22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 17-23, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com The New Yorker is a place that has always had a lot of women in prominent positions, both as writers and editors. I think that, with time, journalism has become a much more evenly distributed kind of landscape, and nobody blinks anymore when seeing a female name on top of a story. You are working on a memoir. Would you mind sharing a bit? It’s called Joyride. I would say it’s both a very personal story, but it’s also tracking pretty closely my writing life. It’s very much about my life as a writer, but it’s also pretty intimate. How do you take your coffee? So funny. As you were saying that, I was actually lifting my cup of coffee and taking a swig. Nonfat cappuccino. When I’m home I make it for myself. I do have a little espresso machine and a milk frother, and I’m a pretty good barista. In 2022, you tweeted: “I honestly can’t remember if I’ve had kids with Elon Musk or not.” Do you remember writing that? Oh, I do. I don’t remember the context that triggered that comment, and of course we have Musk playing even a bigger role in our lives right now. At that time, I believe that the announcement of the birth of another child with another woman was an often thing. It started to seem like he was impregnating just about every woman he encountered. I was just joking around saying that at this point, if you’re female, you have to stop and think for a minute to remember if you’ve had a child with him or not because he’s spreading his genetic pool wider and wider. And since then, he found even more women to carry his children. Oh, those were more innocent times when Elon Musk just was a wealthy, prominent, innovative business person, but he wasn’t running the country. At some point you said you are not interested in writing news and prefer deeper and more timeless subjects. But I am wondering if you are a consumer of the news, and what do you think about the future of journalism? I’m definitely a consumer of news and I’m really happy that there are smart, capable people doing that. I just have never felt that I had the right frame of mind, or motivation, to do a good job being a newshound. I read a lot of news from a number of different sources—The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian. I try to read a lot of news every day and I listen to the news twice a day. My sense of the future of journalism…I just do not know where we’re headed. We clearly have gone through a huge transformative change in the news business in the last two decades, and my guess is that we haven’t seen the end of it. I will be very surprised if physical newspapers are readily available 10 years from now. There’s every reason to expect that it’s all going to migrate to being digital. Now we are able to get the news updated constantly and I think the appetite for news has remained constant or even increased, but the system of delivering it is going to keep evolving. The real question is, how will those platforms support themselves and what is the financial model? It’s not just newspapers—things changed for book readers too in the era of e-books and audiobooks. What is your experience with these formats? I consume a lot of my books as audiobooks and e-books, and honestly I don’t know if there’s a different neurological function to listening versus reading. The point of storytelling is the same, no matter what way or what manner you consume it. I just like the idea that people continue to consume stories and I’m delighted when anyone engages with what I’ve written. I guess certain books are enhanced by being audiobooks, actually. I think there’s an imaginative quality that I’m experiencing myself. I am more engaged with it visually. Storytelling since ancient history was oral, and an audiobook, in a way, is as ancient a format as we could possibly imagine. Then, there’s the environment where it’s not possible to read. New formats don’t demand physical space in your house, you can carry them easily with you, and there is something incredibly liberating about having a book as an e-book. Especially when you’re at the doctor’s office waiting for your appointment and you can read a few pages. What about libraries, do you think they will be with us forever? Again, kind of like news, libraries’ collections will likely migrate to audiobooks and to e-books. But I hope the libraries will be around. You live in and write about California. Do you have any memories associated with this particular part of the Central Coast? I remember coming to Carmel the first time when I was probably about 5 years old. For a Midwesterner, seeing the ocean and seeing the coast was really magical and unforgettable, and it almost seemed like I was on another planet. It was so different from the landscape that I lived in. It’s a very early memory because my family had come to California when I was really young. I remember Carmel in particular; that coastline was something that I never forgot. A Life in Words with Susan Orlean. 6:30pm VIP reception; 7pm doors open; 8pm program starts Tuesday, April 22. Sunset Cultural Center, San Carlos Street at 9th Avenue, Carmel. $45-$175. 620-2048, carmelpubliclibraryfoundation.org. Susan Orlean @susanorlean • Jul 17, 2020 “I’m falling down drunk. First time in ages. Where is my kitty? He is my drunk comfort animal.” Susan Orlean @susanorlean • Jul 17, 2020 “BTW where exactly is my fucking cat when I need him” Susan Orlean @susanorlean • Jul 17, 2020 “I have SO NOT BEEN HACKED” The Library Book, a 2018 bestseller by Susan Orlean, is an homage to the wonder of libraries, spaces that are entrances to thousands and thousands of worlds (through books). The book also reopens a mysterious and still-unsolved event of 1986, when a suspected arsonist set fire to the Los Angeles Central Library, leading to 400,000 volumes burning.
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