Susan Orlean, JOYRIDE: A Memoir

[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked I've at the Whitney I'm so excited to be in person in front of so many fabulous readers and also in front of so many fabulous authors now we get to talk to Susan or lean which is amazing she's been on my podcast before back with joy ride a memoir her debut memoir here congratulations Susan and welcome. Thank you. Thank you.

[0:29]You say in the book that you have been drenched by the reign of good fortune tell us about that I truly feel especially in the course of looking back over my career and and quite honestly my personal life that there are so many junctures where something really fortunate happened I'm not attributing my happiness in life purely to complete accident

[0:59]but there have been a lot of instances where things just ended up falling kind of providentially in my direction some of this is attitude because I can also say I could look back at the course of my life and look at a lot of things and think well that didn't work out or that wasn't successful or that was a disappointment.

[1:29]But I choose to see it all through the lens of this good fortune some of it truly is good fortune one of the things I mentioned in the book is the first story I did for a national publication was for the dearly departed village voice.

[1:48]It was my first story for a national publication and coincidentally it was the first time the village voice ever use color they only were in black and white and then they made this huge leap forward and decided to you know start using color photos.

[2:08]The story that I wrote was the cover story the week that they use color for the first time so it got extra attention so that's what I look at when I think well that was pure luck that was just a matter of coincidence of timing that you know turned out because more people notice the story since it was such a novelty to see color in the village voice.

[2:39]I'm really proud of the story and the story got attention on its own merit so I don't want to over tribute luck but I do feel that luck has been my friend.

[2:54]Well the book really tracks your career and all the different assignments some you go into in great detail about who you were interviewing where it was but you also include a bunch about your own love life and your we were like trench buddies bonded by living through disaster together we bought a new mattress decided to have a baby about the giddy rush of nearly drowning but clawing to shore just in time shocked by the glimpse of catastrophe.

[3:22]Thank you.

[3:25]That was a difficult thing to acknowledge I think anyone who's had a difficult relationship and certainly a lot of what I grapple with in the book is as I wrote it I thought another person would look at this and very correctly say what were you doing why do you stay so long that's crazy but when you're in it.

[3:50]It's not so simple certainly in the case of having a catastrophic event like an affair I don't think it's uncommon that if you may that you cling together in the midst of this very painful experience.

[4:11]That the only two people in the world who've had this is the two of you so you're the two people who really understand what's going on and I was very attached to Peter very attached and certainly attached beyond where my logic led me I think if I were a different person or if I'd been a little older when I met him.

[4:39]I might have been able to say more clearly this is not fair or this is you know he's got issues with me not to give anything away but he told me about this affair the night of my book party.

[4:56]And you know at some point I said to him even you've got admit that this is a little obvious that you feel threatened or you're competitive or you simply don't want me to be happy.

[5:11]It's not an accident I mean it was an affair that had been going on for a long time why that day and I think when you hurt people or people hurt you it tends to have the effect of attaching you more and that's why when we look at people who are truly abused.

[5:31]You often have this very clinical reaction of saying why did they stay why didn't they walk out the door well that's humans are complicated and sometimes it's this impulse to say I can fix it I can make it I'm going to stay and make it better.

[5:50]In my case I think my attachment was sort of primal I just felt very connected to him and instead of saying wait a minute you're a complete jerk and you're trying to undermine me at a very happy moment of my life.

[6:06]One that I would have thought he would have enjoyed as well and instead of saying you know I'll go it alone I think I felt like grasping him closer and I think infidelity also I mean there was an element of it that was competitive and where I thought I'm going to make him care about me more than this person that he cheated on cheated on me with.

[6:35]And then you end up taking up with a guy from a younger man from Tibet is that right Bhutan I'm so sorry yes, he was very far away but yes far far away and you tried to get him a visa and the whole thing yes okay you didn't talk too much about him let's hear more about him.

[6:55]Yes well I think that I did the what is that there's a book about so and so gets their groove back I love to see us Terry McMillan was sort of living that story you know after my marriage fell apart and I was I think one of the.

[7:16]I want to put some daylight between yourself and this failed marriage and it's not even it's almost like you want to begin creating new history that doesn't include the person we've broken up with.

[7:33]I was actually it's a very funny story with a weird irony I had gone to Bhutan to do a story I had seen an ad in a magazine for a fertility trip to Bhutan, Bhutan apparently.

[7:50]It's they're very devoted to the idea of fertility in the country and you won't believe this but the entire nation of Bhutan is decorated with paintings and sculptures of penises.

