Joyride E-Book

Susan Orlean

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 601

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Brilliant...A high-spirited, exhilarating memoir' Wall Street Journal 'In Joyride, the takeaway often has as much to do with the art of living as the art of writing' Elle 'Wise and exuberant...It's funny, as well. Just masterful' David Sedaris 'Superbly good...Ebullient, frank, moving, and inspiring' Booklist (starred review) 'The story of my life is the story of my stories,' writes Susan Orlean in this exhilarating memoir from one of the greatest practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time. Joyride is Orlean's most personal book ever, a searching journey through finding her feet as a journalist, recovering from the excruciating collapse of her first marriage, falling head over heels in love again, becoming a mother while mourning the decline of her own mother, sojourning to Hollywood for films based on her work (including Adaptation and Blue Crush) and confronting mortality. Joyride is also a time machine to a bygone era of journalism, from Orlean's bright start in the golden age of alt-weeklies to her careermaking days working alongside such icons as Tina Brown, David Remnick, Anna Wintour and Sonny Mehta, forces who shaped the media industry as we know it today. Infused with Orlean's signature warmth and wit, Joyride is a must-read for anyone who hungers to start, build and sustain a creative life.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY SUSAN ORLEAN

On Animals

The Library Book

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

The Orchid Thief:

A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

My Kind of Place:Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup:My Encounters with Extraordinary People

Lazy Little Loafers

Saturday Night

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

First published in the United States of America in 2025 by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Copyright © 2025 by Susan Orlean

The moral right of Susan Orlean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Interior design by Carly Loman

Hardback ISBN 978 1 83895 549 6Export trade paperback ISBN 978 1 83895 550 2E-book ISBN 978 1 83895 551 9

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Product safety EU representative: Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd., Ground Floor, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, D02 P593, Ireland. www.arccompliance.com

For Richard PineandFor Chip McGrathWith gratitude and affection

INTRODUCTION

In his great book Here Is New York, E. B. White wrote:

I’ve been remembering what it felt like as a young man to live in the same town with giants. When I first arrived in New York my personal giants were a dozen or so columnists and critics and poets whose names appeared regularly in the papers. I burned with a low steady fever just because I was on the same island with Heywood Broun . . . Robert Benchley . . . Dorothy Parker . . . Ring Lardner . . . This excitation (nearness of giants) is a continuing thing. The city is always full of young worshipful beginners—young actors, young aspiring poets, ballerinas, painters, reporters, singers—each depending on his own brand of tonic to stay alive, each with his own stable of giants.

I have journeyed in the land of giants, waving my pencil, dreaming. I dreamed of becoming a writer, and then I became one, and now I want to tell you why I wake up every day amazed by that fact. Writing has been the only job I’ve ever had, the only work I’ve done since 1978. It feels like I started yesterday, although I’m also aware of how many stories and books I’ve written and how many years have whipped by. Writing always feels new because you never build equity. Every sentence is a slippery invention, a bit of quicksilver I release to the world, and then it’s time to invent the next one. That’s why being a writer is never boring, but that’s also why it’s always a little terrifying, why every time I’ve sat down to write since 1978, I wonder if this is the time I simply won’t be able to do it and words will fail me. But so far, so good.

I noted recently that it has been twenty-five years since I published The Orchid Thief, and that unit of time, the quarter-of-a-century monumentality of it, stirred me to think about where I’ve been and where I’m going, and what I’ve seen and learned along the way. I’ve always dreaded the idea of writing a memoir. I’m used to looking outward, not inward; I like to bring attention to hidden worlds, not to my own. I’m proud of my work, and I want as many readers as I can muster, but I hate vanity. I’m used to convincing my subjects that their quiet lives are shimmering and gorgeous and worth talking about, but it’s been harder to convince myself of that about my own. Yet here I am. This is my story; please listen.

The process of a journey, of striving for something that offers a sense of belonging and contentment, of traversing the wild mystery of the unknown to arrive at the known, is what it means to be alive. Writing is a recapitulation of that experience. Writing documents the process of traveling from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. Even writing that doesn’t seem to be about a journey is at its heart a narrative of the writer’s voyage into a new world and toward a grasp of it and then onward to the process of sharing it publicly. I became a writer because I wanted to describe the people and places around me, particularly the ones that were least likely to be noticed. The nooks and crannies of the world, the odd and original shape of people’s lives, the passion that we bring to those things that matter to us—the way we try to make our lives make sense and the way we struggle to fit ourselves into the world, the unlikely alignments of disparate elements bounced together by accident or magic—these are the subjects that fascinate me and seem important to understand and illuminate.

Writing is a job, but for me it has always seemed like a mission. I felt called, I really did, to describe ordinary life in a way that revealed its complexity and poetry—to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious about the world, and how much joy can be found in letting yourself be surprised. I wanted to draw readers in and convince them to appreciate these stories, especially ones they might not think they’d care about or find interesting. Perhaps they would begin to look at the world in a different way, one that was full of curiosity and welcome. I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to show that any life closely examined is complex and can embody both the heroic and the plain. Writing was my effort to make sense of the human experience, of my experience, and I hoped that it might bring a reader to understand and maybe even empathize with a life or circumstance that initially might have seemed strange or impenetrable. When I started my career, I didn’t know what I was doing. I made lots of mistakes. Some of my early writing was gimmicky and self-conscious, but even then I was sure of why it was important to do it. Writing is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done; it’s given me my place in the world. Even when it’s frustrating and hard, I know how lucky I am.

