The Current - Susan Orlean: Why being curious gives you a richer life

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Susan Orlean is the best selling author of seven books including The Orchid Thief and The Library Book, and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. On stage at the Vancouver Writers Fest, she talks about being curious about the world, and how that's led her to the most unexpected stories. She tells the stories behind her stories of the American Man at Age 10, being portrayed by Meryl Streep, becoming the patron saint of pandemic drinking, and why ending her marriage made her think of a tire driving over a nail. Her new memoir is titled Joyride.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Susan Orlean's life has been guided by curiosity. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992 and is the best-selling author of seven books, including the library book and The Orchid Thief. The stories she tells are often unexpected and always intriguing. She introduces us to people and places that most of us might

overlook or never even know existed. Now, Susan Orlean has written a memoir, Joy Ride. It pulls back the curtain on why she writes and how she writes. As she puts it, the story of my life is the story of my stories. I spoke with Susan Orlean at the end of October. On stage at the Vancouver Writers' Fest, here's our conversation. What is it like, as somebody whose job it is, whose life it has been to tell other people's stories? What is it like to be out on the road telling your own story? it's a real shift it's absolutely fundamental to me to shine the spotlight on other people turning it on myself initially was quite awkward and part of me felt like well why who's going to care what about my life warrants that kind of attention. Over time, I began realizing that the mere mapping of where I've

been is actually very interesting. I have been able to live all of these crazy adventures, and it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that people might come away from those, from my stories, thinking, well, maybe I can bring a little bit of that into my own life, that maybe they can look at the world with a little more curiosity, a little more openness than they even thought they could. Your father was a genuinely curious kind of man. Can you tell me a little bit about him? He really was remarkable, and I credit him with giving me the idea that being open to the world was a wonderful superpower. He grew up during the Depression in Cleveland. He became a

lawyer and a real estate developer, but he brought to his life a kind of curiosity that I noted even as a little kid. And he sort of forced us to experience that as well. Something that I mentioned in the book, and it really was a formative experience for me. When I was young, there was civil unrest in Cleveland. This was a period of great white flight in a lot of cities in the U.S. And kids that I knew, their parents were saying, oh, we're never going to downtown Cleveland again. My dad had the exact opposite thought, which was, as soon as it was safe,

he put us in the car and said, we're going to go downtown and see what happened and maybe figure out why it happened. And you should see this. You should learn about it. It was his way of being in the world. And I think I just modeled myself, but also the rewards were obvious to me from the beginning, that it really was interesting to see the world be able to the immediate. I'll never forget him saying, not everybody grows up the way you do. You also, I mean, just in describing life in the house,

there's a line in the book that stopped me cold. You talk about your parents. They had a tough relationship. And you say, they hurt each other's feelings until the day they died. It was a really difficult thing to experience as a kid. And my parents stayed married for 5,000 years, but they had a quarrelsome, constantly clashing relationship.

So I never saw them in a companionable piece. They just argued about the stupidest, smallest things all the time. And it was hard. I think that I yearned always to be, with parents who had a comfortable, happy rapport. And it's weird because my parents were pretty doggedly committed to staying married, but they didn't treat each other well. And I remember when they were like in their 90s and they were having some fight about

something. And I thought, boy, you guys, like you have unbelievable energy to be fighting. You know, when you're 90, like, what is there left to fight about? Tell me about this quotation, each person is an entire world. What does that mean in terms of the work that you have done for your life? This idea first began to really sort of stick for me when I was working on the library book. And thinking about this Senegalese phrase, which when someone dies, instead of saying they've died, you say their library has burned

and it was a phrase that ended up becoming really instrumental in my writing that book and it stuck with me on so many levels where I began thinking how interesting to imagine each person as a library filled with volumes of memories and thoughts and knowledge and you know everything we experience in our life

It felt real that it wasn't just a kind of invented poetic phrase, but a real construct that each person contained the whole universe and the end of any particular life kind of stopped that entire universe. And you can also see it as a kind of elastic idea about the interconnectedness of all people. If there's anything that I think has really been formative for me as a writer, it's that concept, that each person, no matter how superficially small their life might appear, well that's just an illusion that their life is deeply complex

and full of stories and ideas and a whole web of their existence and that your job as somebody writing about them is to both embrace what might appear to be their regularness but also appreciate the extraordinary complexity of who they are. How do you think about that? I mean, so much of this book is about curiosity.

