Joyride Review by Susan Orlean – A Strange and Extraordinary Life | Biography and memoirs

IIn 2017, 10 years after Susan Orlean profiled Robert Lange, the Caltech-trained physicist turned professional origami artist for The New Yorker, she attended the OrigamiUSA conference for Lange’s workshop on folding a “Taiwanese goldfish.” I was with her, a radio producer trying to capture the sounds of paper crinkling while Aurelian tried to keep up with “Da Vinci’s Origami,” grumbling when her goldfish’s fins didn’t flap in hydrodynamic extravaganza.

Orléans was in her element: an adventurous student, curious and demanding, keenly aware of the inherent mischief of journalistic reporting—and ready to extract some higher truth. “When we first met you said something to me that I will never forget,” Aurélien told Lange. “This paper contains a memory. Once you fold it, you can never completely remove the fold.” Was that an insight into life, too, I wondered?

Over the course of four decades, seven books and countless fascinating magazine articles, Orléans has profiled celebrities and nobility, followed cults and choirs, and turned her sights to supermarkets and surfers. She points out that “writers are divided into two categories: there are those who have something to say to the world, and there are those who believe that the world has something to say to them.” Orleans falls squarely into the second camp. There are two types of stories she likes best: “Hiding in Plain Sight” and “Who Knew?”

Memoirs aren’t usually any of these types of stories, but Orléan rises to the challenge of writing about her own life with grace. Have a nice trip It follows another theme she returns to again and again in her work: the nature of obsession. At Willamette Week in Portland, where she got her start, the editor preached that “no matter how small or narrow its focus, every story has a meaning.” Aurelian married a similar week employee and got her big break covering the Rajneesh cult for the Village Voice.

The subjects of her articles 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, glimpses of Bon Jovi and artist Christo, and an investigation into Benetton’s folding practices. Tasks are flexible, as are budgets. While negotiating the terms of a New Yorker article about a Bronx taxi driver who found himself elected king of the Ashanti people in the United States, editor Chip McGrath told her, “like a sphinx,” that her expense budget would be enough to cover the cost of traveling to Ghana if “it was necessary.” Her final payment? “It will be enough.” “You don’t need me to tell you that magazines don’t work that way anymore,” she writes.

Joyride represents the liner notes on a successful career. There’s a deliciously “exciting, fun, surreal” experience watching Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, based on her book The Orchid Thief, brought to life – including the role of Meryl Streep. (Orlean’s account of opening a Charlie Kaufman script for the first time to discover herself in it is very funny.) A memorable Twitter thread from 2020 — the result of eating too much rosé on an empty stomach — that made her the “saint of pandemic drinking,” is having its moment, too. The most difficult events: divorce, a cancer diagnosis, and the grief caused by her mother being transferred to a nursing home.

Orlean sees a life of writing as one of constant creative renewal—“You never build equity,” she says. Her father, who wanted to be a writer but became a businessman instead, probably agreed: after she published The Orchid Thief He suggested that she finally consider going to law school. Thank God she didn’t do that. “I felt called, I did, to describe ordinary life in a way that revealed its complexity and its poetry—to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious about the world, and how much happiness can be found in letting yourself be surprised.”