[8:05]Throughout the entire country I kid you not like you land in the airport you get off the plane and there's a giant painting a mural of a penis and but it's seen as this celebration of fertility and there's nothing kind of scandalous about it it's it's just seen as you know we love fertility and we sort of worship the idea of.

[8:31]Procreation and so forth so this was a trip to Bhutan from the US of people who wanted to attend some of the fertility festivals and go to the fertility sites in Bhutan and in small writing at the bottom of the ad it said it's not necessary for you to have a baby so.

[8:52]I just thought I've got to go on this trip it just seems so funny that this was you know the proviso in the ad for the the trip was that you if you didn't want to have a baby you weren't required to get pregnant on the trip.

[9:09]So I thought it was a really funny story and Bhutan had almost no tourism at the time so it was a very very exotic place to go they had 2000 visitors a year total.

[9:24]So I went on the trip and I was really heartbroken it was right after my husband and I had gotten separated and he had even.

[9:33]considered coming on the trip and then the last minute said no so I went alone and I was pretty vulnerable I really enjoyed our tour guide it was this adorable much much much much much much younger.

[9:52]Bhutan is man and so we began this sort of flirty relationship which.

[10:00]just probably not so uncommon on travels.

[10:04]And I was there alone with this tour group.

[10:08]And really, everybody else was a couple

[10:11]because it was a fertility trip.

[10:13]And to my great astonishment,

[10:20]I ended up getting involved with this young man.

[10:24]And instead of thinking it was a holiday romance,

[10:29]instead, I think it was entirely

[10:32]because I was in this very vulnerable state

[10:35]of having just gotten separated.

[10:37]I thought, we're going to get married,

[10:40]and we're going to commute between New York and Bhutan.

[10:45]And I think I was just like out of my mind.

[10:49]And many of my friends here, because I

[10:52]did get him a visa, and he came and stayed with me

[10:55]for a few months.

[10:56]And a lot of my friends thought,

[10:59]case really cute, news charming, and this is insane.

[11:05]But I also think many of them understood

[11:08]that after a long marriage, I had been married to Peter

[11:10]for 16 years.

[11:13]I needed to make some new history for myself.

[11:17]I needed to feel, I mean, to be perfectly honest,

[11:21]I also felt like I don't want the last person

[11:25]that I slept with to be Peter.

[11:27]I want a new start in my new life as a person

[11:33]who isn't married to him.

[11:36]And it was an insane, crazy, ridiculous relationship,

[11:40]but very sort of fun and full of good intention.

[11:47]And when his visa ran out and he went back to Bhutan,

[11:51]we said, oh, you know, we're going to stay together forever.

[11:54]Even though I think we both knew perfectly well

[11:58]that it was ridiculous.

[12:00]And this was before Zoom.

[12:02]This was before it was easy to stay in touch

[12:06]with someone on the other side of the world.

[12:08]Bhutan did not have the internet.

[12:10]This was a country that was really in its own little bubble

[12:17]at that time.

[12:18]So it was, of course, impossible.

[12:20]And as luck would have it soon thereafter,

[12:24]I got fixed up with someone who I fell in love with.

[12:28]And he was not very, very, very, very young.

[12:35]He was actually appropriately aged and lived not in New York

[12:40]the where I was living, but he lived in Boston.

[12:42]So it was not quite the same as New York Bhutan.

[12:47]And then, because we're so rooting for you,

[12:50]like reading the book and finding out

[12:52]and like going through as you tell the stories

[12:54]of your writing life, which of course is super,

[12:56]super interesting finding your ups and downs in love

[13:00]is also interesting.

[13:01]And then you finally fall in love and are getting married.

[13:04]And it turns out it's right at 9-11.

[13:06]That day was your wedding was that weekend.

[13:09]So you end up having to change everything again.

[13:11]Tell us about that.

[13:13]Well, that was catastrophic.

[13:16]On Tuesday of that week,

[13:19]I, my great concern at the time was my wedding gown

[13:24]was ivory and my shoes were white.

[13:26]And I had to get my shoes dyed.

[13:28]And this was, you know, who knew?

[13:31]Like that was, I woke up that morning thinking,

[13:33]am I going to be able to get my shoes dyed in time

[13:37]for the wedding?

[13:39]We didn't even have our marriage license yet.

[13:41]We were very sort of sloppy and just said,

[13:44]well, we'll get it on Friday before the wedding.

[13:47]John was living in Boston.

[13:49]So we weren't even in the same city.

[13:52]And that morning I'm just idly listening to the news

[13:56]and heard this strange report

[13:59]about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

[14:03]And I called John and he used to work on the 102nd floor.

[14:08]And he said, it must be a student pilot.

