Book review: Going off-piste for success

In the way of the best memoirs, Susan Orlean weaves in her own life into her accounts. Picture: Corey Hendrickson

• Joyride: A Memoir 
• Susan Orlean 
• Simon & Schuster,£16.99

Trawling through the memoirs of people who have been highly successful in their chosen field, authors usually tend to veer off in one of two ways. 

Either they wholly ascribe impressive achievements to their own smart decision-making and eye for the main chance, or they refer repeatedly to how fortunate they were at various junctures in their careers. 

In the aptly named Joyride, Susan Orlean, one of the greatest American non-fiction writers of the past half century, falls into the latter, more endearing category, constantly acknowledging how lady luck smiled on her at regular intervals.

As an objective reader of her work since first discovering the joys of The New Yorker magazine in a rather cosmopolitan newsagent in Dun Laoghaire in the early 1990s, I think it’s fair to say her triumphs also had plenty to do with hard work, talent, and an unerring nose for the offbeat story. 

She has always specialised in unfurling left-field yarns that plenty of her peers would have passed right by. 

Even in a publication famous for publishing lengthy treatises on obscure topics, Orlean stood out for going way off-piste and somehow persuading the readers to make the trip too.

Her most famous work is a case in point. The Orchid Thief started life as a magazine piece for The New Yorker then became a book and, eventually, a weird but wonderful Nicolas Cage/Charlie Kaufman movie collaboration called Adaptation. 

A financial bonanza for the author, all of this stemmed from her spotting a tiny newspaper story about somebody being arrested for pilfering a rare species of flower from a Florida swamp. 

There is true genius in realising there was a compelling story to be mined there about the human condition.

That has been a recurring theme in her canon. Her first book was a portrait of Saturday night in America, in which she spent that evening with people in all manner of locations and situations that offered a window into the country. 

Simple idea. Brilliant idea that nobody had ever thought of — like her decision to write The Library Book. 

Plenty of us spend copious amounts of time in them but only Orlean would regard the Los Angeles library and its history as fecund ground for a tome about what these evolving institutions mean to us today.

For those who write or aspire to write, there is enough quality information in Joyride for it be considered something of an instructional manual. 

Orlean offers wonderful insight into her process, before, during, and after she comes up with an original idea.

Helpful tidbits abound about how she deploys index cards to plot a path through often-labyrinthine articles and books. 

Of course, if that is all it took, everybody would be writing non-fiction classics that are adapted for the big screen.

In the way of the best memoirs, Orlean weaves in her own life with accounts of how she unearthed stories that made her reputation.

She is brutally candid about the failure of her first marriage and writes poignantly about the deaths of her parents. 

But, at one point, she slips in the fact that she and her second husband were working as speech doctors for the Democratic Party at the 2004 convention that nominated John Kerry to run against George W Bush.

Even as a journalist who doesn’t cover politics, I think she still owed the reader more of an explanation about how and why the poacher turned gamekeeper. 

Especially given the Republicans’ main complaint for decades has been all mainstream media reporters are in the tank for their opponents.

Small quibble. A very fine book.