Book talk - Susan Orlean with Claire Dederer on The Story of a Storyteller
What happens when a person who shares other people’s lives with the world gets a chance to write about her own life? From reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers to shadowing an average fifth grader for a legendary profile to climbing Mt. Fuji, author and New Yorker writer Susan Orlean has collected stories over decades — stories that have inevitably shaped hers.
In her forthcoming memoir Joyride, Orlean explores her long career and the places to which curiosity and wonder have taken her — both literally and on the page: Joyride offers an account of a writing life that also includes her process of coming up with ideas, managing deadlines and writer’s block, and balancing leads and ledes to land a successful narrative.
While Orlean has several bestsellers under her belt, she feels that Joyride is her most personal book of them all. The book covers topics such as how she found her footing as a journalist, the collapse of her first marriage, and finding love again, becoming a mom while mourning the decline of her own mother, seeing her work adapted into Hollywood films, and facing her own mortality.
Joyride is for anyone interested in the true story behind a keeper of stories.
Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles.
Claire Dederer is the author of the national bestseller Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which was listed as a best book of the year by the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Fresh Air, Esquire, and many others. Her other works include Love and Trouble: A Mid-Life Reckoning and the memoir Poser. Her essays, criticism, and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Vogue, New York magazine, Slate, Salon, and many other publications.