Song Exploder - Book Exploder: Susan Orlean - The Library Book

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Introducing a new miniseries: Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from one of their books, and discuss the creative process that went into writing it. Every other week, in between episodes of Song Exploder, you’ll hear from a new author, in conversation with host Susan Orlean. But for this first episode of the series, Susan is interviewed by Hrishikesh Hirway about her own book, The Library Book. Susan Orlean is the author of twelve books, including The Orchid Thief (which inspired the Oscar-award winning film Adaptation), a staff writer at The New Yorker . Published in 2018, The Library Book became a New York Times Best Seller and named a Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year. The book tells the story of the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. In this inaugural episode, Susan discusses a passage from her book, which details the blaze itself. For more, visit bookexploder.com/episodes/susan-orlean.

You're listening to Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write. I'm Rishi Kesh Your Way. And I'm Susan Orlean. I've been making Song Exploder since 2014, talking to other musicians about the creative process that went into the making of one of their songs. And a few years ago, I thought these kinds of conversations could be extended outside of music. And I brought this idea to Susan to help me bring it to the world of literature. So on Book Exploder, each episode features an author, delving into one small section from one of their books.

There's so much to talk about in a book, and there's so much that goes into writing one, years of work often. But by zooming in on one passage in detail, you can really learn something about how an author approaches their work and solves problems. Those granular decisions that they make really let you learn something concrete

about how their creative mind thinks. Susan's a New York Times best-selling author herself and a staff writer for the New Yorker, And for this mini-series, she's interviewed an incredible set of authors. These are some of my favorite writers in the world. Hi, my name is Min Jen Lee, and I'm the author of Pachinko. Hi, I'm James McBride, author of Deacon King Kong. Hi, I'm George Saunders, the author of The Short Story Victory Lab.

I'm Celeste Ing, and I'm the author of The Novel Little Fires Everywhere. I'm Michael Cunningham, the author of The Hours. I'm Tayari Jones, and I'm the author of An American Marriage. And I'm Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House. All those episodes are coming over the next several weeks, in between episodes of Song Exploder. But before we get to those, I thought it would be nice if you learn a little bit more about Susan herself

and her own creative process, to meet her as an author before you meet her as an interviewer. So for this first book Exploder episode, I'm going to ask Susan about a passage from her breathtaking book from 2018, the library book. How does that sound? I think that sounds great. So could you tell me, what do you say to people when they ask you, what's the library book about?

Well, that was one of my biggest challenges because none of my books really have great shelf appeal in the sense of having a concept that is easy to describe. And in the case of the library book, I could default to one of two descriptions. One was to say it's a book about the Los Angeles Public Library and its history and the day-to-day life of a library and the people who work there and patronize it. Or what I ended up gravitating to more was going with the Big Bang and to say it's about the biggest library fire in American history, which took place in 1986 in the Los Angeles Public Library. That kind of sexier description often serve me better. Yeah, I mean, it is a sexy description. The passage that we're going to talk about is very specifically about the fire. The temperature reached 451 degrees, and the books began smoldering.

Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened, and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of city scraps soaring on the updraft. And I'm so curious about how you wrote this, because this is a book of nonfiction. But what you wrote is really something I think that goes beyond what I think of in the constraints of nonfiction. The wonderful thing about creative nonfiction,

whatever name you want to use for this genre, is that it gives you the flexibility to address the main. the material using the techniques that are more common to fiction. And I want to make the distinction that it's 100% nonfiction. It's 100% factual. But the techniques for telling the story are ones that draw more from the traditions of fiction in the sense of tone and voice and pacing and language. But everything that I said happened, happened.

Every quote I used was actually spoken. I took no liberties with changing time, nothing like that. Well, that's part of why this passage is so interesting to me, because I want to find out about the kind of liberties that you felt like you could and you couldn't take. But I was wondering if you could set it up for me. Where does it come in the process of the story that you're telling? Well, this is quite early in the book. When I sat down to write, and I should say I had done about five years of reporting at the point that I sat down to write, and I do all the reporting before I sit down to write, I need to learn the whole story backward and forward before I feel ready to write. I knew, of course, that this would be a really important part. of the book, which was telling people the particulars about the fire. And I think initially I thought,

I'll write a paragraph just detailing the damage that the fire had done. But as I did more work on the book, the more I learned about fire and fire in California, the more I began seeing it as this almost animate quality. You know, California is a place of fire. It's a presence, unfortunately, here in a way that it is not nearly as much in other parts of the country. And I had just moved to California when I started working on this book. I had never given thought to fire. I was living on the East Coast, and of course there are fires. But, suddenly here I was in California and I felt like that's all you thought about. And it just felt like almost as present as the mountain lions that live in the Santa Monica wilderness. I mean,

it felt like this wild animal that was just waiting to pounce. So it was interesting to me how vivid the fire was. And the actual process of the fire moving through the building became really interesting to me. And the way it alluded firefighters, I mean, it's pretty amazing to think that almost every single firefighter in the city of L.A. had come to try to battle this fire. And there was a point at which they were about to write the building off as a lost cause because the fire was so sneaky and it found so many passages to hide in. And it just became more and more intriguing to me how this beast had roamed through the building

and almost won. So for your research, how did you learn about the specific movements of the fire? It wound around fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the, shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward.

