Once you interview as many people as Susan Orlean has, you begin to crave what she calls “counterprogramming.” Each log profile has its own setting; each setting suggests actions that the journalist might consider logical in relation to his topic. Driving in New York is not like that. That's why, right after I meet Orleans in Soho, she gets behind the wheel of her rental car, puts me in the passenger seat, and heads straight for the Holland Tunnel. The 69-year-old writer lives in Los Angeles, but when she lived in Manhattan in the '80s, she had two cars, one of them parked on the street, which meant she spent a lot of time scurrying down the sidewalk to check it out, craning her neck to see if she'd find broken windows that day. Now she's taking us deep into the hole of New Jersey. We pass by a wig store. Motels. Car dealerships. “The beauty of the surrounding area is a little… lacking,” she says. We drive past the American Dream mall and she sighs, “I’m so sad it has that name.” I think the name is honest. “Yes, that’s true,” she says, laughing. “Maybe this is the American dream and we could acknowledge it.”
One of the most prolific and successful writers of her generation, Orlean's success is beyond doubt. One early victory New Yorker where she worked since 1992, there was “Talk of the Town” about how Benetton salespeople fold sweaters. She wrote a book Orchid Thief the story of a plant trader convicted of poaching (this inspired the film Device) and function for Outside about the Maui surf girls (who inspired Blue Crush). Library book, from 2018, tells the story of the fire that destroyed the Los Angeles Central Branch.
Her latest book Joy, this is a memoir. Around the start of the pandemic, she began writing about writing, revisiting her 1992 accomplishments. Esq Profile of a 10-year-old from the suburbs: “American Male at Ten.” She donated her personal papers to Columbia University after discovering the accounting records (and rejection letters). The more she looked at her Esq history, the more context from life it needed. This was new. She's always thought her writing requires “not knowing—that heightened sense of receptivity, like you just want to know everything because you're in this new world,” she says. “I felt lost because I knew the material.” She asked a friend to interview her and then read the transcripts. She was concerned about the pretentiousness of the memoir genre. In the summer of 2020, when she got drunk at a neighbor's house and took to Twitter, she wrote: “You know, I'm trying to write a memoir right now and I feel like a clown because who cares?” [sic] my stupid life, but maybe? She got over it. She finished the book. It is both the most personal work she published and a walk through a thriving media landscape that is now lost. “I dreamed of becoming a writer, and then I became one,” she writes in joy of drivingin the introduction: “And now I want to tell you every day why I wake up amazed by this fact.”
Before Orlean and her family moved to Los Angeles, they lived in the Hudson Valley, in a stone-and-glass complex that slopes into a hillside that sold for nearly $3.5 million. “I would love to search my old house,” she says, “just to be creepy and weird.” We settle for the closer, more public Storm King Arts Center, a sculpture park where she and her husband, John Gillespie, took their son Austin when he was young; Orleans swears that Austin, now a Tulane student, climbed over the artwork. “There are a lot of really ugly names in upstate New York,” Orlean remarks as we pass the turnoff for Suffern. “Like Coxsackie. Wow, can it get any worse?” We pass by a for sale sign. “Let's buy a house!” she says.
The overhanging meadows of the Storm King are covered in a luxuriance of grass that is just beginning to turn brown. Orleans's upstate home also had grasslands until she and Gillespie razed them in a tick-killing spree. However, Lyme disease (she's had it twice) doesn't figure into her worst moments. The most desperate sections of her memoir are about her first marriage to Peter Systrom, a lawyer who worked for Mario Cuomo in the '90s and was New York's assistant attorney general in the mid-aughts. Orlean's book depicts a smart, depressed man who is tormented by his wife's triumphs; he ruined the publication days of her two books by revealing that he was having affairs. They divorced in 1999 after 16 years of marriage, and Systrom died in 2021. “He wasn't a sadist,” says Orlean, a woman who has undergone extensive therapy. “He just had some urge to be miserable that I never understood.” It was painful to pull out these memories. But it's worth it, Orlean decided, because readers love confessional stuff. “Well,” she says, crunching the path, “people never react the way you expect them to.” For now, everyone wants to talk about what she groans and calls “the bygone days of journalism.”
Can you become Susan Orleans without the conditions that created her? In the late 80s, when she was still working as a freelancer in New Yorker her editor accepted her proposal to write a long article about Prince Ashanti, who works as a taxi driver in New York. She asked her editor when she should submit her application. “When it’s all over,” he said. Her subject was from Ghana; Should she go there? “If you think you should do it, then so be it.” How much will she be paid? “That will be enough.” Orleans remembers that under Tina Brown, this genteel atmosphere without contracts began to become more formal. “I hate all these stories about Condé Nast,” she says, referring to the coverage of books like Michael M. Greenbaum Empire of the Elite about the publisher's previous excesses. “It implies that everyone was an idiot who wanted to fly the Concorde and eat caviar. It avoids the central fact: there were a lot of people trying to write really good stories, and often that meant going back. I remember the first time New Yorker told me I needed to do all the reporting in one trip. I felt Oh, that's not the way I like to do business.“I'm still processing the idea that multiple reporting trips were once standard – I started my career at the height of the last recession – when we arrive at the Storm King Cafe, where Orleans insists on paying for my sandwich. “It's one less thing you have to worry about about expenses,” she says.
For New YorkerIn his most liberal era, Orleans saw limitlessness destroy colleagues like Joseph Mitchell, a living legend adrift with no deadlines and forced to whittle his stories down to the point of extinction. Now she watches writers peddle their wares on Substack, where Orlean runs a newsletter that she says helps her “keep her grounded.” (She went viral with a post about how she ordered a Dries Van Noten outfit from Ssense—a site she calls “SiriusXM fashion”—and received a bill for more than $2,000 in tariffs.) Back in Manhattan, Orlean admits that if there's anything anyone should be jealous of, it's that she was encouraged to pursue ideas that would be considered insignificant by most magazine editors. But she says, “I don't think smallness is a virtue in itself. Writers have to figure out how to make a small story relevant. They have to sell it. They can't just say, 'Isn't a seven-year-old cat a cool story?' No, it's not. Orlean drives on, then smiles. “I suddenly thought, What's wrong with that? “, she says. “Now I'm obsessed with writing a story about a seven-year-old cat.”
