Susan Orlean discusses "Joyride: A Memoir"

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Thirty years of writing about orchid thieves and taxidermists and a Rin Tin Tin obsession, and the one subject she kept refusing was herself. That is what makes this book a genuine event rather than another stop on a tour. Orlean more or less invented the register that every magazine feature has borrowed since - deadpan curiosity about a person who cares far too much about one small thing - and the memoir turns that instrument around on her own life, including the drinking and the divorce and the newsroom she came up in. She is also, in person, funnier than the prose lets on. Note the venue, because it is not the bookstore: this one is at the big church on Commonwealth, which Book Soup uses for the handful of authors whose rooms run into the hundreds, and it is ticketed. Worth the ticket for the Q and A alone - she answers like a reporter, with specifics, and tends to ask the questioner something back. A Monday night in a cathedral-sized room on the edge of Koreatown. Not a bad way to spend the worst night of the week.