Wait—have I forgotten to mention how much fun it is? Being a writer is so much fun. It’s Make-A-Wish for the curious, an excuse to do anything that seems interesting because there is always a story if you look for it. I would like to meet a woman who has twenty-seven pet tigers! I would like to hang out with backpackers in Bangkok! I want to learn about gospel music, Cuban Little League players, Thomas Kinkade, umbrella inventors, Maui surf girls, Bill Blass, a high school basketball team. I want to go to Bhutan, to a taxidermy convention, to Mount Fuji, to South Africa, to a dog show, to a cat show. I want to talk to everyone and tag along as they live their lives, and because I am a writer, I can.

After I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1978, I drove cross-country from Ann Arbor to Portland, Oregon, where I was planning to spend a year. I dawdled along the way. I’m glad I didn’t fly, which would have catapulted me from one piece of my life to the next, from one region to another, from my childhood to my adulthood, from my dream of being a writer to the fact of it actually happening. Instead, I dawdled, gradually easing from my Midwestern roots to my West Coast transplantation, poking into every corner I could along the way. I tromped across sand dunes in Indiana and around the Corn Palace in South Dakota; ate at diners with squeaky screen doors and tabletop jukeboxes along twolane roads in North Dakota. In Montana, I had drinks with air force officers and hippie carpenters; I stopped for a stroll in Arco, a dismal little town in southern Idaho that was the first city in America to be powered entirely by nuclear energy, where I was sure I was being irradiated by setting foot within the city limits. I filled my tank at the largest truck stop in the world, in Little America, Wyoming. A long-haul trucker I met there offered to strap my car to his empty flatbed and piggyback me to the West Coast. I turned him down on the piggyback but took him up on his offer to drive me around for a while so I could see the world the way he did, from the sky-high cab of his huge truck, peering down on a shrunken universe that looked like an array of Matchbox cars on skinny ribbon roads—tiny, precious things on an infinite game board. Everything changes in significance depending on how you look at it.

At the time of my move, I had just read Dante’s Inferno—that handy travel guide to hell—and The Canterbury Tales, the account of an excursion one spring in the fourteenth century. I had also recently finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the narrative of a macabre expedition by the Bundren family to carry the body of their matriarch, Addie, to her chosen burial place. Those were my literary touchstones. I was under the spell of the emotional arc of a trek and the serendipity of encounters along the way, and I was beginning to understand the importance of a voyage, literal and figurative, to writing. This was the first time I was living it rather than studying it. Since then, the world has changed, and media has evolved; the ways we communicate have transformed and will keep transforming. Still, people continue to want to write, and people continue to want to read what writers have to say. Storytelling persists and endures, evidence of our primal need to make note of our observations, emotions, and experiences and to transmit them to people around us. I wanted—I want, I will always want—to take part in that.

Being a writer is exhilarating, demanding, fascinating. I have had the most wonderful life, a joyride of a life. But at times it can be terribly lonely. I’m surprised over and over again by how solitary the experience of writing is—how the big conversation the writer conducts with the public, the culmination of a desire to gobble up the world and all its contents, comes down, finally, to quiet moments alone.

When I’m writing, the people I have met and the experiences I’ve had along the way recede, and what I’m left with is the flickering moment I’ve captured of them and am trying to explain. But soon the next story presents itself, and I embrace it, and for the moment it is what the world is made of. The journey begins again, the story starts over; I gather myself and go out to see what I can see and try to tell it as well as I can. What I write is not only what I feel and see but what is left behind, the flotsam and jetsam of life, the stuff that drifts out of our heads and into history—plucked and pressed between pages, so it will stay fresh forever and never slip away.

ONE

I wish I could tell you how the idea of writing about marrying a ten-yearold boy first occurred to me, but I can’t. That’s the thing about writing. Some of it is like carpentry: You have pieces of wood and a bag full of nails, and you have an idea of what you’re trying to build, so you line up the pieces, and sooner or later the thing you had in your mind is manifest. But some parts of writing, like the lede for my 1992 Esquire magazine cover story, “The American Man, Age Ten,” aren’t like that at all. In those instances, there is no thing in your mind to begin with. You don’t yet have a picture of what you’re trying to build, so your tools and materials are useless clutter. What you do have is your research and observations clanking around in the back of your brain. Every attempt to impose order and meaning on this jumble feels a little like trying to remember a dream. The blankness of the page is epic, glaring, and absolute.

Then, suddenly, you type something. And then you type a bit more. In the case of “The American Man,” you type, “If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks.” You don’t have any idea where the words have come from, but they appear and somehow seem right.

This part of the process baffles and fascinates me, even after doing it for so many years. Writing can seem magical, mysterious. How did I come up with that? What synapse fired that idea? What pocket did I pull that image out of ? The sentences seem to have a life of their own as soon as they appear, as if I had nothing to do with their creation. They exist as a fully realized thing. It’s a little miraculous when it happens. What makes writing so challenging is not knowing how to summon that miracle. It comes when it’s good and ready. Unannounced, a sentence appears, dewy with invention. The blank page becomes animated, primed to receive more sentences. At some point, you rely less on pure inspiration and lean instead on your carpentry skills and you nail together the story that forms in your mind, but the beginning of the story always demands this wild, unbiddable moment.

