Woman of the World

Susan Orlean Brings It All Back Home

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, May 26, 2009

Susan Orlean is not a fictional character. True, Meryl Streep won a Golden Globe for playing someone by that name in the 2002 film Adaptation, one of the loopier high dives in the annals of screenwriting, and seven years later, readers still tell The Orchid Thief author how much she resembles Streep. “Talk about power of suggestion,” Orlean laughs. “There is not one feature we have in common!”

The nonfiction Susan Orlean is a fine-boned, incandescently friendly redhead with a freckled outdoor complexion, wide-set blue eyes, and a welcoming smile. She opens the door of her Columbia County home in a lacy blouse over a turtleneck, jeans, and black cowboy boots. As she introduces her rowdy Welsh Springer spaniel, apologizes for her cold, and offers tea, it’s easy to see how she disarms her interview subjects: Somehow her manner simultaneously implies that she can’t wait to meet you and that you’re already old friends.

Though Orlean has done some celebrity journalism, interviewing such media-savvy subjects as Hillary Clinton, Bill Blass, and Martha Stewart, most of the people she profiles are not household names. When an Esquire editor asked Orlean to interview Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin for a feature titled “The American Man, Age Ten,” she offered instead to profile a more typical kid the same age, and chose one from the New Jersey suburbs.

“I often write about things where the first response is, ‘How weird—why would you want to write about that?’” she notes. But Orlean has made curiosity into an art form. As a writer for the New Yorker and other A-list periodicals, she’s toured the South on a gospel choir bus, climbed Mount Fuji in pounding rain, accompanied Spain’s first accredited female matador, and detailed an inventor’s tireless pursuit of the perfect umbrella. She has a gift for putting her readers right in the room with her subject; she gives good phrase. “It’s just that people are so interesting,” she wrote in the introduction to her 2001 collection The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People. “Writing about them, in tight focus, is irresistible.”

Orlean followed Bullfighter with My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere. Its very first line, “I travel heavy,” gives the lie to the bookjacket photo, in which the unburdened author, wearing a natty black suit and stiletto heels, tips her fedora as she strides off on her next adventure. Orlean, who’s accumulated over a million frequent flyer miles, describes herself as a “reluctant packer” who ritually overfills suitcases, makes fruitless attempts to winnow, and winds up packing even more “just to be safe.” On the other hand, she says, “I’m a maniac unpacker. I find unpacking really tedious and just drudgery, so I get it over with as fast as I can.”