When your subject is the writer Susan Orlean, you wish you could just quote from her work and call it a day. “If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale,” is how she once began a profile of a champion show dog. Writing a posthumous appreciation of the man who invented Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion, she noted: “Ron Rice was not a tan man.”
Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for 38 years and is the author of nine books. She’s also semifamous because Meryl Streep played her, or at least a wacko alternative version of her, in the 2002 movie “Adaptation” and because her viral drunken Twitter meltdown in 2020 provided a rare moment of bipartisan merriment in the pandemic. (Sample tweet: “No one on my house is talking to me right now OK!! YeH whatever I hzte you too.”)
Orleans’s writing — about animals, about orchids, about a female bullfighter in Spain, about the Los Angeles Central Library, about the life and death of a 346-year-old tree, about subjects you didn’t think you cared about but actually do — makes for an irresistible calling card. Curious, full of weird and interesting details, humane and humorous, her prose so conjures the sense of a particular person that you almost don’t want to meet her, in case she turns out to be different in real life. (Spoiler: She’s not.)
We’re talking about her latest book, “Joyride,” a memoir of her 45-plus-year career as a writer and how it’s intertwined with the 69-year story, so far, of her life. A postcard from the heady bygone days of glamorous, exorbitant-expense-account magazine writing, it’s also an excellent primer on writing itself and a love letter to her profession — “this pretty joyful experience of doing the work that I do,” as she said.
Orlean has long red hair and was wearing a pair of tricked-out denim pants decorated with Jackson Pollock-like splotches of color that she acquired in Las Vegas, on a trip to check out the Sphere. (“Generally speaking, it’s not my vibe, aesthetically,” she said of the city, “but I’ve often found that there’s no environment in which I can’t end up buying clothes.”)
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