I’ve been asked about the lede of “The American Man, Age Ten” many times. Of all the pieces I’ve written, it’s the one that has been the most anthologized and studied, for many reasons, including the startling fact that Esquire let me profile a regular kid when the everyday meat of most magazines is celebrities. I think it’s also been a source of interest because, as a lede, it’s unusual. I’ve always fibbed when I’m asked about why I began the piece that way, offering an answer that I’ve mostly made up. As it happens, writing that story was one of the most panic-inducing moments of my writing career, but it’s also probably the easiest way to illustrate what I care about and why I do it.

Here’s the truth: In the late summer of 1992, I got a call from an editor at Esquire magazine offering me an assignment. I’d dreamed of writing for Esquire, and years earlier, I had sent them a query. As I wrote in a letter to my mother, “[The editor] wrote me a very nice note and passed my stuff along to the appropriate people so I’m hoping something will come of it. If they gave prizes away for sheer hustle and letter-writing effort I’d deserve a Pulitzer by now.” But nothing came of it. I had no contact with the magazine for the next several years. By the time I got this call, I was much more seasoned: I had been published in four or five national magazines, and I was writing regularly for The New Yorker. I didn’t have a job or a contract at The New Yorker yet, but I had a handshake agreement to contribute regularly. I wanted a more formal arrangement. After much nagging on my part, Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, said he would give me a contract. I was ecstatic. For some reason related to paperwork, the contract wouldn’t take effect for a few months. I got the call from Esquire right before the contract was to begin. I felt like I was being offered a chance to flirt before my wedding.

I met with Esquire’s editor, Terry McDonell, who told me that Esquire was planning a special issue about the milestones of men’s lives. The project had begun with a piece by Robert Sherrill, who was in his late sixties, called “The Truth About Growing Old.” McDonell said that for the next installment in the series, he wanted me to profile actor Macaulay Culkin, to represent the early stages of the male experience. Culkin, who was then ten years old, had already been photographed: The story would be the cover of the magazine that month. “Those were the crazy movie-stardriven days for magazines,” McDonell said to me recently. “A number of editors at Esquire thought I was nuts to put Culkin on the cover instead of, say, Tom Cruise, but I didn’t care.”

I was awed by the prospect of writing for Esquire and by McDonell himself, an esteemed figure in the magazine world, but he was easygoing and funny and friendly, and he made me feel like I could risk speaking my mind. And that was that I had no actual interest in Macaulay Culkin. I had done enough celebrity profiles to know that the story would be stage-managed and controlled by Culkin’s “team.” But more than that, I didn’t think a story about the life of a tween actor would illuminate the male experience for anyone except, perhaps, a few other tween actors. I was more curious about the inner workings of a regular ten-year-old boy than about Macaulay Culkin. I badly wanted to write a story for Esquire, but I wanted it to be a story I was excited to do. I asked McDonell if I could profile an ordinary ten-year-old boy instead.

To my astonishment, he said he thought it was a good idea, and asked if I could turn it in by the end of the month.

I dashed out of Esquire’s offices, incandescent with excitement about the assignment and a little stunned that McDonell had agreed to my very altered version of it. Then the challenge of the task hit me. Subverting the assignment wasn’t something I’d planned. The idea had simply tumbled out of me. I was surprised to hear myself suggest it. Aaargh, why not profile Macaulay Culkin? It would be so much easier. You don’t need to explain a celebrity profile to a reader; you serve it up and that’s it, and people are pleased even if the story is featherweight and predictable, because we all have a weakness for reading about celebrities. A story about some unknown kid would require so much more authorial effort. I would have to justify in the piece why I was writing it and why a reader should bother with reading about such a commonplace individual, and I would have to explain why I’d chosen this particular boy rather than some other boy, and I’d have to grapple with the conundrum of “ordinariness”—namely, that something ordinary had to convey something specific and something universal simultaneously. Also, I didn’t know any ten-year-old boys. I lived in Manhattan. I rarely saw children in my neighborhood. Even if I did stumble on a neighborhood kid, I didn’t want to write about a boy living in Manhattan, because a New York City childhood didn’t seem ordinary. I wanted to profile a suburban kid living a life that was more typical, a life with a backyard and a bicycle and a dog. By the time I got home, I was in a sweat. I had gotten what I had wished for and now didn’t know what to do with it.

Through the friend of a friend, I secured an introduction to a ten-year-old New Jersey boy named Colin Duffy, and to my pleasant surprise, he and his parents agreed to take part in the story. They actually seemed a little indifferent about it, which was ideal. I told Colin I wanted to spend two weeks with him, which would leave me with a week to write the piece. I planned to join him at breakfast each morning and then go to school with him and, I hoped, hang around with him in the evening. I still had no idea how I would make this into a story, but it was too late to change course.

The first morning of my reporting, when I showed up at the Duffys’ house in Glen Ridge, Colin’s indifference seemed to have hardened into something more obdurate. More plainly: He shunned me. Perhaps the oddness of the situation—that an adult woman would be tailing him for two weeks—had sunk in. After a sullen breakfast, we walked to school, and I trailed him by several feet, as if I were a geisha meekly following my master.

I was more of a hit in the fifth-grade classroom, where the kids jostled to get a look at me as if I were an exotic pet Colin had brought in for show-and-tell, but he still wouldn’t meet my eye. I squeezed into my tiny classroom chair, my hips squashed, and then I brooded. My despair might have worked in my favor: Seeing how crestfallen I was, Colin began to feel sorry for me, and he cast an occasional gentle glance in my direction. At the end of the day, while we did our classroom chore—cleaning the chalkboard erasers by slapping them together and sending up puffs of dust—he asked me if I’d like to come see his room at home. Would I ever ! The walls to the citadel had been breached.