And people will ask you constantly, where do you get your ideas? There's a list of, you say, you know, radio, notices on community boards, conversations with anyone, walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods, thinking of the backstory to a big story. The radar is up all the time for you, right? It is. to say that it's possible while sitting here that I might come up with a story

idea. Anything you say can and will be used for future reference. But it's you know, the stories are really everywhere. I mean, when we were backstage and talking about

how all these buildings on Granville Island are aging and I'm thinking, well, that's a good story. It's a really interesting story. about all of them hitting the, say, 100-year mark and sort of falling apart and what's going to happen. Why isn't that a story? It is. In that list, one of the other things that leapt out,

I mean, it's a remarkable idea, is reconsidering something I thought I knew. I love that kind of story in particular because I think we all assume that we know a lot of stuff. and what is fascinating to me is stopping sometimes in the middle of what I consider second nature, I know it backward and forward, and then stopping and realizing I, in fact, don't know it at all. And I'll give you an example, and this will give you an idea of how I can't stop myself. I was in a grocery store one day, and a guy was stocking cookies or something, and all of a sudden I thought, grocery stores are amazing, aren't they?

Like, they're amazing. They are these really complicated mechanisms and a million different vendors, and they service all of these different people, and everybody goes to the grocery store. and I got so excited because I liked the tension between thinking well obviously I've been in grocery stores millions of times and I know how they work in the most simple way but I really don't know how they work at all and it was really one of the most fun stories I've done

you know it was something where my editor was somewhat skeptical where I said you know this is groundbreaking. I've got to get out there. But that's the hidden in plain sight piece, right? That's what it is. And to me, what I love is that everybody knows what I'm talking about, but I think most people like me have to stop and go, wow, I never thought about it, but I actually don't know how a grocery store operates. It's not the easiest kind of story to do because you have to override the readers feeling like, well, why would I want to read about a grocery store? You need to persuade them to have the same light bulb moment that I had

that led me to doing the story. You also have to persuade the editors. As you mentioned, sometimes they're skeptical. Yes. Damn those editors. How did your editors respond when you pitch the idea of a profile of a 10-year-old boy? This is a very, in many ways, the story that most encapsulates my professional life. I got a call from Esquire magazine. I had never written for them before. It was very exciting. They were doing a series about the stages of a man's life.

And they had done a story about aging, written by Robert Sherrill, about turning 60 or something. So they called me in, so we'd really like you to write for us. We're doing a piece about boyhood. We would like you to profile Macaulay Culkin, who is 10 years old. And I had several thoughts,

which was, one, I have no interest in McCauley Culkin. Two, more fundamentally, I thought, what does Macaulay Culkin's life tell us about an average 10-year-old boy? It seemed like completely contradictory. Possessed with what I can only describe as insane confidence, I said to the editor, you know, I really want to do a story for you, and I love the idea of a 10-year-old boy, but how about if I profiled just an ordinary 10-year-old boy

and not Macaulay Culkin? To my shock, really, because they had already done a photo shoot with Macaulay Culkin. They were all ready to do Macaulay Culkin. And truly to my astonishment, he said, okay, would this happen ordinarily? I mean, was he possessed by the devil? at that moment.

I mean, what did he think I would do? I mean, it was a bold move. A very bold move. He also said to me, just to let you know, it's the cover story of the biggest issue of the year,

and the entire rest of the magazine has already gone to the printer. So, no pressure. My first thought as I walked out of the office was, what was so wrong with Macaulay Culkin? What's wrong with me? I don't even know any 10-year-old boys.

I really didn't. I lived in Manhattan. I didn't want to write about a boy growing up in Manhattan because I felt it was too particular. And so my first obstacle, and this is always the case, if you were trying to write about an example of a concept.

It's both, any choice you make is both universal and specific. Like whatever boy I picked by definition was both the universal 10-year-old boy, but very much a particular 10-year-old boy. And I was terrified. And I thought, and Esquire magazine is waiting on the story about some ordinary kid in a suburb. You have the book there. Can you read a little bit of the opening of that story?

Sure. Give me one moment. Just to hear what you came up with, I think, is astonishing. So the piece was called The American Man, Age 10. 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, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard, and we would have always 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 by 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 rhythmic song 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. It's like a, it's a magic act pulling something like that off, isn't it? It is. It's remarkable. Part of writing is completely some combination of instinct, intuition, magic, unconscious,

subconscious, whatever it is. And in this case, a certain amount of bravery. because I think if I had really thought that I was proposing marriage to a 10-year-old boy and describing it, I might have thought, maybe not. But it was so much in service to what the story was about,

which was I was trying to see the world as he saw it. And that was his vision of marriage. And at that point, I had spent two weeks with him and I was the best friend a 10-year-old boy could possibly have. I had a car. I was willing to give him as many quarters as he wanted to play arcade games. I was absolutely non-judgmental, and when he and his friend were horsing around and shooting dog food at me,

