Journalism is an endangered profession. The signs have been evident for decades: subscriptions and advertising in decline, publications folding, subject to the erosion of public trust. Despite that, the field remains competitive and alluring. Why? Perhaps it’s the fantasy that another Woodward and Bernstein, with notebooks tucked into the pockets of their corduroys, may arrive on deadline to save us. Who’s to say that can’t happen again? Many recent books that cast a backward eye at a more golden era for print journalism have sought to cement that halcyon mythology, but a look at the current state of the press shatters that view.
Reading works like Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, it’s punishing to weigh the bloated expense accounts, lavish parties, better pay, and luxury of staff positions against the reality of a freelancer’s sad, shrinking spreadsheet of assignments today. These are bleak times. These books don’t offer much consolation or advice for our current moment, and beyond nostalgia, it’s hard to find the merit in them.
But on the other hand, it’s hard to hold a grudge against someone as effervescent, smart, and curious as author of The Library Book and longtime journalist Susan Orlean. Wouldn’t you like to look back at your career and name your memoir Joyride? Aren’t you glad that she can? This, her ninth full-length nonfiction book, is a literary lark that sees her from childhood to college, followed by a scrappy stint at a Portland, Oregon, alt-weekly, then marriage and a steady freelance career punctuated by assignments for bold-name magazines before launching into the big leagues: a staff position and office at the New Yorker. Books and a swoon-worthy second marriage, complete with motherhood, round out her personal history. On the surface, it might read like a fairy tale. And Orlean successfully writes a book that is as enjoyable as one, but she’s too good to avoid the granular detours and spiky bumps that make a truly complex and rich life worth recounting.
She knows how lucky she is, admitting, “I have had a golden run, which makes me feel very fortunate, and also a little vulnerable.” Anyone with a writing career as impressive and glamorous as Orlean’s would be bound to attract some detractors, but encountering her enthusiasm and aplomb, it’s hard to be anything less than inspired. With enormous candor, she acknowledges that the writer’s life is “never boring, but that’s also why it’s always a little terrifying, why every time I’ve sat down to write since 1978, I wonder if this is the time I simply won’t be able to do it and words will fail me. But so far, so good.”
That tension fuels a rollicking career marked by improbable stories. Orlean reflects, “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. I’m wholly of the second sort.” Her evocative and immersive reportage, to name just three pieces, includes a profile for Esquire on an ordinary, not-famous 10-year-old boy; a Village Voice cover story about a charismatic cult leader; and her New Yorker feature on a New York City cab driver who was also named the king of Ghanaian Ashanti tribespeople living in the United States. These are mere highlights in a body of work that has leapt nimbly from short, keen observations to longer, heavily reported work that then evolved into books. All the while, we’re along for the ride, reveling in her eclectic passion for people and experiences outside her own.
As she moves from one passage of life or period of employment to another, she rightfully speaks about her illuminating moxie, intelligence, and determination. She also measures her successes against an ongoing battle to be taken seriously by the bosses who pay her less than her male counterparts and her first husband, whose microaggressions metastasize over years from simmering resentment to impeccably timed emotional assault. On the night of her debut book’s launch party, she learns of her husband’s infidelity. Years later, after they try to reconcile and have a baby together, on the night that she is launching her bestselling book The Orchid Thief, she discovers that he’s still cheating on her. Hers is a charmed life, to be sure, but it’s not without sharp swerves and stark moments of reevaluation.
In the wake of her divorce, Orlean finds herself a bestselling author but also back in love—this time with a man open, ready, and game for a true partner, John Gillespie. Before long, she is enjoying Adaptation, the unconventional film adaptation of The Orchid Thief; a sustaining new marriage; and motherhood. As her peripatetic life toggles back and forth between coasts, her book research for Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend links her to California. “I never expected to live in California,” she writes. “More accurately, I never thought I quite deserved to live in California. It was too pretty, too cool, too desirable. It was like yearning to date the captain of the football team.… After trying so hard to resist it because it was too easy to love, and feeling not quite entitled to it because it was too exciting and sexy and fast and fun, we grabbed Los Angeles and we got it, a foothold in this mad, maddening, marvelous place.”•
Lauren LeBlanc is a writer and critic who has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.
