20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 17-23, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com the Chernobyl disaster was announced, filling people with terror; each European child and adult was given a dose of potassium iodide to prevent radiation poisoning. Arson was suspected from the very beginning. The suspect was, and still is, Harry Peak (arrested but not tried), a handsome young man who sought fame and celebrity status. Orlean never had a chance to speak with him because he died before she started the book. The Library Book is a love letter to all libraries and why they are being burnt. It’s not so much a mystery or a dry historic assessment of libraries and this library in particular, but rather a book of reflections, even if the reader can find many fun facts about libraries and the Los Angeles Central Library itself, as well as the signature Orlean humor. Once a reader called to find out “which is more evil, grasshoppers or crickets?,” Orlean reports. The below conversation is devoted to the art of writing that Orlean has been developing since the 1980s, starting her career at an alt weekly and eventually becoming not only a staff writer at The New Yorker, but also a bestselling author whose work has been shared widely thanks to Hollywood’s attention. Weekly: Which early piece of yours was the first that went “viral” and made you famous? Orlean: A story that really took off for me was the story that evolved into The Orchid Thief [the book that was adapted into the movie Adaptation]. I had gone to Florida originally just to report a New Yorker piece about the theft of orchids. I didn’t have any idea if people would be interested in this subject or not, because it was certainly an odd subject. But it got a huge response, a great deal of interest, as well as a movie option. You started to write for The New Yorker in 1987 and became a staff writer in 1992. How did you feel when you got promoted to be a staff writer, which is a writer’s dream? Tell us a bit about this transition. Well, I agree that it’s every writer’s dream to write for such a significant publication, but more than that, to have freedom to write. Not that many magazines have that kind of openness to the writer’s ideas. Since 1987, I have been contributing to the magazine regularly, but I really yearned to have the acknowledgment of being a staff writer and everything that that implies. It was almost hard to believe. It was something that I could never have dreamed would have happened for me. It really was just as thrilling as you might imagine from afar. You know, it really made me feel like I had achieved something that was almost unimaginable. How is your writing voice different from your inner voice? Is there a huge difference there? No, I think, in fact, that what you try to achieve as a writer is to write as authentically as you can, and that means you write to accurately reflect your inner voice. The moment where you’ve achieved the most authentic version of your writing voice is when it truly is a reflection of your way in the world. Obviously, you write in a more deliberate, careful way on the page than when you speak off the cuff. But what you’re really hoping is to reflect your personality, your perspective, something that is a really genuine reflection of who you are. You’ve been asked several “desert island” questions in the past. I have a couple, too. What animal—not a pet—would you take with you? My automatic thought would be to take a dog for company and protection, but if we’re not going to include pets, I would take a useful animal. I think I would take a cow, so I can have milk and cheese. Would you continue to write on the desert island, with no readers around? I guess the big question of writing is: What if the reader is not there? I think that I would. I would hope someday to be rescued from the desert island, and then I would have all the writing that I had done while I was there, but writing is also a natural way for me to sort out how I feel about life in general. I think I would automatically turn to writing as a way of recording the experience. How early did you discover that writing leads, potentially, to a sort of secular immortality? I didn’t express it this way as a kid. But I instinctively knew early there’s something about the permanence of writing. As an avid reader, I was reading books by authors that were no longer alive, and their books lived on. The characters they created are timeless and permanent. I was conscious of the way writing can endure well beyond the lifespan of the writer. How have things changed for female writers since you started to publish? There were accomplished women writers in the past, especially in New York. They were trailblazers; their writing was being published. Nellie Bly [1864-1922, a journalist known for her trip around the world in 72 days] comes to mind. For centuries, female fiction writers have been around. Journalists, not so much; when I was a kid, 90 percent of newspaper bylines were men. Susan Orlean @susanorlean • 14w Yes, I hugged an elephant. Highly recommend. No notes, perfect experience. #elephantrescue #jaipur #lifegoals #trunking Orlean loves animals of all kinds. She not only writes about animals in books (below right) and essays, but also documents her animal encounters on social media; the post and photo above originally appeared on Instagram.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==