Joyride

A book reaction

In 7th grade I had a reading teacher who had an overstuffed couch and a giant library in her classroom. Instead of book reports we had to do book reactions. Of note, that same teacher also taught P.E., and occasionally she’d make us meditate after the 10 minute run. It was 1981. Hippie teachers were awesome. In honor of 12-year-old Janet, each week I will try to share a book reaction. Far out, man. Enjoy!

I’ve read a few of Susan Orlean’s nonfiction books — The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People and The Library Book are two outstanding choices if you’re in the market — so I was somewhat interested in her memoir about her life as a writer. But I was not expecting to love it so much. Wow. It knocked my socks off. Orlean spends some time writing about her upbringing, her parents, her two marriages, and her challenges being a late in life parent, and that’s all really interesting. But it’s her writing career that is a treasure trove of fascinating stories. She has written profiles for the New York Times, Vogue, Time, Esquire, and has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for decades. She writes about one of her first jobs reporting on the Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon during the early 1980s. She interviewed members on the compound for many days, and her take 40 years later is unsettling.

I hurried to find Cathy Cheney, the photographer on the story with me. To my relief, the bewitching power of Rajneeshpuram hadn’t affected her at all. She thought the Rajneeshis were sketchy. She was convinced our hotel room was bugged because the Rajneehsi press people knew exactly what we had discussed the night before in the room. At first, I had thought she was overreacting; I hoped that this place was largely benign. But it turned out that her skepticism was justified. Years later, after Rajneeshpuram had sputtered, I learned that the hotel rooms were indeed bugged. A lot worse was going on than I had imagined, including the Rajneeshis’ efforts to poison some of their critics. When I watched Wild Wild Country, the 2018 documentary about Bhagwan, I finally took the full measure of how naive I had been.

And that’s just the start of her career. Her retelling of how her book The Orchid Thief was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Nicolas Cage is a trip and probably worth a whole book itself. And who could forget the time she got wine drunk during the pandemic and started tweeting? I was actually a follower of hers on Twitter at the time (remember when Twitter was fun and not evil?), and I watched the hilarity in real time. She talks about that too. The whole memoir is quite literally a joyride. I give it 15 subscriptions to The New Yorker.