When Susan Orlean chose the title for her memoir, it wasn't merely an apt description of the "joyride of a life" she's lived as a journalist for nearly 50 years. It also teases the pleasure her readers will derive from a book that illuminates her fascinating career while serving as a textbook of sorts for anyone eager to look behind the scenes at a highly accomplished writer's craft.
For Orlean, the drive to write has always seemed as elemental as the need to eat or sleep. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she headed to Portland, Ore., fending off her father's pressure to follow him into the legal profession. She progressed from working for publications like Portland's Willamette Week to a staff writer position with the New Yorker in 1992, where she remains to this day.
In Orlean's work, she writes, "the story is in charge," and the writer always must be prepared to put aside the assumptions she brought to the project. Joyride is packed with tips like these for aspiring writers, among them the importance of constantly cultivating story ideas, and the lesson her Willamette Week editor taught that the process of writing has three parts: "reporting, then thinking, and then writing."
Joyride concludes with an appendix containing a handful of Orlean's articles, including "The American Man Age Ten," her first article for Esquire magazine that she says was "a defining moment for me." These few pieces only hint at the variety of her work, and, as Orlean suggests, even after a lifetime of writing she hasn't lost her zest for finding the next great story. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer