The fire within
Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean tells Dionne Christian how libraries help us remember
“You can still smell the smoke in some of them.” No matter how hard Susan Orlean might have wanted to pretend she didn’t hear that sentence, The New Yorker journalist and acclaimed author of books like The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin: Life of a Legend, couldn’t unhear it.
Almost immediately, she experienced the scalp-tingling sensation that seasoned writers get when they know they’ve fallen upon their Next Big Thing but back then, in 2011 and recently relocated from New York to Los Angeles, Orlean tried to convince herself it wasn’t that significant.
She’d just published Rin Tin Tin, about the German shepherd dog that became a movie star after being rescued from a World War I battlefield by an American soldier. Known and noted for her long-form non-fiction writing, that became the starting point for a wider read about the 16 million animals who served in the war as scouts, messengers, sentries and couriers.
So, Orlean didn’t want to write another book; she’d decided it was too much work. Then her son, Austin, chose to interview a librarian for a school project and Orlean’s own love of libraries was rekindled: “The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”
Invited on a tour of Los Angeles’ Central Library, she heard the story — or at least an extract — about the April 29, 1986 “huge, furious fire” that burnt there for seven hours and 38 minutes, destroying 400,000 books and damaging a further 700,000. She thinks it might have skipped her attention because it occurred on the same day as the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. As Orlean writes, that event rather upstaged the Los Angeles Central Library fire.
“I couldn’t believe nobody had told the story of the fire before . . . it made me really want to tell it — and this was in spite of myself,” she says. “Writing a book was a commitment that
I did not want to make again but, lo and behold, this fell into my lap and I could not resist it.”
“I convinced myself it would be an easy book to write because it was just about this fire in the library, although it felt like an amazing story and I thought, ‘Well, we’re living in LA, the story’s in LA and all the reporting is here and I won’t have to travel; I’ll only need to go downtown a couple of times.’ I don’t know what made me think it would be easy . . . Since then, I’ve almost made fun of myself for thinking that; it really is hilarious that I thought it.”
The Library Book might have been the quick write Orlean was looking for had she stuck to the fire but, like most of her work, it quickly broadened into far more fuelled by her own natural curiosity. She became intrigued by the history of the library and what it said about the development of Los Angeles; she was taken by the cast of intriguing characters who contributed to it and equally fascinated by the place of libraries in contemporary society.
At the same time, her own mother, who had taken her to the library from the time she was a child, was diagnosed with dementia, which became very pronounced. For Orlean, this added an extra layer as ideas about memory — and the place of a library to hold and contain these — coalesced.
“What was happening to my mother made memory feel like a tangible thing; the idea that the whole substance of your life could be forgotten was powerful and poignant and it became particularly poignant in writing a book like this one, where I was reflecting on and sharing memories from my own life and the role of a library in preserving memory and the incredible irony of my mother losing her memory so all these things — these ideas — were very much on my own mind.”
So was the role of libraries in building communities and what community looks like in a world where individualism, technology, remote communications and fear of others and the unknown seems to rule more supremely than ever. As Orlean points out, she started writing The Library Book while Barack Obama was President of the USA, now Donald Trump’s in charge.
While Orlean acknowledges there’s a degree of activism to much of what she writes, she believes it’s also a kind of “call to arms” for being curious and that, to her, is a political matter. “I was interested in what libraries symbolise in terms of openness and inclusiveness and what sort of a statement that makes . . . A library is an institution that has as its core mission inclusion and that idea now seems to quite threatened . . .
“I think this is a moment in time when we have to recommit to the idea of public good and what it means to be a community; libraries are central to the idea of sharing as a community. They are also central to the idea of stories mattering and it being important to share and preserve stories from every part of a community in a world where ideas about community and the public good are incredibly threatened.”