An exuberant, inspiring memoir from the New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief
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n 2017, 10 years after Susan Orlean profiled Caltech-trained physicist turned professional origami artist Robert Lang for the New Yorker, she attended the OrigamiUSA convention to take Lang’s workshop on folding a “Taiwan goldfish”. I was with her, a radio producer trying to capture the sounds of paper creasing as Orlean attempted to keep pace with the “Da Vinci of origami”, wincing when her goldfish’s fins didn’t exactly flutter in hydrodynamic splendour.
It was Orlean in her element: an adventurous student, inquisitive and exacting, fully alive to the mischief inherent to reporting – and primed to extract some higher truth. “When we first met you said something to me I’ve never forgotten,” Orlean told Lang. “That paper has a memory – that once you fold it, you can never entirely remove the fold.” Was that, she wondered, an insight about life, too?
Over the course of four decades, seven books and countless exquisite magazine features, Orlean has profiled celebrities and nobodies, followed cults and choirs, turned her eye to supermarkets and surfers. “Writers fall into two categories: there are those who have something they want to say to the world, and there are those who believe the world has something to tell them,” she observes. Orlean falls squarely into the second camp. There are two kinds of story she likes best: “hiding in plain sight” and “who knew?”.
