Susan Orlean with John Wilson: Joyride

The beloved New Yorker writer and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book joins documentary filmmaker John Wilson for the paperback launch of Joyride: Orleans’ funny, restless, big-hearted memoir about a life spent chasing stories.

Susan Orlean, one of the great practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time, can make seemingly anything feel like the center of the universe: whether it’s an orchid, a ten-year-old boy, or a neighborhood library. Her now-classic profile “The American Man, Age Ten” found an entire world inside the mind of a suburban kid named Colin Duffy.

The Orchid Thief took her into Florida’s eccentric orchid underground — then took an even stranger detour into Hollywood with Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, starring Meryl Streep as a fictionalized Susan Orlean. Another of her magazine stories inspired the surf movie Blue Crush. Her eye ranges from the seemingly ordinary to the eccentric, united by an inexhaustible curiosity about how other people live.

In Joyride, Orlean finally makes herself the subject. Looking back on the alt-weekly world where she got her start, her years at The New Yorker, marriage and heartbreak, motherhood and loss, Joyride is a masterful memoir of finding a creative calling.

Orlean and Wilson, director of The History of Concrete and creator of How To with John Wilson, share a knack for noticing the strange, funny, revealing details hiding in plain sight — a creative kinship that led Orlean to join the writers’ room for the second season of How To with John Wilson. Together, they’ll talk about Joyride, following curiosity wherever it leads, and the art of turning everyday life into a story worth telling.