Confessions of a Homewrecker

Susan Orlean has been to so many countries, she’s run out of pages in her passport. “I have so many frequent flier miles, I could go to Mars,” she says. Given her nomadic nature, it’s a surprise Rover has beat her to the red planet. Courtesy of all these racked-up miles, she and her husband made their honeymoon flight to China without paying a penny.

All Orlean’s adventures have left her with a cache of anecdotes that go beyond the standard cocktail party fare. Have you ever chatted with a female bullfighter in Spain? She has. Split your time between old-school rappers and dog show aficionados? Check. Written an article for an outdoors magazine that got made into the summer blockbuster Blue Crush? Waded through alligator-ridden swampwater in search of an elusive “ghost orchid?” And did Meryl Streep play you in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation? Orlean can boast all this and more.

But she’s also been to more prosaic places in search of a story. “I’m not somebody who’s happiest when they’re at the gate at Logan,” she says. Instead, she likes to travel to non-exotic locales. “To me it’s sort of a thrill to find myself in Kansas City.”

These days, you can find Orlean sitting next to you in class. As a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, she has been auditing classes (last semester she took Wit and Humor, Animals that Talk, and North American Seacoasts and Landscapes).

Sitting in the library of Lippman House, the Nieman Fellow headquarters, Orlean pronounces it “a real pleasant surprise to be back at school.” She wants to branch out and take science or linguistics this semester. “You get here and suddenly you just want to do a million things,” she says quietly but eagerly.

This passion for the eclectic has marked the red-headed, diminutive Orlean’s career. Although she got her start profiling 80s pop sensations like Tiffany for Rolling Stone and Vogue, she eventually realized that it wasn’t for her. “I’m just not that interested in celebrities,” Orlean admits. Instead she turned to the kind of subjects that are “not at all expected”—and found her niche.

After writing about plants in her acclaimed book, The Orchid Thief, Orlean has moved on to animals, penning a piece on Keiko, the whale from Free Willy, for the New Yorker. She also interviewed a woman in New Jersey who kept close to 30 pet tigers. “People have an appetite for exotic things—it’s kind of an enduring issue in human nature.” Both accounts are collected in her new book, Homewrecker: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere, which will come out in November.

Orlean spends so much time with her subjects that she sometimes can lose her journalistic focus. “I stop thinking of them as interviews…on every story, there is a point where I think, ‘I do not know what I’m doing.’ That’s the wages of doing this kind of profile.” However, she says she’s not hung up on the rules. “I’ve never cared about being an expert, never wanted my pieces to make an argument. It’s more like, ‘Gee, I met the most interesting person.’ It’s a more organic way of storytelling.”

When Orlean is not sitting down to interview designer Bill Blass or rapper Fab Five Freddy, New York real estate sharks or Hillary Clinton, she’s usually with her Welsh springer spaniel, Cooper Gillespie. In fact, Cooper’s literary pedigree helped him recently score a book deal. His cookbook, Throw Me A Bone, is out in stores now. Cookbook writer Sally Sampson is a friend and wanted Cooper (i.e. Susan) to be her co-writer. On first hearing the idea, Orlean thought, “My God, I barely know how to cook!” The book includes biscuits, cookies, snacks and even sushi for dogs, and Cooper is currently in talks for a sequel. “We’re very proud of him,” Orlean laughs. “What can you say? It’s a family of writers, it must be genetic.”

Whether she’s covering dog cuisine, gospel road tours or competitive party clowns, this veteran journalist makes it a point not to “write about subjects that are predictable.” And her time at Harvard is just inspiring more of the unexpected. “The other day,” she confides, “I had three really good ideas for stories and one idea for a book, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m on fire!”