My hours of gloom hadn’t been an act. I was sure the story was falling apart and that I had blown my chance to write for Esquire. But I learned from the experience that being quiet and letting your subject approach you rather than making them feel cornered is the best thing to do. From that point on, Colin and I were shoulder to shoulder, playing video games, shooting baskets, gossiping about the girls in his school and about life and his parents and his dogs and his dreams. Sometimes I think he viewed me as a mythical creature, a chimera—a marvelous hybrid being who could goof around with him as if I were one of his ten-yearold buddies, but with the adult assets of a car and a bottomless stash of quarters for pinball.

* * *

After spending two weeks with Colin and fielding anxious calls from my Esquire editor, Bill Tonelli, about my progress, I sat down to write. I immediately realized that I didn’t know how to begin or where to go with the story once I started writing. I had two weeks’ worth of notes. I had great quotes from Colin and his friends; details about his perspective on the universe; some hard science about the male adolescent brain; my own observations about what being ten looked like and what it provoked in me—namely, a keen appreciation of the poignancy of that particular age, when the gauze of childhood begins to give way to the less enchanted teen years, creating a bewildering phase when those stages of life muddle together. I knew the story would test my conviction that writing about a regular kid, a regular anything, was valuable on its own merits. The story had to prove my point. It had to convey why I had taken a perfectly acceptable assignment to do a celebrity profile and substituted a story about a New Jersey boy you might pass in a mall without noticing.

I had to win readers right off the bat. I had to. That’s the case with any story, but it is especially so when you’re writing about something that’s not exotic or well-known. Quite understandably, a reader approaches such stories skeptically, asking why they should read about this unremarkable subject. I picture a battle unfolding in those first sentences between me and the reader: Me, waving my hands and insisting the piece is worth reading, and the reader, grumpily resisting. That battle is pitched, but it’s my secret pleasure. I revel in a contrarian urge, a stubborn desire to seduce people into reading something they don’t think they care about. I’m not trying to trick anyone. I love these subjects, so I write as if I’m shouting, “You’re not going to believe how interesting this is!” I keep shouting until the last sentence is on the page.

When I write, I can’t relax until I have a lede that thrills me. I can’t write the second sentence until I’ve written the first. I can’t start until I’ve started, almost as if I’m telling the story out loud, and it would be impossible to do that out of order. Every story feels like a daisy chain to me, the first sentence leading to the second and then the third and so on. Everything depends on the lede. It needs to be a great striptease act, making the most of bated anticipation: You’ve got to choose carefully which item of clothing to take off first. It has to be enough to intrigue but not give everything away; it has to be arresting enough that it captures readers’ attention and makes them eager to know what comes next.

Often I write a lede that’s not exactly on the topic, so that it serves as a sort of preamble to the story, an overture before the main event. Other times, if a word or phrase has become important to the piece, I’ll riff on it for the lede. A lede doesn’t need to preview the story or summarize what the rest of the piece will be about. What’s important is that it captivates readers and holds them fast to the page so they keep reading. I have a knack for that, an instinct. I can feel in my gut when a lede works, even if it’s oblique.

For two weeks I had been inside Colin’s head and I’d seen the world the way a ten-year-old sees it. I was fascinated by the unusual nature of our relationship: We were adult and child, reporter and subject, female and male, and companions all at once, a tangle of roles and rapports. I was enchanted by him; he was a delightful kid. Obviously, I didn’t fantasize about marrying him, but I did fantasize about what such a cockeyed notion might have looked like from his perspective. I dove into the imaginary adult world as he envisioned it and tried to convey what it might be to live in it with him, a universe in which childhood folded into adulthood, in which being married mostly meant you had matching superhero notebooks:

If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard, and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement—probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.

Quite honestly, I was shocked when I read my lede. I hadn’t considered for one minute that this, or anything that sounded like this, was what I would write. I did know it would be useful to start a story about a seemingly mundane subject (a suburban boy) with a sentence that was quite the opposite, ideally one that was a little startling—such as an adult female speculating on marriage to that boy. It had punch. It was transgressive. It was funny, off-kilter, disorienting; it gave little clue about what the rest of the story would encompass, but somehow it propelled the reader forward to find out. It was a good way to mount the argument that I’ve been compelled by since the first time I ever wrote a story: that anything at all is worth writing about if you care about it and it makes you curious and makes you want to holler about it to other people. In this case, I was genuinely, deeply curious about the life of an ordinary elementary school kid. At first, when I sat down to write the story, nothing came out of my head, and then abruptly it did, fully formed. If writing always made sense, even to the writer, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

I held my breath and turned in the piece. I knew it was not what the editors were expecting, but fortunately they embraced it and ran it beside a stunning spread of photos—not of Macaulay Culkin but of Colin Duffy. (One photo of Culkin was used on the cover.) This story was a defining moment for me. I had relied on my instincts, and it worked. I’ve always marveled that McDonell trusted me so much. His allowing me to do the story my way rather than insisting on the original assignment was a threshold experience in my professional life. In his memoir, The Accidental Life, McDonell wrote, “That’s the way editing could go sometimes—from marginal idea (Mr. Lonelyhearts) to good idea (Bob [Sherrill] on getting old) to good execution (his piece) to bigger idea (the series about men aging) to great work (Susan’s piece).” A breakthrough for sure.

