Susan Orlean, JOYRIDE: A Memoir
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby interviews beloved New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean about her brilliant, high-spirited, exhilarating debut memoir, JOYRIDE. Susan reflects on the “reign of good fortune” that has shaped her career and personal life, from serendipitous early writing breaks to the heartbreaks and rebirths that followed. She also opens up about her complicated first marriage, a surprising post-divorce romance in Bhutan, and rebuilding her life after loss, from 9/11 to the California wildfires.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Totally Booked Live at the Whitney. I'm so excited to be in person in front of so many |
| 0:08.5 | fabulous readers and also in front of so many fabulous authors. Now we get to talk to Susan Orlean, |
| 0:15.8 | which is amazing. She's been on my podcast before, back with Joy Ride, a memoir, her debut memoir here. |
| 0:23.0 | Congratulations, Susan, and welcome. |
| 0:24.5 | Thank you. |
| 0:25.5 | Thank you. |
| 0:28.4 | You say in the book that you have been drenched by the reign of good fortune. |
| 0:33.7 | Tell us about that. |
| 0:35.2 | I truly feel, especially in the course of looking back over my career and quite honestly, |
| 0:43.5 | my personal life, that there are so many junctures where something really fortunate happened. |
| 0:51.5 | I'm not attributing my happiness in life purely to complete accident, |
| 0:58.7 | but there have been a lot of instances where things just ended up falling kind of providentially |
| 1:09.1 | in my direction. Some of this is attitude because I can also say I could look |
| 1:16.9 | back at the course of my life and look at a lot of things and think, well, that didn't work out, |
| 1:23.2 | or that wasn't successful or that was a disappointment. |
| 1:33.4 | But I choose to see it all through the lens of this good fortune. |
| 1:35.7 | Some of it truly is good fortune. |
| 1:42.0 | One of the things I mentioned in the book is the first story I did for a national publication was for the dearly departed village voice. |
| 1:47.0 | It was my first story for a national publication, and coincidentally, it was the first time |
| 1:55.1 | the village voice ever used color. |
| 1:57.9 | They only were in black and white, and then they made this huge leap forward and decided to, |
| 2:04.9 | you know, start using color photos. The story that I wrote was the cover story, the week that |
... |
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