I didn't get them in trouble. And, you know, there was a... this sort of romantic notion of this is the perfect relationship. This is really a kind of dream relationship. But I didn't sit there and think and analyze it. It just truly came out of some gut instinct about what I was trying to create in the story. How do you describe the feeling when you land an idea and you know it's going to be good? You're on a plane. You're on a plane, and you have nothing to read and you look in the little seat back thing and there's a story in the magazine about a guy who steals flowers and it turns out that that becomes the

catalyst for the orchid thief which changes your life again. I mean what does that feel like when you see something like that? It's an incredibly satisfying distinct feeling. The only thing I can compare it to is the feeling when you close the door in a very expensive car and it just has this wonderful, rich

thunk and you think oh my God that really fits that really works so good and you know it honestly it's just a gut reaction in the case of finding

that story that said local nursery men Seminole crew arrested in swamp with rare orchids, not a single one of those words seem to exist in the same sentence. And I just thought, well, I must learn about this. And this feeling also that I have stepped into an alternate reality, that there's something marvelous here that I don't understand, so I'm going to have to understand it.

I mean, I disliked orchids very much so I was not attracted to the story because I thought, oh good, I get to pursue my hobby as an orchid collector. I actually

was attracted to it partly because I thought, why would anyone go anywhere for an orchid? It just seemed so perverse and weird and particularly why would you hike into a swamp? It just, everything about it was so weird.

And also, the depth of my ignorance was unmeasurable. I mean, I didn't know orchids grew wild in Florida. I had never heard of this swamp, and I thought I knew Florida quite well. So, to me, not knowing is very stimulating. It makes me think, well, I've got to learn about this. This is amazing. Hello, it's Ray Winston. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4,

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You get your podcast. How much did you know about Hollywood before the book was turned into a film, before it was turned into adaptation? Not a lot. I had been an extra in The Deer Hunter, which was sort of my moment of fame. You just mentioned that casually and continue on. Yes. Well, you know, it was a film that I thought was kind of ridiculous, and I was doing it as a favor to a friend. and I said

this is never going anywhere so you can tell that I'm kind of right on the cutting edge so when my book well actually what happened is I wrote the story for the New Yorker about this orchid heist and that got optioned immediately

I hesitated because I had then decided I wanted to make it book length. So my arrangement was you can't do the film until I finish the book because I don't want the film to come out before the book. And I really knew very, very little about the process of a film being developed. In fact, when my agent said to me, oh, they've hired this really wonderful screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman,

I thought she said he'd just written a movie called Killing John Malkovich. And I thought, oh, this is this going to be a horror film? What is going on? So I moreover, I thought it was a ridiculous idea for a movie.

And I thought, if you want to option it, that's your problem. But I don't see how this could be a movie. It just it seems so un-cinematic. I mean, it's a very non-linear narrative about

a crime in which no one got killed, nobody is addicted to a dangerous drug, you know, there are no car crashes, and I remember even saying to my husband, they'll probably like turn it into a murder, have

car chases, and of course they did, but... And more. Yes, but not the way I thought they would, and of course what's funny is that the scripts sort of comments on that exact fear of mine, which was they're going to turn it into a Hollywood movie. So the process all along the way was completely surprising and funny and

unexpected. And until the movie came out, I got totally petrified and thought, is it too late to change my mind? I'm not sure I really want to be a character in a movie. But My agent said, yeah, it's too late. You were often asked in the wake of the film coming out, what it was like to see your life portrayed on a screen with a nine-foot-tall, Merrill Streep, saying, I'm Susan Orlean. It was so strange. Once you're in a film, you exist in the culture in a very different way.

I mean, it's funny because I often want to say to people, I'm not just a character in the movie I actually wrote the book like let's not forget that you also write about your own life and I mean it's interesting as your writing career is extraordinarily successful your personal life is this kind of wild

roller coaster that's going up and down what is it like to write about your own life and your own marriage your first marriage and turn the mirror around in that way it was difficult I won't pretend otherwise And there was a lot of sort of moral hand-wringing on my part about talking about an unhappy marriage, a person who treated me badly, what was my right to tell a story that we each had participated in. Just talk a little bit about what happened.

I mean, you're launching books. There's supposed to be the best moments of your life, and it feels like, part of your life is falling down around you at the same time? Yeah, the day of my book launch for not one book, but again, a second book, my husband chose that day to tell me that he was cheating on me. And this, you know, you don't write books every day. So a book launch is a very special, joyous, wonderful moment. you're celebrating an achievement that has taken you years.

