Joyride: A Writer's Life in Stories

Susan Orlean's Joyride does what the best autobiographies do; it makes you feel like you've been invited into someone's life not as a voyeur, but as a trusted friend. I'll admit that before picking up this book, I had never read any of Orlean's work. I hadn't encountered her legendary profiles in The New Yorker, nor had I read The Orchid Thief orThe Library Book. However, memoir and autobiography are my favourite genres, and I’m fascinated by the creative process and the craft of writing, so Joyride felt like it was written precisely for readers like me.

What makes this memoir so compelling is how Susan frames her entire existence through the lens of storytelling. Her life and her stories are inseparable, each one feeding the other. She weaves together the personal and professional, showing how her life has been shaped by her curiosity, the joy of discovery and the thrill of finding the perfect way to tell a story. Her entire career has been committed to understanding the world through narrative! 

She begins with her early days and how she found her footing in the golden age of alternative weekly publications. 

“I studied literature and history and always dreamed of being a writer, but had no idea of how you went about being a writer – or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events. There is no guidebook to becoming that kind of writer, so I assumed I’d end up doing something practical like going to law school, much as the thought of it made me cringe.” 

From there, Susan shares details from career-defining assignments that took her to unexpected places; whether profiling an ordinary 10 year old boy, exploring Saturday nights, meeting a woman with a large number of tigers and so much more.

For anyone interested in the mechanics of creativity and writing, this is a masterclass! What I appreciate most about Joyride, is how Susan doesn't just tell us about her work; she shows us how she thinks, how she finds fascinating stories in everyday life and how she's sustained a creative life across decades. 

Susan is refreshingly honest about the personal challenges she’s experienced along the way, including the collapse of her first marriage, the struggle to balance motherhood and her mother’s health deterioration. There’s also the surreal experience of watching her work adapted into films like Adaptation and Blue Crush. Even without prior knowledge of Susan’s impressive body of work, I found myself completely absorbed. Joyride is the kind of memoir that makes you want to look at the world more closely, to ask better questions and to approach each day with the same sense of possibility. Susan writes with a genuine desire to share what she’s learnt about building and sustaining a creative life. She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but has learned to trust her curiosity and follow where it leads. If you’ve ever wondered what it means to be a writer and live a full creative life, this book is essential reading!

Reviewer: Andrea Molloy

Atlantic (Allen & Unwin)