Susan Orlean's Blog, page 14

I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date. In the past, I had a fairly standard set of suggestions for anyone who wanted to write for a living. Move to a medium-sized city, I'd say. Get a job writing for the paper, any paper—don't forget the alternative newsweeklies, the local rags, even the community newsletters. Don't go to graduate school—it's expensive, and no one cares about writing degrees. And, most important, ...

On September 11, 2001, I began the day fretting over whether I would have time to get my white shoes dyed ivory, to match my wedding dress. I was getting married in four days, on Saturday, September 15th, and as mightily as I had resisted becoming a typical bratty bride, I really was convinced that the world would end if I didn't get my shoes dyed or find the perfect guest book for our friends to sign or talk to the d.j. one more time to make sure he didn't play anything by K.C. and the...

There are many bad things in this world of ours, but the use of the word "monetize" has to rank high among them. Also, "incentivize." Actually, all the "-ize" words, like "contextualize" and "utilize" and "prioritize." And—this is almost too horrible to type—"juniorize." (I have no idea what that means, but could it be, perhaps, a process by which one is demoted? I'm just praying it doesn't mean having a baby that will be named after its father.)

I don't want to be a knuckle-rapping...

There is nothing at all novel about the peculiar, ambient intimacy of social media if you have spent any time living in New York City. Life in Manhattan is like living inside a gigantic Twitter stream. What you get to know about people you don't know simply by accidental adjacency is astonishing. For a few years, a guy who lived in the building across the street from me practiced piano every day in the nude. He had double-height windows in his apartment and had positioned the piano to take...

When I mentioned my predilection for snooping in strangers' houses, I failed to mention that this is a two-way street. I snoop, and I am snooped on. In other words, I have a house that I rent out to strangers sometimes, and I assume—no, I am certain—they spend at least a little bit of time trying to figure out something about me while they're there. What does it reveal? As far as I can tell, nothing out of the ordinary: that I shop at Ikea; that I have a kid (the abundance of sand toys and...

There are plenty of things to love about staying in a hotel, most of which have to do with unlimited clean towels, but for our last few vacations we've skipped the hotel route and instead rented houses from private owners who've listed them on Web sites like vrbo.com and ineedavacation.com. Renting a real house from a real person comes with a very different set of pleasures. For me, the biggest, guiltiest one is the opportunity to nose around and see if I can figure out something about the...

I don't remember what letter I had left off on when I told my alphabetical tale of publishing a few months ago, but for anyone keeping track, I have now advanced down the line yet another letter, as Editor some-letter-near-the-end-of-the-alphabet, who was most recently in charge of my current book project, has just been sent packing. Editor G, who is now Publisher W at Publishing House B, where my book is living these days, assured me that I am not some sort of jinx, which in my weaker...

Someone asked me if I moved to the country because it's so peaceful, and I said yes, even though it's not the least bit true. Country living isn't peaceful. It's full of blood and guts and murder and rivalry and treachery and chaos, in a lovely green world without pity. Last week, I decided to let my two new chickens socialize with my main flock. The new and the old birds had viewed each other for two weeks through a wire fence, and after some preliminary squawking and feather ruffling they ...

We decided to get right back on the horse—or, rather, on the dog: after finding a week with such a sad, quiet house almost too much to bear, we got a new puppy this weekend. Her story is a harsh illustration of what it means to be riding out the long wake of the Great Recession. The puppy—we named her Ivy—is a highfalutin purebred, purchased as an eight-week-old by a family that obviously had enough disposable income at the time to buy an expensive dog. And then the working parent in the...

What I notice the most is the sound, or rather the absence of sounds: I miss the click of Cooper's nails on the wooden floor, the jingling of his tags (so exasperating at times that we considered buying those rubber jingle-stoppers), and, because he was an itchy dog, the drum-major's thump-thump-thump as he worked his back leg up and down to scratch behind his ear. I know I will experience phantom dog noises for a while.

Cooper died unexpectedly last weekend, when we were away from home, ...