Back in 1995, Susan Orlean, the New Yorker staff writer who would soon become a literary sensation for her book The Orchid Thief, set an unusual challenge for herself: writing a profile of Biff, a champion show dog nearing retirement. In the introduction to her new book, On Animals, she explained what happened when she was finally alone with Biff, poised with her notepad in hand. Of course, she realized that he couldn’t speak to her, and her usual interviewing methods would have to go right out the door.
“When you are reporting on something, you think, ‘I don’t want your manager in the room, and I don’t want your agent in the room, and I don’t want all these people mediating between me and my subject.’ I wanted to interact with this animal, just me and the animal,” Orlean said during a recent interview. “It really was this moment of thinking, okay, I don’t know how to do this. It was really funny. It made me feel like I was so caught up in my journalistic protocol that I forgot this basic fact, which is that we interact with animals through a mediated relationship.”
Orlean navigated that challenge and emerged with a piece of writing that astutely captures Biff’s mannerisms while meditating on the network of humans who handle and manage him. It’s one of 16 pieces collected in the new book, which was borne out of the fact that she has frequently written stories with a specific animal or species at their center—and that’s not even counting her 2011 biography of the famous dog actor, Rin Tin Tin.
If you’re familiar with Orlean’s work, you know there’s no a subject she isn’t willing to imbue with wisdom—just think about her indelible profile of a ten-year-old boy—but in the work collected in On Animals, she writes about her personal affection for dogs, goats, and chickens, and the farm she bought with her husband where she eventually acquired a menagerie. She also discusses how being a self-identified Animal Lover influenced her decision to tell stories about the ways humans and nature interact, to an extent. “Until I collected these pieces, I didn’t see that aspect of them,” she told Vanity Fair. “Each piece was enlarged by being around the other pieces.”
In July 2020, a wider audience got some exposure to Orlean when a series of her tweets documenting a drunken pandemic night went viral. By expressing some of the frustration and rage overcoming many of us (“WHO IS SICK AND TIRED OF EVERYTHING,” the night’s most popular tweet read) and adding in a few choice details—the fennel seed candy she ate, the yogurt she forgot she made, being briefly shunned by her family—the thread actually felt a bit like a formal Orlean story in dramatic miniature. It’s only fitting the fateful evening began when she visited a neighbor’s newborn colt while drinking a few glasses of wine. She woke up the next morning, and upon realizing exactly how far her ramblings had traveled, graciously live-tweeted the hangover.
About a year ago, Orlean also found a slightly more sober way to connect with readers, by launching a book club through Literati, a book subscription company that also connects club members through a social networking platform. So far, she has chosen a selection of fiction and nonfiction from writers like Jesmyn Ward and Carmen Maria Machado, but this month she’ll lead her club members through On Animals.
Orlean spoke to Vanity Fair about why she got involved with the Literati book club, her experience revisiting her past work during the pandemic, and why she is so drawn to stories about animals.
Vanity Fair: What did it feel like last year when you kind of became the mascot for what so many people were experiencing coming out of quarantine last summer? I feel like that was a really relatable moment.
Susan Orlean: Who knew! This was my unique experience that I had no idea was something that was being felt widely. During the pandemic, I don’t know about you, but five o’ clock every night it was like, “Oh my god, pour me a glass of wine.” It was so stressful, and I’ve never done that before, checking my watch and thinking, Is it time for a glass of wine so we can go, “Oh my god, we’re living in a nightmare.” I honestly never imagined in a billion years that this would explode in any way, not at all. It was my own little, mad experience.
When I woke up the next day, besides having a hangover, I had a moment of thinking, what did I do? Did I do something embarrassing? And then I thought no, I got really drunk, it happens! It was more a matter of thinking, well alright, I guess people have now seen a side of me that I perhaps don’t normally display, but the reaction was overwhelming, like, I feel you, sister. I thought, Oh, okay. I guess that was okay.
You also edited this collection during COVID. What was it like revisiting all of these essays—especially since a few of them were very personal—in that headspace?
It was a real pleasure, and for me, a particular pleasure because I don’t reread my work as a rule. I feel like once it’s out in the world, if I read it, I’m going to have criticisms and things I want to change. It was also very poignant because we were leaving our farm, and we ended up selling that house this year, so it was really, very personal and touching to go back and read those pieces. The reported pieces were really interesting to review. Even though some of the pieces that were very old didn’t feel dated to me, because the topics are kind of eternal.
