Bullseye with Jesse Thorn Susan Orlean on her memoir 'Joyride'
Jan 27, 2026
Susan Orlean, award-winning nonfiction writer behind The Orchid Thief and The Library Book, discusses turning her attention inward in Joyride. She talks about reporting adventures, risky assignments, and the tiny details that make stories sing. The conversation explores immersion journalism, career-wide curiosity, and why noticing matters to narrative nonfiction.
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Writing As A Mission
- Susan Orlean treats writing as a mission to reveal complexity and poetry in ordinary life.
- She believes close attention can make any life compelling and foster reader empathy.
Find Joy In The Craft
- Embrace the fun in reporting and sentencecraft as a core motivator to keep going.
- Celebrate small victories like writing a sentence you really love to sustain work on hard projects.
Reporting Adventures
- Susan climbed Mount Fuji and traveled with diverse groups while reporting to learn their worlds.
- She also spent weeks working inside a grocery store to understand its operations intimately.
