Susan Orlean shares all in her new memoir. Turns out her 'Joyride' revved up in Portland

November 10, 2025 / 4:58 pm

caption: Meet Me Here co-host Katie Campbell recently interviewed journalist and author Susan Orlean, who recently published her memoir, "Joyride."

When Susan Orlean started her now storied writing career in Portland, she had to clarify: Portland, Oregon, not Maine.

"At the time I moved to Portland, the city was small. It was relatively undiscovered," Orlean told me while she was in Seattle on book tour. "There was an opportunity to truly take whatever you wanted and become that thing."

What she wanted to be was a writer, a storyteller.

(Listen to our conversation by hitting the play button above.)

Fans of her work today may find it hard to imagine a time when her status as a "real writer" was in question. Orlean is the author of eight books now, including her new memoir, "Joyride." And she's been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, in addition to work she's down for other major magazines, including Esquire and Vogue.

Portland is a lesser-known chapter in her history, but one she said shaped the writer she became.

She moved to Portland in a pickle-green Camaro and got her first shot at the now-defunct Paper Rose before writing for the Willamette Week, where she said she worked with an experienced staff for the first time. They gave Orlean the guiding principles she needed in this field. And Orlean gave them her unending curiosity.

"Portland, to me, was this exotic new place. I grew up in the Midwest, so being out west, being in the Pacific Northwest, being in a city I didn't know well, it all animated me," she said. "I loved poking into corners of the city. ... I also would find myself drawn to odd little subcultures that kind of tickled me."

She got a taste for the unusual and it stuck, like a favorite song whose tune follows you through the seasons of life.

Has anyone ever analyzed the significance of those first post-college years? It's so enormous. I remember once reading how music you hear when you're in your early teens has an outsize impact on your sense of what is good musically: It brands you deeply, imprinting the way no subsequent music ever will, and you measure all music thereafter by how much it does or doesn't deviate from that music of your teens. ... I lived in Portland only four years, but I lived a lifetime in them. It was the first time I had a real job; the first time I set up a home; the first time I bought furniture. It was the first time I took myself seriously. It was the first time I dared call myself a writer. JOYRIDE, PAGE 44

In the years since, Orlean has asked people to get vulnerable with her, to open themselves to her and to the wide audiences she's served. In "Joyride," she asked the same of herself. And she delivered only as she could.

"A part of me that felt like, 'Well, nobody really needs to know. They don't care about these details.' And yet, I was trying to give a fully realized portrait of my my life," she said. "It felt like it would be oddly lopsided to not include, in a pretty personal way, what the rest of my life was, because it factored into my life as a writer."

That meant writing about how her first husband had cheated on her, the beautiful love she later found with her second husband, and her years-long struggle to become a mother.

"Talking about becoming a mother was fundamental and, certainly, a part of the book that meant a lot to me, because I struggled with parenthood as a working person and a working person with an irregular schedule," she said. "It felt important to include that and also to say to people, 'Look, this is a deeply personal pursuit as a profession. Your own life leaks into it at all times, and you deserve to see a bit behind the curtain.'"

If you're read her books "The Orchid Thief" or "The Library Book" (one of my all-time favorite books, by the way), you know the care with which Orlean approaches storytelling. She's done the same with her own story and the stories behind her written work.

In an interview for KUOW's "Meet Me Here," I told her, awkwardly, that one of her early pieces for The New Yorker, a profile on Mark Wahlberg (or Marky Mark as he was known at the time) came out on the day I was born. My point was that I've built a writing career in a very different world. She rose to prominence at a time when outlets let writers have a romp of time reporting so that readers would have a romp of a time reading. A good story was worth traveling to Bhutan or Cuba or the Fakahatchee Strand in Florida for. That's much rarer now.

Writers like Orlean have always been a rarity, though. Consider how she wrote about the birth of her son, Austin:

The stubborn little boy held firm [passed the expected due date], and after what felt like an eternity, my obstetrician announced that we probably needed to do a cesarean. I was outraged: To have been in labor so many hours and still end up having a cesarean seemed unfair. Rallying whatever strength I had left, furious at the prospect of having wasted so much effort, I summoned the baby out of my body at last. There were five people in the room, and suddenly, there were six. It was a true wonder, a conjuring. JOYRIDE, PAGE 214

I love that language: "summoned" and "conjuring." Orlean is like a conjurer in that way, calling up the right words to bring the reader into the story, into that moment. To say giving birth was like "a conjuring" is to give that memory magic. Even I, someone who has never given birth and who does not intend to, felt that passage vibrate with the wonder she felt in that room.

"That's the experience of being alive," she said. "That's the enduring value of storytelling. ... [Writers will] go out and be the explorers, and then we'll come back and tell you what we found. That I feel will never go away."

I hope she's right.

At 70, Orlean certainly isn't done with her work. In fact, she said she recently signed a contract for another book. All she'd tell me was that it's about a building. If these walls could talk, eh? They surely will when Orlean is the one asking questions.

Listen to my conversation with Susan Orlean by hitting the play button above.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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