And so to choose that moment, somebody, a friend was saying yesterday, couldn't you have waited a day? And, you know, there's some truth to that. And as much as, you know, I think there are probably a million sub-stories in here and perhaps he would see it differently, I think there was no accident involved. I think as my career was making me happier and happier, he felt resentful, competitive, simply left behind maybe. Mostly, I just think he saw being happy as a zero-sum game

and that if I was happy, he was less happy. And that moment of me truly enjoying the satisfaction of my book coming into the world was a particularly hurtful time to have him say, I have to tell you something. I'm seeing someone. And, of course, I was devastated. And the aftermath was a pretty tortured stretch of time. the second time led to our divorce. You say in the book, I mean, people will ask you, why didn't you leave?

And you say, that's a fair question, and you ask yourself that. And you use the analogy of a tire driving over a nail. Can you explain what that means? I was trying to think, because as I was writing the story of being in a bad marriage, and I suddenly realized that if a friend were telling me this, I would have said, well, why don't you leave? And I think we all do that, even in the case where somebody is actually physically abused, you can't help yourself from thinking, well, why don't, why didn't you leave? And I suddenly had this image of a tire, and you've driven over a nail, and you have to figure out what to do.

You can leave the nail in, and the tire will remain inflated weirdly, even though it's been grievously injured. it keeps its inflation. But what you should do is pull it out, but that means the tire is going to deflate. In the long run, that's the better choice, and then you fix it for real. But I couldn't see my way to that reality. And the fact is when I was very much in love with my husband,

I met him. We had a lot of good time. So I think I kept imagining somehow I was preserving this thing that would heal itself. I was probably also scared to be alone. For somebody who's perfectly happy traveling around the world by myself and doing all of these crazy stories all by myself, I really had never lived alone. And it was a, strange, I just couldn't even picture it. And also a certain conservative impulse, which was just, it's better to keep things as they are than to change. And then finally, it was just impossible. It just, there was no way to remain together. And then once we were divorced, I felt like, what was I doing? How did I end up sort of,

gaslighting myself, which was very disturbing for somebody who considers themselves quite pragmatic and realistic and able to kind of analyze my life, I really had no perspective on that. It's a really powerful part of the book. And again, as somebody who tells other people's stories, it's really bold and brave is kind of overused. some ways, but it is really brave the way that you tell that. You've written in all sorts of different ways in magazine writing and full-length books and what have you.

How did you become, as you say, the patron saint of pandemic drinking on Twitter? I'm so proud of this. There are many people who know you because of that. I know. A whole swath of people who were introduced to you writing because of what you did on Twitter.

I know, and I feel like, well, that was some of my finest writing ever. Fueled by Rose. Yeah. Well, you know, it was the first summer of COVID. My husband and I at the time had a house in the Hudson Valley in New York, a farm, and we were there, like everybody around the globe, just trying to make sense of what was going on.

And we, and I would say most of the people I know, were starting cocktail hour a little earlier than usual. And there was nothing else to do. Like, might as well start drinking. But this came about a little differently, which was our next-door neighbor's horse had just foaled. And they said, you know, come on over and see the foal. And, you know, we'll social distance, but just come visit.

So we went over and saw this beautiful little fall. It was a boiling hot day, boiling hot, and I, for some reason, had not eaten yet. So we were at their house, and they're very, very sociable, friendly people. Let's have a glass of wine, celebrate the little colt. I was like, yeah, why not? And my neighbors have a heavy pour. So we have these, you know, I don't know if you've seen the Saturday Night Live, you know, where it's a glass this big. And we're drinking and talking and commiserating.

Then my neighbor's wife said, I'll get some food, and she brings out a platter of sushi. It was like, ugh, are you kidding? Boiling hot, sushi sitting in the sun. And I thought, not into it, no. And I'll just have some more rosé. So, you know, the hours go by, and finally we think, well, oh, we have a kid, we should go home. And we say to our neighbors, this is great, and thank you, I stand up, and I thought, oh, my God, I am so drunk. I cannot believe it.

Like, smashed, I'm going to fall down. drunk. So I grabbed onto my husband and was like, bye, by the way, just as an aside, and I can't remember if I said this in the book, but my neighbor was the former governor of New York. Yes. And, you know, yes. And so I was super embarrassed. I thought, oh, my God, I wonder if they can tell how drunk I am. So we get home, and that summer we were living with my stepson and his wife, my husband, me, and my son. And I just thought, I don't want to see any of you. I don't know why.

I was just suddenly really mad at everybody. And I just said, I'm going to sleep. Leave me alone. And I got into bed and dangerous to have your phone next to you when you're in bed. And I was on Twitter a lot back in the day. I loved it. It was a lot of fun. It was not anything like X now.

