Book review: ‘Joyride: A Memoir’

“There is nothing small about Susan Orlean’s life, and Joyride blossoms beautifully.”

(Image credit: Roy Rochlin / Getty Images for Paramount+ with Showtime)

“Joyride might be the best craft book on writing you will ever read,” said Laurie Hertzel in The Boston Globe. Though Susan Orlean’s latest is written as a memoir, it’s the memoir of a journalist who dreamed of telling great stories and achieved great success doing so, and “there is so much brilliant advice in the first half that I yellow-highlighted nearly every page.” Orlean is a veteran New Yorker staff writer who is best known for The Orchid Thief, a book about an unlikely obsessive, and her tips defy convention. “Write about what you don’t know, she says, over and over.” Also, find a topic that intrigues you, and dive in until you find a story you can’t resist sharing. “The message is not just to follow your bliss,” said Marion Winik in The Minnesota Star Tribune, “but to follow your bliss with every mote of passion and every ounce of confidence you can muster.”

When Orlean got her start in journalism, of course, “it was a different time,” said Mark Athitakis in The Washington Post. A child of Cleveland’s suburbs, she graduated from the University of Michigan in the mid-1970s and chased her dream by moving first to Portland, Ore., then Boston, writing for alternative weeklies in both cities. And she didn’t stop hustling, sending letters and knocking on doors until she was writing for Esquire and Rolling Stone and filing short, non-bylined pieces for The New Yorker, landing her current position five years later. And while she’s less interesting than the oddball subjects she usually wrote about, she “comes up with a work-around by filling the pages with extended samples of her own work.”

“Rejections, criticism, and missed deadlines have all afflicted Orlean,” and she shares those failures with her readers as well, said Nathan Smith in Air Mail. But while she downplays the inherent interest of her own life story compared with the tales she has told throughout her career, her verdict on that point proves unpersuasive. In The Orchid Thief, she confessed her belief that “a small life, when sympathetically examined, could effloresce.” In her new book, she shows that she was right back then. “There is nothing small about Orlean’s life, and Joyride blossoms beautifully.”