JOYRIDE

A celebration of a supremely accomplished writing life, with a few lumps along the way.

The occasion for this look back at a sterling writing career, in part, was Orlean’s realization that the 25th anniversary of The Orchid Thief was fast upon her, a signal moment indeed. Yet, she demurs, she had always steered clear of writing a memoir: “I’m used to looking outward, not inward; I yearn to bring attention to hidden worlds, not to my own.” The hidden worlds of others have proved rich mines in the past, but so, too, Orlean’s own life turns out to be, from a nerdy, bookish childhood in Shaker Heights, Ohio (easy to lampoon for its suburbanness, but, she adds, also an unexpected locus for the Civil Rights Movement), to her first efforts at journalism and on to the glories and disappointments of the writer’s daily work. Orlean is often funny, especially when telling stories on herself, as when she had to have her nose cauterized after a snort too many, “which embarrassed me to no end”; she can also be steely, as when she recounts how she became a target for QAnon after tweeting “I’m so tired of old white men” in response to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. For all the pleasures and pains herein, though, the great value of this book is the MFA in nonfiction writing that Orlean packs into it, full of some of the most useful advice on craft that any budding (or long-practicing, for that matter) writer could ask for, such as when she writes, “Every significant move forward for me has occurred because I developed ideas for myself. Story ideas are everything.” And on that note, how she got the idea for The Orchid Thief is a tale that alone is worth the price of admission.

A spry, entertaining memoir/writing workshop by a nonfiction artist at the top of her game.