It’s funny because so many of us during COVID were aware of this surge of desire to have a pet. We all live and interact with animals, in our own home, and also in the world at large, because it’s an inescapable fact of living on planet Earth. To me those are the most interesting stories, the ones that are both epic in their application but also very particular and specific—it makes it more interesting to me than a big policy issue on animals.
A theme that really comes through is the way that love of or desire for animals is always in conversation with a cultural context and the society around it. In the introduction, you mention that you loved Rin Tin Tin as a kid, and so you really wanted a German Shepherd. Does it feel like most animal stories also necessarily become stories about humans too?
One of the great things about writing about animals is that it removes it from [the abstract]. The issues around wildness and tameness and companions, all of the maintenance of habitat—all of those things exist as a constant. Human issues are evolving at a much faster pace, and they’re affected much more by the trend of the moment. A lot of the themes here are really permanent conditions of living with these other species: What does it mean to use an animal? What is wildness and how do we manage these wild creatures and how do we live with them? It’s been true since we came into being, and the entire nature of our relationship with animals is probably our primary aspect of the development of human civilization. It’s a pretty interesting, timeless subject.
It was interesting to reread some of the less personal stories with the knowledge that you are an animal lover. Did that passion of yours help guide you to write so many stories about animals? For example, I’m a music lover, and sometimes that pushes me towards stories about music and other times my music writing is so far from my own personal love for it.
Animals didn’t present that kind of problem, and I think that I’ve written a lot about animals because I think a lot about animals. So if a story pops up, in my normal reading or browsing around looking for stories I’m maybe more likely to be attracted to those stories because I’m curious about that universe. I would like to believe that these are stories that don’t require that you are an animal lover per se, the fact is that these are all about people ultimately.
I have no feelings about rabbits. They’re cute and they’re soft, but I’ve never wanted a rabbit, I’ve never had a rabbit, I just don’t think about them. But the story of this virus was so metaphorical, and it was also so scary, because of the implications to the greater world of wildlife if this spreads into the wild rabbit population, but also then it was this realization that whoa, this is a huge industry. There are lots of people who eat rabbits, there’s rabbit fur, it’s a whole ecosystem that is being threatened by this virus, and of course, writing it during COVID was irresistible. So that was an example of something where I had no preexisting interest particularly in rabbits, but the story itself fascinated me, and the fact that it involves living things makes it more challenging and more interesting to write about.
There’s a moment in the essay “Farmville” where you say that you’ve always regarded your chickens as “provisional holdings,” and it makes a lot of sense. There’s a risk or an uncertainty whenever living things are owned as pets or used as part of the supply chain.
It’s the same thing that drew me to write The Orchid Thief. I didn’t even like orchids. I thought they were weird. They just were these weird flowers, but the idea that people strove to amass these collections of things that could die and that don’t behave predictably, to me it was more interesting about people who collect, say, Hummel figurines. With that, you buy one, you have it. There’s no ongoing dynamic—it’s just a thing, you put it on a shelf, and that’s it. This is much more interesting because you can’t control it and you can’t control it and you can’t even be sure it’s not going to die. To me, that made it truly interesting.
I mean, now I like orchids. I’ve come to really reassess my position on them but I certainly didn’t end up doing that story because I found the subject so tantalizing. It was more the idea of wanting to possess something and this drive to collect and what that does to you, to have a focus in your life. That’s true in a lot of these stories as well. I happen to like animals, but I found these stories rose above that level of, oh just, I love dogs, or donkeys are cute.
You’re going to be reading this book with your Literati book club, right?
It’s going to be really fun to read [On Animals] with my Literati group. It’s like putting the shoe on the other foot. Instead of saying, oh, here’s a wonderful book, and let’s chat about it, it’s a chance to… First of all, they’re getting it early, which is nice and kind of special, but to be able to talk with this group that I’ve come to feel connected to, and to answer questions and be able to talk about it in that way is going to be a really wonderful adventure.
My grand unified theory is that in your writing and in your online persona, even your viral moment, there is a common thread. You’ve always presented yourself as an idiosyncratic person who also wants to be a useful audience proxy. Is that fair?
One thing I can’t be is inauthentic. I just don’t have the capacity for it. I don’t know, for me writing is already so wired into who you really are, and while I think I’m a somewhat unusual person, I also feel some intuitive connection with whoever is reading what I’m writing. I can’t explain it. Partly, I want people to feel that I’m their proxy, and that they’re sort of stumbling through this story just the way I am. If I’m able to convey that, I take it as an enormous compliment, because that’s probably the thing I most hope for. The way maybe you have a friend who thinks of an adventure that you wouldn’t have thought of, and you think, alright, I’ll give it a try. What I hope to be is that friend.
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