TALKING TO STRANGERS
IF SUSAN Orlean were a character in a children’s book, she would be composed of equal parts Harriet (the spy), Alice (from Wonderland), Charlotte (of the web), and the Little Engine That Could. One can see her curiosity and daring in The Orchid Thief, the breakout book that she chased through the murkiest corners of the Everglades; her faith in the power and necessity of communication in magazine profiles of gospel singers, girl surfers, and a crowd of other unique individuals; and her tenacious, powerful work ethic in her hope that each new book is better than the last.
Growing up in Cleveland in the late 1950s and early sixties, Orlean read voraciously, and from as far back as she can recall, she wrote. “I kept quite a detailed diary of family trips,” she says. “It wasn’t like a journal. I was writing them as stories that I imagined someone else reading. They weren’t diaries for me; they were reportage. For my vast audience!” She laughs, adding, “I always felt that writing—it just felt magical to me; it felt like alchemy: that you could take mere words and end up creating a feeling or a sensation or evoke a memory.”
Orlean’s childhood dovetailed with the end of a golden age of children’s novels starring animal protagonists. She read as many as she could find, from Lad: A Dog to Misty of Chincoteague. Other passions included the novels of Eleanor Alice Hibbert, who wrote under the pen name Victoria Holt (“sort of a Brontë sister wannabe,” Orlean says), known as the Queen of Romantic Suspense. “My sister and I would absolutely beat each other up to be the first one to get them at the library,” Orlean recalls. “And then I got turned on to Faulkner and Hemingway by a really wonderful high school teacher. And I felt like, ah, this is a whole other world that I’m discovering.”
Her parents subscribed to the big magazines of the time, some of which were doing groundbreaking work in the 1960s. “I was an avid magazine reader, and and were kind of in their glory days.