How could you reconstruct the events of the actual fire's journey? I got really lucky, and this is every reporter's dream is to come across significant documentation of any event. And in this case, I came across two invaluable documents, One is the logs from the fire, namely one of the firefighters was keeping basically a minute-to-minute log of the firefight. Wow. Where the fire was moving, what kind of hose they used, who they sent where in the building. I mean, it was a dream for a writer to come across us because, I mean, it was incredibly specific. and, you know, artless except for the magnificence of all of the details.

And so I had a lot of information that I could draw on. And I thought I can use that to start assembling the material into a structure. Yeah. And so I just begin with the smoke detector setting off an alarm. And I wanted to just immerse you slowly bit by bit into this hour of the fire first unfolding. At first, the smoke in the fiction stacks was as pale as onion skin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black.

Because this was the experience that people at the library had. There's a smoke alarm. Nobody's particularly concerned. because the building is old and has all sorts of problems and the smoke alarm goes off all the time and nobody pays any attention to it. People are sort of annoyed that they have to evacuate because they know it's nonsense.

And then the fire department comes and they're not in any big hurry because it's the library after all and their fire alarm goes off all the time. And they go and they walk around the building, nothing concerning. But when they go to reset the alarm, it won't reset. And suddenly things get a little concerning.

Hmm, why won't this reset? Well, maybe there's something wrong with alarm, or maybe on their walk around, they miss something. And they start walking through the building, and they come into the stacks in the fiction department, and they see a wisp of smoke. And then, boom, I'm throwing you into the fire. We'll be right back with more after this.

So there's a sentence within all this drama that I wanted to ask you about when the fires reach the cookbooks. The fire flashed through fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. And you have this sentence, the cookbooks roasted. Yeah, you know, I have to admit it's hard for me to pass up a good joke. And even though this was in the middle of a very dire description and a, you know, a genuinely tragic event, I couldn't help it. I also felt like it was a teeny bit of a breather for the reader to be able to break a smile. Because, I mean, I've had librarians tell me that they cried while they read this section.

Yeah. And I was just trying to lighten the mood for one second. It also was the case that writing about fire, on one hand, I was super excited. I thought, ooh, this will be fun and fun to write description. But there's so many cliches that we use around fire. And to write about a fire without using any of those cliches was, my number one goal. So using the word roasted was one of those opportunities. Was there any kind of note or something in the documentation that you had read, you know,

in the minutia of the fire department's reports that made reference to cookbooks specifically that sparked that idea for you? Yes, not the fire department, but the library did an accounting of the books that were lost. So, you know, I got the report that noted the sections because in most cases it was an entire section that was ruined. Yeah. And in fact, the chapter that begins after this passage began with the phrase what was lost. Right. And then I just detailed at length some of the particular items that were lost in the fire.

So was this paragraph? difficult to write? Was it something that you labored over? Clearly you put so much thought into what you wanted it to be, but in terms of the actual writing, was it something that you had to attempt many times before you got it right? I wrote this really slowly. I wanted it to be really economical. I felt like every word had to be chosen carefully. I wanted it to feel really fresh and really intense. So I kind of embraced the idea of the fire as a single entity, as this stalking creature that was kind of making its way around the building and trying to outsmart the firefighters. That was one of the strangest things, because you come to feel that fire,

I mean, look, we all know it's a chemical condition. But it seems to have a certain quality of life. It wants to live. It will do whatever it can to live. And the craftiness that the fire used to evade the firefighters was really strange. It found ways and passages. to travel through the building that were uncanny. And that's a lot of what inspired me writing this

was thinking of this as a foe that was specifically trying to beat you. This fire wanted to consume and it was going to do whatever it took to keep going. That was the feeling I had as I sat down to write. And I think it helped me. It helped animate these sentences in my effort to capture that quality. And it's interesting to me how many people refer to this passage when I'm talking to them about the book,

when in fact it's not a very long passage. And so I'm delighted that it's stuck in people's heads. And it genuinely was a challenge to write. but a very gratifying experience because I had set out to do something very specific, and it felt like I had done that. And now here's Susan Orlean reading a passage from the library book. At first, the smoke in the fiction stacks was as pale as onion skin. Then it deepened to dove gray.

Then it turned black. It wound around fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees, and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened, and then spread. away from their bindings, a ream of city scraps soaring on the updraft. The fire flashed through fiction, consuming as it traveled.

It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloom with flame. At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroom down again to the sixth tier. It poked around looking for more air and fuel. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumpled and vanished.

On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, then decided to move laterally. The fire burned through sixth tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northeastern. northwest stacks. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collections stored in the northwest stacks. It gripped the blocky patent gazettes. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until it last the gazettes, smoked, flared, crackled,

and dematerialized. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. Hot air saturated. the walls. The floor began to fracture. A spider web of hot cracks appeared. Sealing beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. The temperature reached 900 degrees, and the stacked steel shelves brightened from gray to white, as if illuminated from within. Soon, glistening and nearly molten, they glowed cherry red. Then they twisted and slumped, pitching their books into the fire. The library book is available in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook. Susan's website is susanorlean.com.

You can visit us at bookexploder.com for more information. This episode of Book Exploder was produced by me, along with Theo Balcombe and Susan. Nick's song is our production assistant. Raina Takahashi created the Book Exploder logo. Our episode artwork is by Paula Jackson, and I made the show's theme music. Book Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. A network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. Find out more at Radiotopia.fm.

I'm Rishi K. Shirway. And I'm Susan Orlean. Thanks for listening.