Obsession

I believe Susan Orlean and I would get along fabulously. We would while away the hours talking about an endless array of topics: New England eccentricities, monomaniacal collectors, underwear models, blogging compulsives, you name it. In fact, Susan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to give me a call the next time you're in town on a book tour.

(It's a damned shame I missed her on Oct. 7; she was promoting her new book, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere, at Kepler's, my favorite local bookstore.)

Who else but Susan Orlean could get me to read an entire book on white orchids (The Orchid Thief)? Really, it not only isn't the type of book I'd ordinarily read, it isn't even the type of book I'd generally pick up. But I found it sitting on an acquaintance's coffee table a couple of years ago, scanned it, and became intrigued. So I went out, bought it, and found it fascinating and engrossing.

In the person of John Laroche, Susan found the embodiment of obsession, a man whose passions become all-consuming, until they one day disappear as suddenly as they began. As a ten-year-old boy, Laroche obsessively collected turtles, determined to collect one of every species. "Then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils. He collected them, sold them, declared that he lived for them, then abandoned them for something else." So it went with lapidary (hey, I missed that one), old mirrors, orchids, and tropical fish:

At its peak, he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house and went skin-diving regularly to collect fish. Then the end came. He didn't gradually lose interest: he renounced fish and vowed he would never again collect them and, for that matter, he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was seventeen years ago. He has lived his whole life only a couple of feet west of the Atlantic, but he has not dipped a toe in it since then.

      —"The Orchid Thief," Susan Orlean (1998)

Those of you who haven't read the book may have seen Charlie Kaufman's movie adaptation starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper, called—what else?—Adaptation. But don't let the movie deter you from reading the book. Charlie went off on a drug-addled tangent of one sort or another. The movie resembles the book not at all (but Susan loved it, so you can see she has a terrific sense of humor, one more reason we'd get along).

Most recently, I read Susan's essay in The Best American Essays 2004, about a taxidermist convention. I was hooked from the opening sentence:

As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door.
      —"Lifelike," The New Yorker   (2003)

Susan Orlean is consistently funny, observant, and unconventional. And whatever catches her interest, she observes with clarity and discusses with wry intelligence and infectious enthusiasm.

That bit of vanity at the outset about becoming friends with Susan and discussing everything and anything, from the Red Sox and stuffed quahogs to pet rocks and dog show blogs, is not just a private fantasy. Just listen to how Susan begins one article on a typical ten-year-old boy:

If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me... We wouldn't have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home... We would hang out a lot with Colin's dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.
      —"The American Man, Age Ten," Esquire   (1992)

Surprising as it may seem for Susan to envision her marriage to her ten-year-old subject, she takes an even greater leap of imagination in an article about a championship show dog:

If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale.
      —"Show Dog," The New Yorker   (1995)

By the time you finish the essay, you may or may not be in love with Biff too.

But you will certainly be in love with Susan Orlean.