SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Susan Orlean says the story of my life is the story of my stories. But she's put parts of her own life into a memoir of her career as an esteemed, long-form journalism storyteller - her decades at The New Yorker and her books - "The Orchid Thief," "The Library Book," "Rin Tin Tin" and more. Susan Orlean joins us now from Rhinebeck, New York. Her new memoir "Joyride." Thanks so much for being with us.
SUSAN ORLEAN: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: 'Course, I want to ask you about a number of your most celebrated stories - "Herbert The Near-Sighted Pigeon."
ORLEAN: Yes. This was my first published work. I was the publisher. I was the author. I was the illustrator, and I was the distributor. In other words, I wrote this when I was 5 years old. This was a story about a pigeon who suddenly has become estranged from his friends. He doesn't understand why.
SIMON: Boy. At 5 years old, an estranged pigeon?
ORLEAN: (Laughter) Even at that age, I had this impulse to put stories down on paper.
SIMON: You discovered later in life that your father, who was a lawyer and real estate developer, had actually dreamed of becoming a writer. Was that a spark that passed? What happened?
ORLEAN: I think what happened is my father grew up during the Depression. Being a lawyer had the security of a professional license, a training, a career path. But my father always lived in the world with the curiosity of a writer. He liked taking us to different neighborhoods in Cleveland that when I was growing up, people didn't travel from the suburbs into the downtown of Cleveland. It was not typical. He liked talking to strangers. He liked talking to every kind of stranger or somebody highly placed in society and someone very much down on their luck. He had an appetite for learning and discovering and exploring. I think it traveled intact from him to me.
SIMON: Rajneeshpuram. This was a community founded by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In the early '80s, as I recall, you were working for Willamette Week, but you went there to cover the story for the Village Voice. What did you learn from an encounter with Swami Deva Wolfgang (ph)?
ORLEAN: I learned early on how easy it is to become seduced by your subject. What I do is immerse myself into these new worlds that I want to write about. Immersing yourself by definition almost means you go into it openheartedly and with a really sincere interest in learning what this world is all about. And it is very easy to begin losing the objectivity of being a reporter. You - you're kind of romanced by the adventure itself.
SIMON: We should explain - group of people who had separated from society at large.
ORLEAN: And no prohibitions. It was fine to be rich. It was fine to drink and smoke. And I absolutely - you know, the honey caught the fly in this case, enough so that I started to feel myself losing perspective. Luckily, I had the wherewithal to stop myself and say, wait a minute. I see what's going on here. I need to distance myself emotionally a little bit and not let the romance of the moment overwhelm me.
SIMON: You say at one point that you don't like reporting that relies on coded shorthand that doesn't consider the nuance in a story and that supposes readers share an assumption.
ORLEAN: It's the thing that I - that gets under my skin the most, which is we drop these kind of code phrases and assume everybody knows what that means. During the period after the Oklahoma City bombing and after Timothy McVeigh was arrested, it was mentioned in a lot of profiles of him that he lived in a trailer park. I began feeling like, why do we assume that we know what that means? So I set out to write a story about life in a trailer park, and it was absolutely fascinating. Some of it confirmed my assumptions. Some of it absolutely did not confirm my assumptions. But more importantly, I feel like that's the role of a storyteller to take these packed phrases and unpack them and look at them more deeply and get to the humanity behind them so that they become more than just this phrase that we drop on a page.
SIMON: Susan, how did you encounter the extraordinary world of orchid enthusiasts?
ORLEAN: It is indeed an extraordinary world. This was a lucky accident. I was flying home from Miami, and I had finished the book that I brought to read on the plane. So I started digging around in the seat pocket, and someone had left a copy of the Miami Herald. Way back in the front section, there was this little headline that caught my eye that said, local nurseryman and crew of Seminoles arrested with rare orchids in swamp.
SIMON: (Laughter) That's quite a - yes. I can see why it caught your eye.
ORLEAN: Yeah, I just was like, I have never seen these words together in one sentence. And it was a brief mention of this man, John Laroche, who had been arrested with his crew of Seminoles in a swamp that I had never heard of - a state preserve in Florida. And they had four pillowcases full of orchids. I didn't know orchids grew wild in South Florida. I didn't know that people collected orchids. I thought if you wanted an orchid, you went to Home Depot and bought one. Every sentence in this short piece had me hungry for more. And I immediately headed back to Florida to go to the hearing. And after I published a piece for The New Yorker, I thought, there's more here. I want to write a book about it.
SIMON: 'Course, "The Orchid Thief," 1998 book, wound up inspiring the film adaptation about a screenwriter who couldn't figure out how to adapt the book into a screenplay. Did the fact that you approached this with interest but not a lot of knowledge help you?
ORLEAN: I think the lack of knowledge is a superpower. It brings for me this voraciousness to learn, to gobble up this world that I'm plunging into. It helps me, even though it's humbling, to say, how do orchids have babies? And have the head of the Orchid Society give you a look that is like, oh, my God, we're going to have to really explain things to her. That's OK. I also feel like, in that case, I'm a proxy for my reader. I am going through what they're going to go through when they read my piece, which is to say, wait, wait, wait. Explain to me, what is this all about?
SIMON: Susan Orlean's new memoir, "Joyride." Thank you so much for being with us.
ORLEAN: Oh, thank you so much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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