American Man, Age Ten has often been anthologised and studied.

Originally assigned to do a profile of child actor Macaulay Culkin, Orlean convinced her editor to run a piece on the life of a typical American boy instead. [“If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks.”]

“These are not small stories. The portal you’re travelling through is small, but you’re seeing a whole universe.

“And you’re seeing a very big story, whether it’s about family or passion or whatever the thematic kind of nugget is, these stories are really big.”

Orlean has thrived writing about other people’s lives but when it came to writing a memoir and turning her focus inward, she felt less than comfortable.

“It’s not something that I felt at ease doing. I had made an agreement with the reader that I was going to share with them who I was, and that was what guided me. But it certainly was challenging.

“Some of it made me very sad to think about, and I didn’t quite know how to write some of it.”

Her relationship with her late ex-husband

She writes with admirable honesty about her relationship with her late ex-husband, who had given up journalism to become a lawyer and became increasingly jealous when her writing career took off. 

In a flabbergasting turn of events, he decides to reveal his infidelity just before the launch of her first book — and then goes on to do it again for her second. 

This is all conveyed with a distinct lack of bitterness on Orlean’s part.

“I felt like it spoke pretty loudly on its own. I resisted in initially accepting the fact that this was no accident, because I thought, how can anyone be that petty and mean-spirited?

“I mean, this is the person who’s supposed to love me, who you would think would be excited, happy and celebrating, and instead, this is the moment to knock me down.

“There are a lot of men who find female success particularly threatening.”

Orlean admits to a naive optimism which at times got her into hairy situations, for example when she was drawn into the orbit of discredited Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh while researching a piece at his commune in Oregon. 

She witnesses a TV cameraman covering the story abandoning his assignment to join the ranks of followers.

“That is where I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here, this is really scary’.”

Confidence has, oddly, as one of its components, innocence, in the sense that you believe that everything is going to be fine. You’re focused on the positive possibility.

The same attitude prevailed when her book The Orchid Thief, which expanded on her piece about John Laroche, an eccentric plant dealer who had been arrested for poaching rare orchids from a Florida swamp, was optioned for the screen.

It became the award-winning Adaptation, with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, who took a surreally metafictional approach to Orlean’s book. 

Although she initially had some reservations, Orlean eventually gave her approval and things took an even stranger turn when it turned out she would be portrayed by acting legend Meryl Streep. 

Orlean had been an extra in Streep’s breakthrough film The Deer Hunter.

“Most of the time my impulse is to say yes, because I feel like if I say no, I’m never going to know what this could have been like.

“They made a few alterations that I asked for but I thought these are smart people, they do really want to make a good movie. I’m still not quite sure I understand it, but I didn’t not want to do it.”

The tone of Joyride runs very much counter to the stereotypical view of journalists as cynical and world-weary. 

It’s also a refreshing insight into the craft, and graft, of reporting and writing in a world where the press is now often seen as the enemy, a dangerous perspective stoked by political leaders. Orlean’s open approach to the topics she writes about runs counter to the prevailing mood.

“Even if it’s about something like a children’s beauty pageant where I know that my private feeling is of discomfort and questioning whether this is a healthy thing to do, my approach is that it’s valuable to someone, in which case I am obligated as a writer to understand why.

“More than ever, we’re fostering this attitude that I just decide, de facto, that I disapprove of you, that I don’t want to learn about you, there’s a turning inward that is really frightening.

“We seem to be losing the appetite for saying ‘I don’t understand this, let me explore it a little further’, and it’s really scary, I genuinely think this is how society implodes.”

Orlean says storytelling and writing are fundamental to human existence. She is characteristically optimistic that it is something we will always have in one form or another.

“You never lose certain fundamentals. People continue to want to hear stories, but they hear them in different forms.

“We’re not going to go back to the era of big glossy magazines, and we may have fewer outlets, but the ones that have survived seem to be really growing.

“ The New Yorker, between the print magazine and the website, has more readers than it ever did. That gives me hope.”