So I'm lying sideways. and I just finger, thumb-type, drunk. And I thought, yeah, honest. Truth? Yeah. And, you know,

I'm really, the room is spinning and then I just start, like, tweeting more, feeling like I'm just sort of writing notes to myself. And I am very meticulous. I don't have typos. I am grammatical. I use punctuation.

I'm very anal about that. And I'm just like, you could barely read what I was writing. So, and I got really mad about everything. Like, where's my cat? And why don't we have any chocolate in the house? I can't believe this. Just like everything was pissing me off.

And I, you know, and everybody was watching a movie. I was mad about that. so my husband comes into the room and he said are you okay and I said yeah I'm okay why and he said well I'm getting some texts from people they think your Twitter account has been hacked and I said it is not it is not hacked and then I tweeted I am so not hacked I was so angry and you know virality is a mystery

I don't know how it happened but it kind of blew up but I was not aware of it I was sitting in the dark just talking to myself I woke up the next day and I thought oh god

did I say anything that I regret and I did remember I had been really angry because the only candy we had in the house was sugar-coated fennel seeds. And so I was

raging about how they're not really candy, how dare anybody consider them candy. So I woke up and I thought, all right, the only thing I think I really kind of went off on was fennel seeds.

So maybe I'm okay. and then I start getting called by the media want to talk to you about it and it was like what what happened so I went back and looked and I thought did I do that and then why are there 10,000 likes on me saying I hate fennel seeds and I just thought I can't leave the house

I was so mortified and then I got a text for from Elliot Spitzer, my neighbor, is saying, I guess you really enjoyed yesterday. It was a different time. It was. It really was a different time. It was really a different time.

I mean, part of your job is to get people to open up. And part of that is, as you said, rethinking what you know, rethinking perhaps who people are, getting people to open up and talk to you. I just wonder whether we still do that, whether we are as a society is willing to kind of share things and be open

or whether you worry that this isn't about politics but in some ways it is infected by politics, whether we pull back a little bit and the work that you do, that kind of open curiosity, asking people open, generous, genuinely curious questions, whether that's threatened right now. I'm afraid that I've,

feel it is. I think it's not only that we don't know how to ask questions, but we don't want to hear the answers. We assume we know a lot that we don't know. And that, to me, is maybe the most dangerous mindset. Assuming you know and not wanting to take the time to really learn. I was going to say, what do we do about that? I think journalism can play a role in that, and unfortunately we're not in a moment where there's huge support for journalism, but that's a huge function of what journalists can do. And to also check their own biases, I often like to write about things that make me uncomfortable. In fact, when I work for Rolling Stone, I became well-known in the office for... I only liked writing about bands that I hated.

And I was always really interested when a band was popular and I didn't like them because I thought, well, why does anyone like them? What don't I understand? What don't I understand? And what did people see? Not these people are stupid because they like this bad band, but rather, what do they see? rather, what do they see that I'm not seeing? And I never was predicated on the need for me to come to like the band.

It was that I wanted to begin to understand the differences in the way we are in the world. The more we can do that and not assume we're always in an argument that someone has to win. but rather I want to hear the opinion that is very not my opinion and not that it's going to change my opinion but isn't it worth hearing and doesn't that actually inform your own opinion further if you understand the other side and I think we've really become so polarized that people are are afraid and resistant and really defiantly opposed to even hearing the other side of any argument. And it's terrible. It can't end well. All said. That speaks to the last question that I had for you, which is we've been talking a lot

about curiosity. What is your advice to the rest of us about how we can be more curious? To me, this is so essential. And if there's something anybody takes away from any of my books, it would be how to find your own... You don't have to be a writer, a newspaper reporter, to exist in the world in a curious state. The only way you can do it is begin practicing it.

and realizing that it's very rewarding. Instead of it being uncomfortable, intimidating, or uninteresting, you have to actively maybe even force yourself to get out of the places that are so familiar to you that you don't have any actual curiosity and put yourself in a new situation and enjoy the experience of it. It's really fun to learn.

and stuff. And if you practice it in small ways and make it a habit, I feel like it's something you can carry with you into the world and you can live this richer life. It's full of wonder and surprise if you let yourself venture out of that safety and familiarity. It's not scary. It's marvelous. My favorite word is wonder, and you are an architect of that. You're just extraordinary. I've read your writing forever, and it's just a joy and an honor to meet you. Thank you very much.

Susan Orlean, everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I spoke with Susan Orlean on stage just a couple of weeks ago at the Vancouver Writers' Fest. Her memoir is called Joyride. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.