[14:12]That's the only thing that makes sense.

[14:15]In due time, we all learned to our horror,

[14:20]what was going on.

[14:22]And my first reaction almost instantly was,

[14:26]we have to postpone the wedding.

[14:29]I just, even without knowing how bad it was going to be,

[14:34]I felt like there was an instant sense of catastrophe,

[14:40]of sorrow.

[14:42]I remember going out really the next day

[14:46]and seeing those flyers all over New York,

[14:50]missing another person missing.

[14:53]It was devastating.

[14:55]And you'll appreciate this.

[14:58]I call my parents and many of our guests

[15:03]were coming from Montana and you couldn't come to New York.

[15:06]And I said to my mom, look, we're going to postpone the wedding.

[15:10]We can't have a wedding in this atmosphere.

[15:14]And my mom said, it's bad luck to postpone a wedding.

[15:18]It says it in the Talmud.

[15:20]And I said, mom, I don't think it says that in the Talmud.

[15:24]And if it does, I don't think it's specifically

[15:29]like when there's a terrorist event that kills thousands

[15:33]of people, it's bad luck to cancel a wedding.

[15:36]And I think my parents were just, you know,

[15:39]they didn't live in New York.

[15:41]They didn't have the full sense of the heaviness

[15:45]of the atmosphere here, the feeling

[15:48]that to undertake a joyful activity like a wedding

[15:53]would have felt so wrong.

[15:55]I didn't have one minute of hesitation.

[15:59]I just thought, and the funny thing, of course,

[16:02]is the night before on September 10th, I said to John,

[16:06]we were getting married in the Explorers Club.

[16:09]And I said to John, should we just pay the balance, you know,

[16:12]and just be done and send the money?

[16:15]So yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[16:17]It wasn't due, but I just thought, let's just pay it.

[16:20]So I go online and hit send and send the remainder of the money.

[16:26]And I thought, you know, my, I mean,

[16:29]we didn't know what was gonna happen.

[16:31]We didn't know whether they would not agree

[16:35]to postpone the wedding.

[16:36]You know, nobody knew what was going on.

[16:38]And it was the lowest priority of concern,

[16:42]but it certainly was a considerable expense

[16:47]that we thought, well, what's gonna happen?

[16:49]I'm so glad that we did it.

[16:52]I'm so glad.

[16:53]And maybe being not a young bride, not my first wedding,

[16:57]it was so easy to say, no, I'm not getting married

[17:01]in the middle of this heartbreaking, you know,

[17:05]the mood in New York for weeks and weeks and weeks

[17:08]was so, so heavy, so dark, so sad.

[17:13]When we finally got married at the end of November,

[17:18]everybody felt, I think, this sense

[17:22]that finally we can celebrate.

[17:25]Finally, we can, you know, many people said

[17:28]it was the first kind of happy celebratory occasion

[17:33]they'd been to since 9-11.

[17:36]And I was glad that it had that distance from the event

[17:42]and to give us a chance to celebrate

[17:46]in the fullness of the moment

[17:48]and not with the heaviness of what was going on.

[17:52]And then towards the end of the book,

[17:54]actually at the very end of the book,

[17:55]you take us to LA where you've left your house,

[18:00]stayed with a friend due to the fire

[18:02]and are dealing with that as well.

[18:04]I feel like you've gone through just so many societal things.

[18:08]Tell us a little bit about that.

[18:09]That was really, well, as you know,

[18:14]horrifying experience.

[18:16]We spent five years lovingly restoring

[18:20]this mid-century modern house in the Hollywood Hills.

[18:24]It's all wood, literally all wood.

[18:27]And fire is very present as a,

[18:32]I think of it as like a wild animal

[18:34]that roams through LA at all times.

[18:39]And not coincidentally, my last book,

[18:43]the library book was all about fire.

[18:46]And so I wrote a lot about fire

[18:48]and I had never lived anywhere where fire was so present.

[18:53]It's always on your mind.

[18:55]You're always conscious of it.

[18:56]You're always clearing brush from your yard.

[18:59]You're always aware of it in a way

[19:02]that nowhere else I've ever lived has fire been.

[19:07]It, as if it were a part of the sort of ongoing scenery

[19:14]of the place, we, the day of the fires,

[19:19]the wind I've never felt wind like that day.

[19:25]We thought our windows were gonna blow in.

[19:27]We never thought our, we just weren't thinking about fire.

[19:32]We were thinking about our windows blowing in

[19:34]and we put tarps down through our house

[19:37]because we have a lot of very big windows.

[19:40]The fire began and the palisades began in Altadina.

[19:44]So we're sort of halfway between the palisades in Altadina.

