In 2017, 10 years after Susan Orlean profiled Caltech-trained physicist turned professional origami artist Robert Lang for the New Yorker, she attended the OrigamiUSA convention to take Lang’s workshop on folding a “Taiwan goldfish”. I was with her, a radio producer trying to capture the sounds of paper creasing as Orlean attempted to keep pace with the “Da Vinci of origami”, wincing when her goldfish’s fins didn’t exactly flutter in hydrodynamic splendour.
It was Orlean in her element: an adventurous student, inquisitive and exacting, fully alive to the mischief inherent to reporting – and primed to extract some higher truth. “When we first met you said something to me I’ve never forgotten,” Orlean told Lang. “That paper has a memory – that once you fold it, you can never entirely remove the fold.” Was that, she wondered, an insight about life, too?
Over the course of four decades, seven books and countless exquisite magazine features, Orlean has profiled celebrities and nobodies, followed cults and choirs, turned her eye to supermarkets and surfers. “Writers fall into two categories: there are those who have something they want to say to the world, and there are those who believe the world has something to tell them,” she observes. Orlean falls squarely into the second camp. There are two kinds of story she likes best: “hiding in plain sight” and “who knew?”.
A memoir is usually neither of these sorts of stories, but Orlean rises to the challenge of writing about her own life with grace. Joyride follows another thread she has repeatedly returned to in her work: the nature of obsession. At the Willamette Week in Portland, where she got her start, the editor preached that “no matter how small or narrow its focus, every story was meaningful”. Orlean married a likeminded Week staffer and got her big break covering the Rajneesh cult for the Village Voice.
The subjects of her pieces from this time – for the Voice, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Vogue and the New Yorker – are a cultural time capsule. There’s a history of Lycra, profiles of Bon Jovi and the artist Christo, an investigation into the folding practices at Benetton. Assignments are elastic, and so are budgets. While negotiating the terms of a New Yorker feature about a Bronx cab driver who had found himself elected the king of the Ashanti people in the United States, she is merely told, “Sphinx-like” by editor Chip McGrath, that her expense budget will be enough to cover travel to Ghana if “necessary”. Her final payment? “It will be sufficient.” “I don’t need to tell you that magazines don’t work that way any more,” she writes.
Joyride represents the liner notes to a career of hits. There’s the deliciously “heady, fun, surreal” experience of watching Spike Jonze’s movie Adaptation, based on her book The Orchid Thief, come to life – including being played by Meryl Streep. (Orlean’s account of flipping open Charlie Kaufman’s script for the first time to discover herself in it is laugh-out-loud funny.) A memorable Twitter thread from 2020 – the result of too much rosé on an empty stomach – that made her the “patron saint of pandemic drinking”, gets its moment, too. And harder episodes: a divorce, a cancer diagnosis, the sorrow of moving her mother into a nursing home.
Orlean sees the writing life as one of constant highwire creative reinvention – “you never build equity”, is how she puts it. Her father, who wanted to be writer but became a businessman instead, might have agreed: after she published The Orchid Thief he suggested she consider finally enrolling in law school. Thank goodness she didn’t. “I felt called, I really did, to describe ordinary life in a way that revealed its complexity and poetry – to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious about the world, and how much joy can be found in letting yourself be surprised.”
• Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean is published by Atlantic (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
