When Susan Orlean chose the title for her memoir, it wasn't merely an apt description of the "joyride of a life" she's lived as a journalist for nearly 50 years. It also teases the pleasure her readers will derive from a book that illuminates her fascinating career while serving as a textbook of sorts for anyone eager to look behind the scenes at a highly accomplished writer's craft.
For Orlean, the drive to write has always seemed as elemental as the need to eat or sleep. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1978, she headed to Portland, Ore., fending off her father's pressure to follow him into the legal profession. Thanks to her talent and dogged persistence, she progressed from working for publications like Portland's Willamette Week--where she profiled the controversial guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his cult--to a staff writer position with the New Yorker in 1992, where she remains to this day.
Orlean divides her work into two categories: "who knew?" stories that involve "a subculture I didn't know, a hobby that came as a complete surprise," and "hiding in plain sight" stories, "the kinds of things that were familiar, even mundane, but once examined closely, turned out to be much more unexpected and fascinating." In either case, she writes, "the story is in charge," and the writer always must be prepared to put aside the assumptions she brought to the project. Joyride is packed with tips like these for aspiring writers, among them the importance of constantly cultivating story ideas, and the lesson her Willamette Week editor taught that the process of writing has three parts: "reporting, then thinking, and then writing." If either of the first two are ignored, she's learned from hard experience, the third is destined to fail.
Orlean candidly describes the sometimes bumpy road her books traveled through multiple publishers and editors to publication. The most engaging of these accounts is the story of The Orchid Thief, her book that took on a radically different shape in the movie Adaptation, starring Meryl Streep as Orlean.
Joyride concludes with an appendix containing a handful of Orlean's articles, including "The American Man Age Ten," her first article for Esquire magazine that she says was "a defining moment for me," and "Devotion Road," a New Yorker story about her travels across the American South with a male gospel group, the Jackson Southernaires, that raised some intriguing questions of journalistic ethics. These few pieces only hint at the variety of her work, and, as Orlean suggests, even after a lifetime of writing she hasn't lost her zest for finding the next great story. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Longtime New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean shares the story of her lengthy, diverse career along with a revealing look into how she fashions her intriguing stories.