TWO

When did I decide I wanted to be a writer? More to the point, when didn’t I want to be one? Writing always felt elemental to me. It was something I wanted to do as soon as I realized it could be done. I wrote my first book, Herbert the Nearsighted Pigeon, when I was about five years old. Herbert is estranged from his friends because he needs glasses and can’t see them well enough to recognize them. His life is in crisis until he meets a myopic owl who wears glasses. This prompts Herbert to realize what his problem is; he has an eye exam, gets a prescription, and the tide turns. Exit Herbert, wearing glasses, with his reconnected friends.

After Herbert, I kept writing. As a teenager, I kept a journal full of weepy, raging, hormonal entries:

Back to school. I’m mad at everyone. Didn’t even call while I was sick. By the way, in ten years I’ll be twenty-three.

Back to school again! I really think I’m getting a bit more popular.

Daddy really is unfair. Sometimes I hate him! Hyla told me she hates her father too (another resemblance she and I have).

I kept lists of words I loved and phrases that struck me as beautiful or original—a nerdy habit that I shared with my father and continue to this day. I wrote letters to the editor of The Plain Dealer and The Cleveland Press. (Dear Diary, Wrote letter to the editor of the Press about the killing of baby seals. Hope it gets in.) Writing things always felt natural to me, as if it completed the electrical circuit of a thought. A thought didn’t quite exist unless I put it on the page. Writing held things fast, clutched them. It pinned experience down, preserving it like a butterfly on a tackboard. Most kids want to hurry time along, but I never did. (As I whimpered in my diary: I can’t believe how fast time goes! It makes me feel sick! Really! Everything changing so much. I hate it!!! ) I wanted to slow time, save it, stop it somehow. I worried that life whooshed by, and that no matter how intense or profound or exciting or sad a moment was, it was gone in an instant, dissolving as if it had never happened and never mattered. The swinging eraser of time moving across experience terrified me. Time moving forward made me sad. Writing protected me. It made things last forever.

The awkward tween years

I started writing poetry when I was young, and time preoccupied me as a poetic subject, too. I published this in my junior high newspaper:

Time moves on

Never slowing

Why must it?

Yet—

It erases the

Pain of some memories

But—

It continues to

Dim others.

Time—

Slow down

Back then I signed my poems “Susi Orlean.” I dotted the “i” with a smiley face.

I don’t think my parents planned on raising a writer, but I know my inclination started with them. My mother loved to read and dreamed of being a librarian, and she channeled that desire into making her children library-goers from the minute we could walk. Every week she trundled us off to the local branch and allowed us to take out as many books as we wanted. She was a painstaking, careful reader and a deliberate writer. She kept a diary with great diligence and wrote multiple drafts of any correspondence until she was satisfied with the tone. She never would have dreamed of writing for public consumption, but she paid meticulous attention to what she put on the page.

My mother was ladylike and old-fashioned and painfully sensitive. I was the baby of the family, her favorite, and she doted on me, treating every one of my achievements as a huge victory. When I began getting published, she clipped my stories, no matter how small, and kept them in a series of huge scrapbooks. She made copies to share with her friends, her hairdresser, her butcher. Even when I was writing for obscure magazines and barely earning a living from it, she treated me like a star.

My father had a buoyant confidence my mother lacked. He thrived on curiosity. He was a taker of the long way home, a knocker on unknown doors, a talker to strangers. He was small and sturdy and as feisty as a terrier, with red hair that rose from his forehead in scalloping waves. His friends called him Red when he was young. He loved accidental discoveries and the surprise of everyday experience. His interest in other people was expansive and all-inclusive. He chatted with bums and waitresses and farmers and cops as easily as he did to senators and powerful businessmen. He could be somber and ornery at home sometimes, but out in the world he was twinkly.

Even when he was well into his eighties, he liked to while away the day when he visited me in New York by catching whatever bus was passing by and riding it wherever it was going, the more circuitous the route, the better. Then he would catch another bus back. He considered this the best way to see the city; that traveling at the inching-along pace of a bus across town was much more interesting than taking a cab to a specific site. Not knowing what he might encounter was the fun of it. A bus ride to who-knows-where was his kind of journey, ambling and rambling and full of serendipity. He didn’t need to witness something spectacular to be pleased by the experience. He was happy seeing how life unfolded, what was happening on the street, what people looked like in different neighborhoods, what was being built, what was being demolished.

My mother, Edith, on a trip we took together to Switzerland

When I was writing a lot of Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker, I often got my ideas by wandering around different neighborhoods until something caught my eye. A handwritten sign on a wall, a name on a doorplate, a flyer on a telephone pole, or an unusual magazine at a newsstand would spin me toward a story. I realize now that I picked up this habit from my father. He and I traveled in the same loose-limbed fashion, counting on happenstance and accident to light us up.

My father, Arthur, who was fond of tennis and cars.

I am my father’s daughter in many ways. I have his wavy red hair and blue eyes and freckles. Being a redhead is more than a mere descriptor: It is a way of being in the world. You stand out. You’re noticed. You’re a minority of a minority, listed for extinction, identified as different, associated with fieriness, temper; obvious in a crowd. My earliest memory is of being approached by strangers asking my mother if they could touch my hair. I was so young that I was still in a stroller, but even then I understood there was something about me that drew these strangers near.

