Joyride by Susan Orlean

Joyride

By Susan Orlean

Avid Reader Press 2025

Beginning one’s memoir with an excerpt from E.B. White’s Here Is New York (1949) on personal giants, those creative luminaries we feverishly crave any opportunity to bear witness to, is a bold move. But it’s not an unsympathetic one. Joyride, Susan Orlean’s memoir on the writing life, reads like the author making an explicit case for becoming part of the reader’s own esteemed artistic pantheon. Move over, Joan Didion and John Updike: there is real benefit to sweatily palming through Orlean’s oeuvre underlining the ledes and rhythms that can keep the embers of the reader’s own creativity alive and encourage them to keep pushing, to keep fanning the sputtering flames and nurturing their own seemingly unattainable fantasies, despite the reality that the publishing landscape has transformed radically since Orlean first made a name for herself in the pages of Esquire, Vogue, and The New Yorker.

For the uninitiated, there is no better primer to Orlean than Joyride, which is very much structured, thanks to its inclusion of a robust appendix of significant essays, as the Susan Orlean reader. What her curation of essays and excerpts supports is her (sometimes redundant) insistence that her writing, at its best, is a journey to and through the “people who were rarely written about.” Joyride tells the stories behind her portraits of the subcultures and the cultural anxieties they reflect, ranging from the starchily coiffed and rouged children strutting across the southern beauty pageant circuit to the cultish darshon ceremonies that platformed the mystic Bhagwan at Rajeeshpuram, that populate and extend “the American panorama.” Writing her 1990 book Saturday Night, a diverse chronicle of the week’s end across America, Orlean gained momentum by inhabiting the story in “the way I inhabited it in real life—as an observer and a guide and the person whose curiosity was guiding the tale.”

In Joyride, however, Orlean has no choice but to make herself the central character and thus become a case study for her own subculture: women writers, supported by varying degrees of privilege, professionally navigating salary inequities and the courage required for self-advocacy and promotion, on top of the personal demands of dating, marriage, and divorce, of infidelity and infertility, of the seeming impossibilities of preparing for parenthood, much less the role reversal that underlies caretaking for aging parents, and of the physical and psychological safety that is so easily threatened by the turning tides of social media.

Along the way, there is no denying how comprehensively she captures the myriad highs that writers chase, in the close quarters of a subject’s tour bus, in dusty archives surrounded by brittle personal records and historical tokens, and in the smoky offices of attentive editors, sustaining them during professional droughts or personal crises. There are the private moments of reflection, of admittance that sometimes words come to us in ways that defy easy explanation: “How did I come up with that?” There is the encouraging satisfaction that comes with “the click in your brain when you feel you’ve found a story idea… like the rich thunk of an expensive car door shutting.” And, perhaps most of all, there is the persistent, primal desire for parental recognition. Orlean admits, “I was running for someone to tell me I had done enough, that I was enough. For my dad to acknowledge that I had made it as a writer.” There is something intimate and comforting about her willingness to publicly acknowledge this need. It’s an instinct that does not dissipate, even years after her career was cemented and the specter of the law school admissions committee — that friend of many an English major with doubtful parents — had finally been exorcised.

At the start of Joyride, Orlean argues that “writing always feels new because you never build equity.” On the one hand, to be a writer is to continuously start over with each new assignment, perpetually honing one's craft and reinventing oneself in the process. But on the other hand, part of becoming creatively deified means acknowledging whatever degree of professional security your thick stack of prestigious clips and connections permits, along with the fact that there exists a generation of writers working diligently in the shadows to channel your best sentences, your best work, your best advice. Indeed, Joyride is Orlean’s equity.

Gabrielle Stecher Woodward writes essays and criticism on the stories we tell about creative women. Her book reviews have appeared in publications including Harvard Review, American Book Review, and Necessary Fiction. Explore her portfolio at www.gabriellestecher.com.