[19:49]So in part we felt like, well, we're,

[19:52]we're far from both of those.

[19:54]Then all of a sudden, a fire broke out

[19:57]and run in Canyon, which is right up the.

[20:00]treat from us.

[20:01]And everyone in LA has these alerts on their phone.

[20:05]And we went from green, meaning you're fine,

[20:08]stay at home to yellow, get prepared.

[20:12]We thought, what?

[20:14]Get, wow, this is real now.

[20:18]And then read very quickly.

[20:20]And they said, you have to evacuate.

[20:24]It was a strange feeling because I've often thought,

[20:29]if I had to evacuate, I would take this.

[20:32]I would take that when it really happens.

[20:35]Your mind goes blank.

[20:36]I all I thought was we need dog food.

[20:39]We need to get the dogs in the car

[20:43]and we need to get whatever medications we need.

[20:47]But as far as thinking about material things in the house,

[20:52]as I said in the book, everything was too much and not enough.

[20:57]Like, what was I going to take?

[20:59]And also we have a certain kind of advantage

[21:02]in the digital age that most of our pictures are digital.

[21:07]All my work is online.

[21:10]So whatever I was working on, I could access,

[21:14]even if my computer melted, even if my office burned down.

[21:20]But boy, was it terrifying?

[21:22]We drove down the hill to a friend's house.

[21:27]And we were sort of settling in.

[21:28]And we're all just glued to the television

[21:31]and glued to the watch duty app.

[21:34]And then they were told to get ready to evacuate

[21:37]because another fire broke out.

[21:40]It was so surreal, so strange.

[21:44]And the fire near them then got put up pretty quickly.

[21:49]But it was absolutely traumatizing.

[21:51]We probably had 13 friends who lost their houses,

[21:57]both in Altadina and the Palisades, just lost everything.

[22:03]One friend who I checked one of my colleagues from the New Yorker,

[22:06]I checked in with her in the beginning of the evening.

[22:11]And she said, we're OK.

[22:13]And then her house burned down.

[22:16]And talk about the heaviness of 9.11.

[22:19]Obviously, it's different when it's a natural disaster

[22:22]versus someone choosing to harm you.

[22:26]But there was very much that feeling of despair,

[22:32]of heartache, of knowing how many people lost everything,

[22:38]feeling the vulnerability of the city.

[22:42]And that's just a reality.

[22:43]California, well, listen, it's not just California.

[22:47]It's now become a state of being

[22:51]in a climate-changed world that fire Canada

[22:57]has become a victim of really terrible fires.

[23:02]And we don't care about it as much

[23:04]because it's another country.

[23:07]But you certainly get all the smoke.

[23:09]And there was a terrible story in the times today

[23:13]about the number of people who are going to die from wildfire

[23:16]smoke, not to be so grim.

[23:18]But there was a lot of real heartbreak in the aftermath

[23:24]of the fire.

[23:25]And I think it remains, I think LA still feels very wounded.

[23:31]Well, sorry for going to all these dark places.

[23:34]Why don't I leave us with something a little bit more

[23:36]positive, which is your love of writing,

[23:39]which you write about so incredibly beautifully.

[23:43]And you also write about your parents and religion.

[23:46]And there's just so much else.

[23:49]But let me just read this from the beginning.

[23:52]Writing is a job.

[23:53]But for me, it has always felt like a mission.

[23:56]I felt called.

[23:57]I really did to describe ordinary life

[23:59]in a way that revealed its complexity and poetry

[24:01]to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious

[24:04]about the world and how much joy can be found

[24:06]and letting yourself be surprised.

[24:08]I wanted to draw readers in and convince

[24:10]them to appreciate these stories, especially

[24:13]ones they might not think they'd care about or find

[24:15]interesting.

[24:16]Perhaps they would begin to look at the world in a different way,

[24:18]one that was full of curiosity and welcome.

[24:21]I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to show

[24:23]that any life closely examined is complex and exceptional

[24:28]and can embody both the heroic and the plain writing

[24:32]was my effort to make sense of the human experience,

[24:35]of my experience.

[24:36]And I hope that it might bring a reader to understand

[24:38]and maybe even empathize with a life or circumstance

[24:41]that initially might have seemed strange or impenetrable,

[24:46]which you have absolutely done.

[24:48]So thank you so, so much.

[24:49]Thank you.

[24:50]Thank you so much.

[24:51]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi,

[24:55]formerly momstone after time to read books.

[24:58]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,

[25:01]follow me on Instagram at zibiowans, and spread the word.

[25:05]Thanks so much.

[25:06]Oh, and buy the books.