My parents grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and remained in Cleveland their entire lives. When they were teenagers, the Great Depression began, and they were shaped by it. My grandfather Samuel Orlinski—my father’s father—was born in a village in Poland, then deserted the Russian army and made his way to America. He became a carpenter and builder in Cleveland and somewhere along the way changed his last name to Orlean. Eventually, he did well enough that he owned several apartment buildings. During the Depression, he lost them all. My father, Arthur, was the oldest of four siblings, and he felt responsible for taking care of his family. He put himself through college and then law school. Every time he was faced with a choice about school or work, he opted for whatever offered the most security. He did the necessary thing. Even after his business as a real estate developer flourished and provided my parents with plenty of resources, they always bent toward tangible assets and safe bets, the hard stamp of the Depression still imprinted on them.

My mother, Edith, was born in Hungary in a small, scenic town called Sátoraljaújhely, in the soft hills a few hours northeast of Budapest. Her family lived in a handsome brick house and had fine porcelain, oil paintings, and maids. Her father—my grandfather Lewis—was an accountant. His father had been a doctor. He and my grandmother were assimilated, educated Hungarian Jews who thought of themselves as Hungarians first and Jews second. In the early 1920s, my grandfather put his finger to the wind and became convinced that conditions for Hungarian Jews were souring. He applied for an American visa. In the 1920s, the U.S. had a quota on Jewish immigrants, and consequently, their application was denied. Determined to leave Hungary, my grandfather found a job in the accounting department of American Smelting and Refining Company, in San Luis Potosí, a copper-mining town in eastern Mexico. In San Luis Potosí, my mother and her sister, Eleanor, attended a Catholic school that they loved; it left my mother with an abiding affection for nuns. They walked to school chewing on long sticks of sugarcane, which they loved as well. In my favorite family portrait, my grandfather and grandmother and my mother and her sister are dressed in stiff woolen clothes with high collars and long sleeves—clothes that would have been suited for Sunday lunch in Budapest—but they are standing in front of a row of saguaro cactus, their pale skin blanched by the midday Mexican sun.

After eight years, the family’s application for American visas was finally approved and they moved to Cleveland, where my grandmother had cousins. When I was growing up, I didn’t know that the rest of their family didn’t come to America because they had been killed at Auschwitz. When I was around eleven years old, I saw a photograph of my grandmother’s brother. He was dressed in a Hungarian army uniform and had a neatly clipped mustache, a barrel chest, and a faraway gaze. I hadn’t known that my grandmother had a brother. I was greedily excited by the picture, imagining that I had stumbled upon a source of many new cousins I didn’t know I had. I asked my grandmother where her brother lived. She took a sharp breath and said, “He perished.” Had I ever heard the word “perish” before? I don’t think so, but I sensed it was a word that discouraged further discussion. My grandmother put the photograph in a drawer and never spoke of it again.

When I was young, I was embarrassed that my mother hadn’t been born in the United States. No one ever would have known it, since she was thoroughly American in her manner and affect, and she didn’t have an accent. No one would have cared, anyway. But I wanted my mother to seem modern, and coming from a place like Hungary didn’t seem modern at all. By the time I was an adult, though, I reveled in the idea that she was a little exotic, with Europe and Mexico in her background.

When I think of my parents, the word that comes to mind is “sturdy.” My parents met playing tennis, which they continued to play until they were in their eighties. But their sturdiness was not just about their athleticism. They were capable, competent people, admirably unspoiled and unsnobbish. They didn’t deny themselves comfort, but they had no patience for indulgence or laziness or fragility. They had no airs. My father worked until he died, at ninety-two. My mother had a part-time job from the time I was five. They both were happiest when they were getting things done. They inspired me with their resourcefulness, their intrepidness: their sturdiness.

I assume there was a spell when my parents enjoyed each other’s company, but that was before my time. They shared so many qualities, but they managed to rub each other wrong. By the point when I was paying attention, they had settled into a tense, weaponized coexistence that was held together tenuously at best. Our house had a center hallway that was open to the ceiling of the second floor. An internal balcony on the second floor overlooked the front door and foyer. Voices moved as easily as air throughout the house, and if you sat on the second-floor balcony, you could hear everything being said on the first floor. I spent a lot of time sitting on that balcony with my sister, eavesdropping on our parents bickering downstairs, and scurrying into our bedrooms the minute we heard the rubbery creak of a shoe on the stairs. If I could say something valuable came out of this miserable pastime, it would be that I became adept at listening while staying out of sight, which seems like good training for a future writer. But it was a costly education. I was frequently crippled with worry about my parents’ relationship. I became attuned to any ripple of discord around me—a hypervigilance that is useful for a writer but hell on one’s nerves. My parents had remarkable stamina for battling each other. Even into their nineties, they squabbled about anything and everything. They hurt each other’s feelings until the day they died.

We lived in Shaker Heights, a woodsy, sumptuous suburb of Cleveland built in the 1920s as a white Protestant enclave. Beginning in the late 1950s, Shaker Heights deliberately integrated by actively soliciting Black families to buy homes there, making it a rare example of a wealthy town with racial diversity. My junior high was almost all white, but my high school was thirty percent Black. In 1964, the rabbi of my synagogue, Arthur Lelyveld, volunteered to register Black voters during Freedom Summer and was attacked and beaten with a tire iron by segregationists in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He often talked about the experience at our Saturday-morning services. In 1967, when I was twelve years old, a state representative named Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, making it the first major American city to elect a Black mayor. Not long after, my father partnered with a Black developer, George Thompson, and they worked together for years. I tell you this not to rack up points for virtuousness but to clarify what it means to be from Shaker Heights, a place usually known only for its gracious houses and affluent residents. That is true, but it is not the only thing that is true about the town. While its experiment in voluntary integration has had its failings, growing up in Shaker gave me a view of the world that was broader than it otherwise might have been.

