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“Luck doesn’t just happen,” said bestselling author Susan Orlean. “It’s not enough to have good fortune fall your way. You need to know how to recognize it and actually do something with it,” Orleans, a long-time staff writer at the New Yorker, whose work includes “The Orchid Thief,” “Rin Tin Tin” and “The Library Book,” spoke with the Star recently from her home in Los Angeles, where she was about to embark on a cross-country tour for her ninth book, “Joyride: A Memoir.” Among the giants with whom Orlean worked at the New Yorker was one of the great prose stylists of our time, Roger Angell, who kept writing until his hundredth year. Luck alighted then when Angell edited a piece Orlean wrote called “Out of the Woods.” “He had a talent for making things better through these little deft touches in rhythm, pacing and tone,” she said. “He had such a pure capacity to make a sentence beautiful. He was pretty extraordinary.” Like Stephen King’s “On Writing,” “Joyride” is a memoir of the craft, a comparison that, Orlean said, “makes sense, because it’s certainly a personal book. But it’s also very much about the particular nature of being a writer and what that entails.” And there is a generosity of spirit throughout that reveals a vulnerability, as Orlean writes about cruelty in her life and how it made her a keen observer. “Although I haven’t been absent in my writing, I’ve actually been a pretty regular presence in my stories,” she said, “I’ve never before written intimately about my personal life. “It was certainly a very different experience,” she added, “and it didn’t come easily. It was definitely a leap for me emotionally.” When she first considered constructing “Joyride,” Orlean thought, “I’m going to take one piece of mine and completely take it apart and explain in great detail how I made the choices I made.” But then it became clear to her that she needed to provide context, and that led to the nature of her curiosity, which led to an exploration of who she was. “Each aspect radiated into a more personal perspective,” she said. “I can’t overstate the importance of the fact that curiosity drives my pursuit of story and that I’m always cultivating and nurturing it. I think that’s just a very fundamental fact about how you go about being a writer. What are you interested in? What compels you? What do you want to learn more about? The intensity of the curiosity that a writer brings to a story is what elevates it.” Curiosity has led Orlean to explore archives, particularly while working on “Rin Tin Tin” (about a famous Hollywood dog), “The Library Book” (about an L.A library fire) and “Joyride.” “As somebody who seemed to rely in the past very much in experiencing in real time what I was writing about,” she admitted, “it was a big surprise to me, a welcome one, to discover you could also find a life in the collected archives. “What I found most interesting was that, in many cases, you get closer to a person, observe more of the intimate details of their lives, through their archives as opposed to face-to-face,” she continued. “It’s almost like the dailiness of their life is revealed in a way that it never would be if you met with them.” That revelation made her appreciate how rich and alive archives are. Combing through her own personal papers at Columbia University was also “definitely a process of discovery,” she said, “because there was stuff there I didn’t remember having kept. You think you remember every detail of your past, but you don’t.” At the time she made the donation, Orlean was moving from the East Coast out west and remembered, “I was really under a lot of pressure. I just said to the archivist, ‘Come take it, I don’t have time to go through it.’” It was surprising, what she found, and very interesting to her to follow “the bread crumbs that had been left behind me over 30 years of being a writer.” Of the mentors Orlean has been fortunate to work with, editor Chip McGrath (to whom “Joyride” is dedicated along with her longtime agent Richard Pine) stands out thanks to his abiding advice about the writer-reader relationship. “Chip trained me to not write a conclusion,” she said, “because the reader finishes the tune of a piece in their head.” It’s useful to think of writing as a conversation, as an interaction between the writer and the reader, she added. “There’s a very important role of silence. If a piece of writing is strong, you’re kind of inhabiting it in your head as a reader, and you keep filling in those blanks. It can be very intimidating as a writer, because you often feel a need to fill in the empty air. To accept that silence is not only OK, but is also potent, is not an easy thing to do.” No stranger to Hollywood — her book “The Orchid Thief,” for one, leapt to the big screen as “Adaptation” in 2002, with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, and Meryl Streep playing a version of herself — Orlean is keenly aware of how long book-to-screen projects can take. “The Library Book” was acquired by the production company Anonymous Content in 2019 and, she said, “it’s being adapted for an unlimited series, and we’re on the brink of knowing if it will be moving forward.” “People might find it shocking that we’re still developing it,” she added, “but by Hollywood standards it’s pretty moderately paced.” After all, she had another project, a feature film called “Little Wing,” starring Brian Cox, come out in 2024. Based on a story she wrote about homing pigeons for the New Yorker in 2006, it had been optioned 17 years earlier. Though she’s had to put her volunteer work on hiatus until she returns from her book tour, Orlean is a devoted walk-in tutor at the L.A. Public Library. “I set up for a set number of hours and whoever shows up I help,” she said. “There are people who come regularly. It’s primarily literacy work with people who are non-native English speakers who are working on their English or who need help filling in documents. “The secret about volunteering,” she added, “is that the volunteer gets as much if not more as the person that they’re helping. I feel very privileged, and it’s appropriate to reach out and be a good citizen.” As somebody who has written about libraries and believes in their mission and their place in culture, Orlean said, “they deserve to have as much support from the public as they can get. While we haven’t had direct attacks on libraries, they are absolutely in the line of fire for supporting free speech, lack of censorship, and serving undocumented or unhoused people. Libraries are definitely vulnerable.” Good luck may not just happen, but Orlean continues to be ready for it when it lands at her feet, genuinely optimistic about her joyful capacity to find stories and to tell them.
