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The insatiably curious author of "The Orchid Thief" and "The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup" isn't Mister Rogers and doesn't laugh at biscotti.
Feb 26, 2001 | The first thing you notice about Susan Orlean is her job. The New Yorker staff writer and author of "Saturday Night," "The Orchid Thief" and now "The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup" makes a living spending time with anybody she wants and then writing about it. The kooky owners of Biff, a Massachusetts show dog? She's there. A real estate broker in New York? She's on top of it. A 10-year-old New Jersey boy leading a normal life? That's her turf. Orlean carefully chooses the kind of subject who doesn't seem carefully chosen; she is paid to investigate the ordinary things our own lives are too short to look into. She's a little bit thrashable.
Orlean makes no impression in the first 10 minutes you're with her. She's a normal person who answers the questions she's asked. We order coffee in her hotel lobby. She doesn't say extravagantly writerly things, or extravagantly banal things. The only celebrity qualities she has are an abstract interest in her own life ("Sometimes I marvel at my ___") and a height of 5-foot-2. Also, she's friendly and unambiguously redheaded.
Don't think her looks don't matter. They matter so much as to advance the plot of this fall's new Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman film, "Adaptation." In the movie, a screenwriter hired to adapt Orlean's "The Orchid Thief" becomes seduced by her fetching dust jacket photo. The events of the movie are fictional, though "The Orchid Thief" is mentioned by name. Orlean herself figures in the film, although Meryl Streep plays her. It's the kind of Paul Auster-style high jinks you'd never find in Orlean's straightforward prose, but she's game enough to speculate about Streep's performance.
"I wasn't sure whether she was going to call me to hang around or not," Orlean says of the actress. "The director told me she probably isn't, that she's going to make it up. Which is appropriate because while the character is me, it's a very invented character."
Orlean doesn't linger too long on the upcoming movie. She admits to initial feelings of reluctance -- "that's my name up there," she says -- but seems reconciled to letting it be another thing to grow curious about. We return to the subject of her writing.
Orlean is the kind of writer who always "desperately, desperately" wanted to be one. She started after college at the end of the '70s at a Portland, Ore., weekly and in 1990 her first book was published. "Saturday Night," an informal investigation into how the United States spends its favorite evening, established Orlean as a person with really good story ideas. In 1992, the New Yorker hired her.
She's not in Portland anymore and it shows. When I hold up the silly, earring-size biscotti that come with our expensive coffee, she doesn't think it's silly. She's eaten a lot of tiny hotel biscotti by now. "Bullfighter," a collection of profiles she's written over the past few years, came out in January and she's been on the road promoting it for a while.
Not that the bright lights have her jaded. At my prodding, we go through the life of a New Yorker staff writer, and she seems aware that she has it good. The profile of Jean Jennings, Automobile magazine's eccentric editor in chief, in the Feb. 19 and 26 New Yorker is Orlean's most recent piece. The manufacture of the article went like this: After eight days in Detroit with Jennings ("I was with her the whole time," she says), Orlean returned to New York. She took her usual day to regroup, let her editor know she was back, then rolled into the office the next day at noon (she plays squash some mornings). There she typed up the notes from her trip, chatted with friends and digested the story before beginning to write. She recently signed a contract to complete "seven or eight" stories a year for the magazine.
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