My parents were defined by being Jewish. It wasn’t a matter of observance or specifics; being Jewish was simply integral to who they were. They enrolled us in Hebrew school when we were toddlers, and we attended two days a week after school as well as Saturday mornings. My father was determined that we get a Jewish education. When I was in high school, I declared that I didn’t want to continue Hebrew school, and he made it clear that this was not an option. There were very few things my father was adamant about, but this was one of them. I continued in Hebrew school. The irony was that my father was an atheist, and he hated attending services, particularly on High Holy Days, because he thought it hypocritical to attend once or twice a year. “People are just going to show off their new clothes,” he liked to grumble. Eventually, I saw the logic in what seemed contradictory to me then. He wanted to make sure we knew who we were, to steep us in the cultures and traditions and beliefs of Judaism, so that we could make an informed decision about how we wanted to observe it when we grew up. He couldn’t tolerate the phoniness of performative religiosity, the preening display of Rosh Hashanah outfits, and the spectacle of public piety, but he was one of the most deeply Jewish people I’ve ever known.

My brother was brilliant academically and a superb athlete; he competed in national tennis tournaments. My sister was pretty, shy, artistic, and graceful. I was the clown child, the peacemaker, a tomboy, good at distracting from whatever storm was brewing between my parents. In many early pictures, I’m dressed in a costume. My favorite was a cowboy outfit, complete with a hat and a holster and bright red jeans. I paid for my clowning with stomachaches and headaches and my hyperalertness to strife; I was always primed to perform in hopes of breaking up a fight. I told myself stories to divert myself from worrying about my parents. I played out different scenarios of my life, imagining what would have become of me if my mother’s family had stayed in Hungary. Or if they’d stayed in Mexico. Or if my mother had married her first sweetheart, who was an artist. In each of these scenarios, I, or at least the “I” that I turned out to be, wouldn’t exist. It was like writing my own horror stories, imagining a jagged hole in the world that my nonexistence would leave.

My favorite outfit—ready for the Wild West

I was the kind of kid who read until my mother told me to turn out the lights, and then I grabbed a flashlight and made a tent of my bedsheet and kept reading in the humid little refuge I had created. I often fell asleep with a book in my bed and woke up with my cheek glued to it, the texture of the front cover lightly imprinted on my skin. I read books about horses and books about dogs and books about magical kingdoms. Then I graduated to books about governesses hired by handsome, tragic widowers in lonely castles on the darkening moors. In high school, my English teachers introduced me to great literature. I was immediately pulled in. My eleventh-grade English teacher, Mr. Heaps, gave me my first exposure to Faulkner when he assigned The Sound and the Fury; reading it, I felt like the top of my head had lifted off, making room for an entirely new way of shaping language and telling stories. To savor it fully, I started reading it a second time before I had finished it the first time, so I had bookmarks in two different places. How the sentences pitched and rolled, the heavy melancholy, the way the story was so finely detailed, the way it built and populated an entire world—I couldn’t believe words could do that. I started the book right before winter break. That year my family went to the Caribbean for vacation. All I wanted was to be alone with The Sound and the Fury. Every day, when the rest of my family trotted off to the beach, I begged to stay in the hotel room and read. I never dared to think I would write like Faulkner, but the idea that a human could produce such a thing inspired me and made me dream.

When I was in junior high, my yearning to be a writer latched on to some specificity. My parents subscribed to Life magazine, which was then in its heyday. The magazine often ran slice-of-life, documentary-style stories. I already knew that I didn’t want to be a newspaper reporter, but I couldn’t put my finger on what kind of writer I hoped to be except that I knew I wanted to write about what was in front of me rather than what was in my imagination. I loved reading fiction, but I liked the prospect of telling true stories, about whatever topic my inquisitiveness led me to. I wanted to see the world and talk to people and then return to tell the tale.

One week, our issue of Life arrived as usual. My brother and sister and I always fought over who got it first, so I snatched it out of the mailbox. I was looking for good pictures of animals—a Life specialty and my favorite pastime. As I was flipping through, I noticed a full-page photograph of a middle-aged man leaning against the counter in what appeared to be an exam room. He was wearing wrinkled medical scrubs. His face was blurred by fatigue. I recall he was holding a cup of coffee or doing something that made it clear he was taking a brief pause in an exhausting day. I started to read the story. It was a profile of a doctor, the sole practitioner in a small Midwestern town. The story followed him for one typical workday, dawn until dark, as he delivered babies, stitched up split knees, told someone they had cancer, vaccinated children, comforted dying patients, sent bills, and paid bills.

Reading that story was like hearing a thunderclap: It was the blast that shook me awake and rang in my ears for a lifetime. The content was fascinating, especially for a suburban girl who had no idea what country doctoring entailed. But what mattered most was realizing that a writer could produce a story about something routine—or at least something that wasn’t “news”—about someone who wasn’t famous, and that the power and purpose of the story was to reveal the truth about another life and nothing more, and that was sufficient to be interesting, to be worth publishing. If the storytelling was good enough, that justified telling it. I’m sure I didn’t understand it on those terms at that moment, but something made sense to me for the first time. I knew then that using writing to satisfy my curiosity, and to illuminate the truth in the lives of others, was what I wanted to do.

