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Chapter 2 of Susan Orlean’s memoir Joyride (Avid Reader Press, 353 pages, $32) covers her early life, when she was figuring out she wanted to be a writer. After growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and attending college at the University of Michigan, Orlean made her way to Portland. She landed in the Rose City because her college boyfriend was moving here to attend law school at Lewis & Clark College, and her sister Debbie already lived here. In 1977, Orlean packed up her pickle-green Camaro and headed west, where she worked at a small startup magazine and then a radio station before landing at Willamette Week. Here’s how that went:
The staff at Willamette Week formed a single-cell unit very quickly. We rolled from long, loud days at the office to drinks after work to dinner at some Vietnamese restaurant or pasta joint and then more drinks at a tiki bar or a club. We went camping on the weekends. We hiked to hot springs in the mountains and went whitewater rafting together; we accidentally set up tents in the middle of a rattlesnake breeding ground in eastern Oregon and bonded over the experience. We saw Mount Saint Helens erupt and drizzle ash on Portland. Within our ranks, we found best friends and, often enough, lovers.
I loved to dance like a maniac, and to scream at the top of my lungs while I was dancing, and I loved staying out until dawn. The sound of a cashier ringing out for the night accompanied by the vacuum mumbling across the floor of a bar as it closed was my favorite melody. I threw huge parties and often barely knew most of the people who showed up. There were drugs everywhere in large quantities. I think most of Portland’s economy in the 1980s was bolstered by cocaine sales, and at parties there was always a platter of cocaine even if the host hadn’t bothered to provide food. I found coke boring, but I did a lot of it because it was always present, and eventually, it ate away enough of my nasal membrane that I had to get my nose cauterized to stop it from bleeding, which embarrassed me to no end. When I went for the cauterization, I told my doctor that I thought I’d been using Kleenex too aggressively, but he was no idiot and carried on with the procedure without saying a word. Despite this dip into debauchery, I never lost track of myself and the fact that I wanted to be a writer, writing what I wanted to write about. Even when I was raging at a party at midnight, it was never far from my mind.
Has anyone ever analyzed the significance of those first post-college years? It’s so enormous. I remember once reading how the music you hear when you’re in your early teens has an outsize impact on your sense of what is good musically: It brands you deeply, imprinting the way no subsequent music ever will, and you measure all music thereafter by how much it does or doesn’t deviate from that music of your teens. The first years after college seem to have that same disproportionate impact—they loom larger than any years that follow, they form you more, they linger in your soul more permanently. I lived in Portland only four years, but I lived a lifetime in them. It was the first time I had a real job; the first time I set up a home; the first time I bought furniture. It was the first time I took myself seriously. It was the first time I dared call myself a writer.
I was tethered to Willamette Week’s music section, but after a while I wheedled assignments for front-section features and kept asking for more. Ron [Buel, WW’s editor] finally agreed to let me hand off the music section to someone else and start writing features full-time. In exchange, he wanted me to cover a beat. What he offered me was the arid topic of county government. It was perhaps the worst assignment I could have imagined, but I accepted because I wanted so badly to do features. I intended to keep my word and cover county government, but I started handing in stories in which the only possible connection to the subject of county government was that the stories took place in the county. Each time I turned in one of these stories, I sheepishly explained to Ron that the subject was part of the county; after all, it had taken place in the county. It was the lamest defense imaginable, but it seemed to work: He let me keep going.
I wrote about the wave of new Hmong immigrants in Portland, and the boom in sales of amyl nitrite at grocery stores and gas stations. I wrote about a time-share company that had set up shop in Portland; I attended one of their sales events and got so carried away that I almost bought a time-share. I profiled performance artist Laurie Anderson and an architecture firm. I took a cheesy gambling junket to Reno, Nevada. I wrote about prostitution on one of Portland’s main thoroughfares, and I posed as a high school student and attended classes for a week at Grant High School. I wrote about how the once groovy neighborhood of Old Town had lost its sizzle—the headline was Is Old Town Dying?, which did not endear me to the largest commercial landlord in the area. I wrote about a horrible murder/suicide: A young woman filed for a restraining order against her abusive husband, who had been jailed for assaulting her. He made bail on one floor of the courthouse as the paperwork for the restraining order was being filed on another floor, an administrative glitch that went unnoticed. That night he ambushed her outside their house, killing her and then himself. It is the only murder story I have ever written. I was so haunted by it that I knew I could never do another. These stories just dawned on me. They were everywhere I looked.
Portland felt so ripe. I was always being surprised by something I came across, so I would take note of the surprise, and it would roll around in my head until it started to nag gently at me, demanding to be explored and then written. Often I drove around and looked, and I almost always found something that warranted further looking. I went down dirty alleys and along the wide, wavy river; I drove into the shaggy hills and walked through downtown; I picked up flyers and followed their instructions. Back then, Portland had a quality of being suspended in time, a city preserved in amber. There were taverns peopled in the early morning with saucer-eyed drunks, and there were the remnants of the timber industry and the leftover bits of a once-thriving Chinatown that had been forcibly cleared of its Chinese citizens in the 1940s; there were cavernous nightclubs on the fringes of the city, where the entertainment might be a guy with a harmonica and a drum kit and mastery of every Paul Revere & the Raiders song in the book. I loved it all. I was happiest when I was ferreting out a subculture—the more unfamiliar, the better—and forcing myself to be a quick study of it. I wasn’t drawn to writing about people who were like me, inhabiting my socioeconomic slice, probably because it didn’t offer me the opportunity for that wakening plunge into the unknown. I never minded being the stranger who had to ask about everything. I began to feel that the willingness to acknowledge my ignorance was my greatest virtue as a reporter. I discovered, fast, that people enjoy explaining themselves and teaching others what they are passionate about, and I was happy asking them to do that. I had no shame in being the newcomer who didn’t know.
Joyride by Susan Orlean. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