There is a tenet in Judaism that each person is an entire world. More pessimistically, the Talmud says that anyone who kills a single soul is considered to have killed a complete world. You can interpret this in many ways: for example, that ending a life cuts off an entire universe springing from that person’s existence, or that all of reality is intertwined, and the destruction of any part of it is catastrophic to that entirety. I always pictured it as something more individual: that each of us contains an unimaginably rich world, a full universe of thoughts and knowledge and aspirations and reveries, of stories and memories and perceptions and emotions; that the sum of each person is an entire galaxy, unique and whole. If I had to point to one principle that has guided me, inspired me, and taught me how to be in the world as a writer, this would be it.

For a long time, I didn’t know that my father dreamed of being a writer. He had never breathed a word of it to me. One afternoon, I was visiting my parents, and my dad and I were hanging out chatting. I was telling him about the Hollywood folks I had interviewed for my book Rin Tin Tin. Since my dad was a lawyer and real estate developer, I assumed he had never thought much about how I did my job or what it entailed, so I thought he would find these details interesting.

I knew he had been a champion debater in college. I knew he read the dictionary for fun and rolled new words around in his mouth as if they were candy. He always had a word-of-the-day desk calendar. He wrote fanciful, funny letters to me and my sister and brother at camp and college. (“Dear kids, The ocean waves are high, the wind is strong, and the sun is weak. See you soon, Dad.” “Dear kids, As of this moment I have no sunburn and a dry bathing suit. Home soon.”) It never occurred to me that he yearned to write for a living, or that he had ever wanted to be something other than what he was. This was probably for the same reason I couldn’t picture him as a child, or a young man, or a soldier, or any other version of him that had existed. I couldn’t imagine him as anything other than my father. In this way, I was a typical kid: Children, with their vast imaginations, can conjure a monster in the closet, but their imaginations fail when they think about their parents. They are unable to picture their parents having any complexity or history or identities other than the single fact of being parents. That day, during a pause in my monologue about work, my father, who was probably around ninety years old at the time, said offhandedly, “I always wanted to be a writer.” I was dumbfounded. And yet it made perfect, poetic sense. His adventurousness, his enjoyment of poking around in new places, his deftness at chatting with strangers—these were the qualities of someone who wanted to tell stories for a living or, at the very least, understood the potency of storytelling. I came to appreciate what a luxury it had been for me to want to be a writer and be able to pursue it rather than being in my father’s position of thinking wistfully that it was something he wished he could have done.

My father trained me to be an observer and to be inquisitive, to be comfortable in settings that were unfamiliar or even strange; without saying it explicitly, he trained me to think like a writer. Here’s an example: In 1966, when I was eleven years old, there was a week of violent civil disorder in central Cleveland that began after a white bar owner refused to serve water to a Black customer. White suburbanites, already curtailing their trips to downtown Cleveland in favor of new malls outside of town, became terrified of the inner city. I remember classmates telling me that their parents would never venture downtown again. My father had a different attitude. As soon as the unrest settled, he plunked me and my sister and brother in the back seat of his car and drove us to see the neighborhoods that had been in conflict. “I want you to understand that everyone doesn’t get to live the way you live,” I remember him saying to us. “You are not members of the idle rich.” It was not only the prospect of idle children that troubled him; it was the prospect that we might retreat into the bubble of privilege he had created for us and never know a world beyond it and never feel responsible for making that world better. A large part of my father’s business was the development of Section 8 subsidized housing. On several occasions, he commanded us each to choose a toy from our many toys, without telling us why we were choosing. Once we had chosen, he put us in the car and drove us to one of his Section 8 projects and had us visit with the children there. Then, at his instruction, we gave our chosen toys to the kids.

I won’t pretend that we enjoyed touring the ruined neighborhoods downtown, and we were definitely uncomfortable meeting children we didn’t know, and I assure you we did not like giving away our toys. But the experience sank in—the way it forced us to appreciate the existence of the whole city and not only our primped little part of it, and the frankness of seeing things that were harsh and sad but real, and my father’s willingness to engage with his tenants in a housing project rather than just building it and cashing the rent checks. The lesson for me was to see the wholeness of life, and not to shrink from the hard parts, and to find the marvel in it, because seeing anything, everything, all of it, is an illumination.

My father recognized the appeal of being a writer. But while he inadvertently prepared me to think like a writer, to see the world like a writer would, he discouraged me from pursuing writing as a profession. We sparred about my career choice for years, and I knew it made him uneasy that I was entering such a wobbly profession, especially one that didn’t have a well-defined route to it. It’s true that I had no idea how one went about becoming a writer. The path to becoming a newspaper reporter was clear—you took journalism classes and then got internships and stints on a copy desk and went onward from there—but my desire to write long narratives didn’t seem to follow any job path I knew.

During my junior year of college, my friend Lisa Klausner gave me a subscription to The New Yorker for my birthday. I was aware of the magazine, but I hadn’t read it regularly. At the time, New Yorker stories loped along page after page, broken up only by occasional illustrations, so at first I thought it was a brick of text that wasn’t very engaging. Then I started reading it regularly, and I felt a flash of recognition: This was what I wanted to write, and this was where I wanted to be published. The story that embodied The New Yorker for me, which I read after college, was Mark Singer’s 1983 piece “Supers,” a profile of five brothers who were superintendents of upscale Manhattan apartment buildings. The story had no urgency, no news peg. It simply described the brothers and their relationship to one another and to the tenants in their building and to New York City—but in doing that, it illustrated a world. The story felt specific and intimate, but at the same time, it showed what a working life feels like, what family means, how humans coexist. I tore the story out of the issue and kept it on my nightstand, like a ticket to a place I wanted to go.